A powerful, rightwing lobbying group is promoting a hard-right policy agenda and cementing ties between the Republican party and the far right at at least 21 events involving senators, members of Congress, and both junior and senior political aides, documents obtained by the Guardian show.
The documents offer previously unreported details of Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) trainings and “bootcamps” for congressional staff at CPI’s sprawling Maryland ranch, and lavish, star-studded retreats for members of Congress – mostly members of the far-right Freedom caucus – at a string of Florida resorts.
They also show how CPI, widely described as the “nerve center of the Maga movement”, enlisted its own network of affiliated organizations along with like-minded far-right organizations – some classified as hate groups by experts – as well as individual extremists to promote anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-vaccine policies, along with others premised on the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
The revelations raise further questions about the powerful influence exercised on Capitol Hill staffers by the well-heeled NGO, and the extent of its successes in moving Republican elected officials even further to the right.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project against Hate and Extremism, said speakers featured at CPI events included some “seriously extreme people”, and indicated “how far right the Maga movement has become”.
The Guardian contacted CPI for comment but received no immediate response.
Maga’s ‘nerve center’
CPI was founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint following his ouster as president of the Heritage Foundation, then attributed by Heritage’s board president to “significant and worsening management issues”.
DeMint, also a former South Carolina senator, still serves as CPI chairman alongside founding the executive director and longtime Republican political operative Ed Corrigan.
After a comparatively modest start, the organization’s fortunes dramatically changed in 2021, the year it appeared to receive the imprimatur of the former president Donald Trump in the form of a $1m donation from his Save America Pac that July.
That donation was part of a $45.7m cash haul that year, followed by nearly $36.4m the following year according to CPI’s IRS filings.
The largesse came in part from longtime donors to rightwing causes like the libertarian philanthropist Rebecca Dunn; the retired aviation mogul Robert Bruce; Uline founder and political mega-donor Richard Uihlein; and the billionaire John W Childs.
Another donor, the retired Houston software developer Mike Rydin, gave his name to “Camp Rydin”, a sprawling 2,200-acre property on Maryland’s eastern shore purchased after his $25m donation to CPI in the wake of January 6.
CPI paid $7.25m for the property in December 2021 according to Maryland property records.
Rydin was also honored in the naming of Rydin House, one of four adjacent properties on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC that CPI literature has described as “Patriot’s Row”.
Those buildings were reportedly acquired via a network of for-profit companies in a year-long “shopping spree that added up to $41m”. CPI’s own reporting envisions this as a “campus” separate from its neighboring headquarters.
CPI appears to be particularly closely wedded to the hard-right House Freedom caucus.
Recruiting election deniers
As its coffers swelled, CPI added high-profile Trump world figures to its staff roster.
In 2021, the former congressman and Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI on a starting salary of about $522,000, which grew to over $864,000 the following year thanks in part to a bonus of $300,000 according to CPI’s 2022 filing.
Also in 2021, Cleta Mitchell, a veteran GOP lawyer, was appointed to lead CPI’s Election Integrity Project, which saw her lead a series of “election integrity summits” around the country.
Both Meadows and Mitchell were at the center of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Meadows was indicted in Georgia last August and in Arizona last month over his alleged role in attempts to persuade state officials to change vote counts in those states. Those proceedings are ongoing.
Mitchell was not indicted in those cases, but participated in a 2 January 2021 call in which Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” 11,780 votes in order to hand the state to him.
The Guardian previously reported that Mitchell’s “election integrity” efforts were seen by pro-democracy groups as efforts at voter suppression premised on the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen.
Birthing a Maga galaxy
Mitchell’s organization is just one that CPI has been “incubating” with large donations, according to tax filings and media reports.
Others include the opposition research outfit the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), reportedly under an IRS audit over undisclosed ad spends; American Moment, led by 25-year-old Saurabh Sharma, which is “on a mission to recruit and train the next generation of Republican elites”; and America First Legal (AFL), a litigation shop headed by the former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, which also employs Gene Hamilton, a former Trump administration official.
Miller was a senior policy adviser to Trump during his administration, and is credited as chief architect of an immigration policy that encompassed the so-called “Muslim ban” and the family separation policy at the southern US border. In 2019 the Guardian reported on emails sent by Miller before he joined the Trump administration in which he promoted white nationalist literature, racist immigration stories and eugenics-era immigration laws.
Hamilton signed the 2017 DHS memo that ended Daca, an Obama-era immigration reform initiative.
Documents of disclosures by Congress members and staff
The documents that reveal the details of CPI events are disclosures filed by members of Congress and their staff to the House ethics committee, and by senators and their staff to the secretary of the Senate.
Members of Congress and their staff must file a detailed report of gifts received from outside organizations using the Financial Disclosure Statement or the Gift and Travel Filings form. Senators and their staff file the corresponding public financial disclosure report.
Both House and Senate forms must include a description of each gift, its estimated value, the identity of the donor and the date received. In the case of donated travel for conferences and training, like that offered to members, senators and staff by CPI, filers must include guest lists and draft or final event programs.
These forms are available online in separate House and Senate repositories, but no unified search is possible and nor is it possible to search by donor organization. The Guardian used search engine operators to obtain records of CPI gifts.
This revealed details of 21 CPI events held between February 2021 and April 2024.
Molding Maga minds
Events for staff were almost exclusively held at Camp Rydin, the Maryland ranch. Flagship events for representatives and senators, however, were almost all held back-to-back in winter at a string of resort hotels in south Florida, and billed each year as the Conservative Member Retreat and the Winter Leadership Conference.
Some staff events were tied to fellowships advertised on the Conservative Partnership Academy website, which the site says are “are oriented toward helping conservatives become leaders, policy professionals and effective communicators”. These include separate fellowships for policy staff, communications staff and senior staff.
The site does not disclose curricula for these fellowships, or for various other courses advertised on the site, instead inviting those wanting more information to “tell us more about yourself” by completing a web form.
Other events revealed in the documents, however, appear to line up with those courses, covering Senate procedure and generic communications skills as well as specific policy areas including defense, immigration and energy.
From the beginning, speakers advertised for CPI events have included a mix of the non-profit’s staff; Republican politicians, and particularly, members of the Freedom caucus; and representatives of affiliated or like-minded outside groups.
Organizations including AAF, AFL, the Center for Renewing America, the Heritage Foundation, Heritage’s lobbying arm Heritage Action and the America First Policy Institute are well represented across all events.
Maga megastars
Increasingly, however, CPI has been able to mobilise Maga star power in attracting people to their events.
At an October 2022 workshop aimed at “communications professionals”, advertised speakers included AFL’s Stephen Miller, Lauren Boebert, the Colorado congresswoman, the Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway and Ben Williamson, a former Trump White House aide.
Hemingway’s book about the 2020 election, entitled Rigged, claims that big tech companies, wealthy individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, and Democratic party operatives colluded in gifting the election to Biden.
In her own book, Enough, Cassidy Hutchinson, a Trump administration official, wrote that Ben Williamson celebrated his subpoena from the January 6 committee with a vodka seltzer and the toast: “Cheers to our subpoenas. We’re officially in the big leagues.”
In September 2023 Trump-endorsed Boebert – a vociferous and controversial loyalist to the former president – who was ejected from a theater after vaping and apparently groping her companion in the stalls. Nevertheless, Boebert was listed as an attendee at the Conservative Members Retreat and Winter Leadership Conference at the five-star Biltmore Coral Gables hotel in Miami, although ex-husband Jayson Boebert did not accompany her as he had at the 2023 event.
The biggest billed names are reserved for member events. The 2023 member’s retreat and leadership conference featured Turning Point USA’s public faces, Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson, and Gaston Mooney, the CEO of Blaze Media.
The corresponding 2024 schedule billed as speakers Ben Carson, the former Republican presidential candidate, Steve Bannon, the former Trump aide and War Room host and Jason Whitlock, a sports media identity and outspoken conservative.
Extremists in attendance
Along with familiar faces from the Republican right, CPI events have billed controversial groups and individuals whose politics lay further out on the far-right fringe. Being platformed by CPI possibly allowed these individuals to exercise influence on lawmakers and their young staffers.
Beirich, the extremism expert, said that including extremists in staff events indicated that CPI “wanted their cadres trained up in far-right ideas including racism, bigotry and hate”.
An October 2022 training for legislative directors, for example, featured a session on the theme of “Putting Conservative Philosophy into Practice”. The featured speakers were David Azerrad and Pedro Gonzalez.
Azerrad is an assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and a former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow.
Beirich describes him simply as a “racist”.
In April 2022, Azerrad gave a speech at St Vincent College, a Benedictine college in Pennsylvania titled Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria in Contemporary America, in which he reportedly argued that Black people in America had more “visible” privileges and that there was a “consensus amongst our elites” that “Black citizens should not be held to the same standard of conduct as white people”.
The college president was forced to issue a statement in the wake of the speech, describing it as “not consistent with our Benedictine values of hospitality and respect”.
Gonzalez, meanwhile, was also scheduled to co-host a dinner conversation with CPI’s Corrigan on 26 June 2023 at a retreat for legislative assistants, on the theme of “pitfalls to avoid in the conservative movement”. The following day, Breitbart News surfaced chat records from 2019 and 2020 in which Gonzalez made derogatory remarks about minorities and Jews.
A February 2024 members’ retreat featured Nate Fischer from New Founding and American Reformer on a panel about conservative innovators.
The Guardian has previously reported on Fischer’s connections to the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a men- and invitation-only fraternal lodge whose internal mission statement speaks of achieving the “political and social dominance” of their Christian nationalist beliefs.
Andrew Beck and Andrew Cuff, meanwhile, were listed as speakers at an August 2023 Senate communications retreat. Both men work at marketing agency Beck & Stone and its subsidiary, Knight Takes Rook or KTR.
Beck admits to his own membership in SACR on his profile page at Beck & Stone. KTR’s site, meanwhile, signals an apparent preparedness to act secretively on behalf of clients.
Under the heading “special operations”, KTR announces that it “facilitates clandestine actions with plausible deniability on behalf of clients who share our mission”, adding the claim further down the page that “none of our Special Operations can be linked to KTR or our clients before, during, or after they are conducted”.
At a March 2023 Immigration Policy Bootcamp, billed speakers included Mark Krikorian, Art Arthur and Jon Feere from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), along with Roy Beck, founder of Numbers USA.
Both organizations are strands in a web of anti-immigration groups originally founded or influenced by John Tanton, which advocate for restrictive immigration policies. CIS is designated as an anti-immigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Beirich said that listing was “richly deserved” and that CIS and Numbers USA “have their roots in John Tanton’s White Nationalism”.
Along with other speakers at the events, Beirich said, their presence indicated that “there doesn’t seem to be any line of impropriety on the Maga right”.
