Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda, is proposing the Justice Department launch an attack on a certain swing state election official as part of its plan to drastically reshape the federal government.
Created by people closely allied with former President Donald Trump's campaign and funded by the influential Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 outlines a comprehensive plan for a government-in-waiting that aims to implement a vision aligned with Trump-era conservatism and strengthen the power of the White House.
Part of that plan would reassign responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses, such as voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction, from the civil rights division to the criminal division of the Justice Department.
The move would make it easier for the Justice Department to "investigate and prosecute" the top election official in Pennsylvania over the 2020 election. While the nearly 1,000-page handbook doesn't mention the official by name, USA Today reported that the person who held the appointed position of secretary of the commonwealth in 2020 is Kathy Boockvar.
The secretary sent guidance to counties in 2020 about ways voters could cast ballots after an elections office rejected their mail-in ballot. The document claims that was a violation of Pennsylvania state law.
Pennsylvania was a critical swing state where Trump and his allies aggressively tried to overturn Joe Biden's victory in 2020, and a state Trump needs to win in November to regain the presidency, USA Today noted. A new Emerson College Polling survey finds 49% of voters in the Keystone state support Trump, and 48% support Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
While the Heritage Foundation did not comment on the report, Boockvar told USA Today that her department "absolutely" did nothing wrong.
Although crafted by former members of his administration, Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025, saying it goes "way too far." The plan was written by the Heritage Foundation with input from more than 100 different conservative groups.
"It outlines, in the opinion of about 400 people who worked on this book, what conservative success would look like at that agency over the next four years," Spencer Chretien, associate director for Project 2025 and former special assistant to the president and associate director of presidential personnel during the Trump administration, previously told WWL First News.
"It's designed to lay the groundwork, to support future conservative presidents and to begin the process of catching up to the left when it comes to building the infrastructure for presidential transitions, for government service," he continued. "We see that the deep state is real and that it serves as an impediment to conservative change. So this project was designed to unite the movement around solving those problems."