Paul Dans was the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an action plan for implementing President Donald Trump’s campaign promises as policy. He is now running for Senate in South Carolina against the Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham.
You’re back with a new mission to unseat Lindsey Graham. What did you mean when you said Graham should lawyer up, and that Graham was the one who launched the Russia Hoax instructing John McCain to turn the Steele Dossier to the FBI?
For President Trump, with friends like Lindsey Graham, who needs enemies? Graham is a uniparty escort who walks Donald Trump into trouble and then offers him a rescue line. The first thing Graham did after Trump won the 2016 election was to say that Russia hacked the election. He was publicly stoking the flames of the Russia hoax from the very beginning, but it turns out his involvement was even deeper.
In 2019, Lindsey Graham admitted that he advised “his friend” John McCain to turn over the Steele dossier to the FBI, the document paid for by the Clinton campaign which started the Russia hoax. Graham said he thought the contents of the dossier “could be true.” Yes—the Russiagate coup that stymied the first term of Trump and kept the president on a short leash could have been publicly blown up by Graham as a bunch of hooey. Instead, the dossier’s delivery at his direction put Robert Mueller and Jack Smith in motion and forever changed the face of our country. Because of Graham, the wall built during the first term was not at the Southern border, but one encircling President Trump. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, yet failed to build the border wall. The damages stemming from Graham’s efforts to delegitimize President Trump’s 2016 victory are immeasurable, but you can start by counting the 20 million illegals who have streamed into our country over the past 10 years.
Before I went into politics, I was a high-stakes commercial litigator, known for my seminal contribution in unearthing the evidence that led to the biggest civil RICO case in American History, the Chevron Ecuador case. On behalf of Chevron, we subpoenaed documentary film outtakes that revealed the smoking-gun evidence behind a corrupt scheme between New York plaintiff attorneys and the Socialist government of Ecuador to extort $27 billion from the company. The lesson in life is we oftentimes skip over the obvious—that the damning evidence is hiding in plain sight. Lindsey Graham is part of the uniparty conspiracy, still ongoing, to depose President Trump.
Lindsey Graham is a snake, wrapped around President Trump’s neck. We all remember he was a fixture on CNN attacking Trump in 2016. He said “Donald Trump can go to hell” and refused to vote for Trump in 2016. His 32 years in DC as a career politician have been characterized by caving to the Democrats on immigration, climate change, and gun control. The only thing he’s done consistently is cheerlead endless war (Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine), endless government (Patriot Act, Chokepoint 2.0), and endless spending (his record embodies everything that conservatives and national populists stand against).
Famously, Graham did an about-face in the spring of 2018, with the two-year approach of reelection, and began to beat the drum for President Trump, knowing that South Carolina voters would have it no other way. The left felt immediately betrayed, as McCain and Graham had been the poster children for the Republican opposition to Trump. For the left’s part, the sudden howls from Graham, their former collaborator, to now investigate the Democrats for the Russia hoax was one double-cross too many. In the infamous clip on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough asked: “Who was the one who told John McCain to hand the Trump Dossier over to the FBI—that person, that person has a lot to answer to the voters of South Carolina!”
But Graham’s explanation was spared by intervening disaster—a Covid blizzard would soon blanket the country, and with no viable primary challenger to dig out this truth, Graham’s fraud would remain snowed under. He is a fraudster and has always been one from his first broken promise to the voters of South Carolina—term limits. He is fundamentally dishonest.
President Trump’s now declared mission to unravel the Russia hoax is melt season for Graham’s fraud. Here’s the timeline: Graham and McCain visit Ukraine in 2014 and cheer on the Maidan coup. McCain and Graham are then humiliated by Trump in the 2016 election. In December 2016, Obama rolled out the Russian interference narrative. At this time, John McCain obtains a copy of the Steele Dossier and Graham urges McCain to turn over the Steele Dossier to the FBI, which he does. Graham takes to the airwaves in December 2016 decrying Russian interference, saying it is of bipartisan concern. In May 2017, Graham holds Judiciary hearings aimed in his words to reinforce the IC finding that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election.
Graham attacks the dismissal of Comey, urges appointment of Barr, ensures that Barr will allow the witch hunt to continue, and warns the president not to interfere with the independence of Mueller, saying firing Mueller would be the end of Trump’s presidency. When Durham is appointed to investigate the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, Graham, sitting as Judiciary Committee Chairman with full subpoena powers, was now perfectly fitted with an excuse to do nothing, lest he “interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.” He contended that exercising Congress’s power as a separate branch of government to get to the bottom of the hoax would somehow be “unethical” (NB: importantly, not “illegal”) imposition on the Justice Department and courts. Famously, he stonewalled Maria Bartiromo for an entire year defending his inaction to launch an investigation. Durham’s never-ending investigation was the definition of justice delayed being justice denied. Its final delivery stretched for four years, conveniently missing the 2018 midterms, the 2020 election and even the 2022 midterms, before it was handed to a Democrat Congress in January 2023.
Of course, Graham cannot hide behind the recently declassified Durham report annex, claiming now, as he does, that he had no idea that the Russian interference narrative was cooked up by Obama et al. Graham had access to classified materials with the report’s delivery in 2023, and said nothing. His fraud is now about to be unraveled. Lindsey Graham has no business asking questions; it is now his time to answer them. Senator Graham, what did you know and when did you know it?
Do you feel that America First is being hijacked by neoconservatives?
Among others, yes. As I said, this Senate race will be the ultimate steel-cage match for the very soul of the MAGA movement. If we fail to get rid of Lindsey Graham now, he will have a hand in defining this movement after Trump. You have, in Graham, the ultimate uniparty establishment career politician and, in me, an outsider—a Mr. Smith-goes-to-Washington, proven swamp drainer. As an appointee in Trump’s first term, I shook up the Office of Personnel Management and reinvigorated the axiom that “personnel is policy.” My leadership got, among other things, Schedule F off the shelf and put in place. OPM is the motherboard of the administrative state, and by reclaiming that agency for the president under his core Article II powers, I helped ensure that President Trump in his second term could exercise the will of the people over a bureaucracy. This was the fundamental teaching of Project 2025, one I had learned from my own experience in the trenches. My aim was to convey this to our movement when I drew up its plans for Project 2025 from my kitchen table in Charleston, SC in 2022.
Call it the Catholic in me, but my disposition toward granting absolution is deeply ingrained, and I will always allow people a chance to go forth and sin no more. However, we know that many deep-state neocons never go away and we have to be internally vigilant of these shapeshifters. They can only go so long before they reveal themselves and pine for the next bombing or boots on the ground.
As a movement, we have significantly changed the makeup of the House, but the Senate has remained largely unchanged. We haven’t been able to unseat the Senators of the old guard. Defeating Graham will send shockwaves that cause the rest of the dominoes to fall.
Graham is in favor of further escalation in Ukraine and against Iran. Do you think that MAGA risks losing the foreign policy mantle to arch-interventionalists changing jerseys?
Yes—I’m running for Senate to end the endless wars. Look, no amount of lipstick can fool MAGA to fall for Graham. His new MAGA Act, however, may trick low information voters.
Our bravest—the men and women of our Armed Forces—should only ever be put in harm’s way for a cause worth dying for, only when American liberty is at stake. We cannot spend trillions of the inheritance of future generations because Graham and others think chasing Russkies is “game on,” as if they were playing Stratego in the Cold War ’80s. It’s our kids and their futures, not his. Let’s concentrate on the East Palestines in America for a change—let’s address the crumbling infrastructure and broken lives of people all over my state of South Carolina and indeed all over this country, instead of blowing things up and destroying lives abroad.
In a South Carolina speech, Trump positioned his first campaign against the folly of the Iraq War and changed the Republican Party. Why has this realist momentum eluded South Carolina senatorial politics, which seem stuck in the rhetoric of 2004? You’re clearly focused on foreign policy. What is the foreign policy of your campaign?
When Trump essentially said we had been lied to about Iraq, he [revealed] that the deep state has been running the foreign policy of the United States, with little interruption since Eisenhower, save for a momentary disruption under Reagan.
I will always look first through the prism of the American citizens and ask how any decision ultimately leads to their flourishing. Are proposed actions worth the trade-off that will likely cost lives and further diminish their standard of living? We can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman. No longer will we force feed the cultural Marxist social policies of 21st-century American elites to our neighbors around the world. I will reject globalism in all its forms and any such attempt to put the United States under the control of any nation or community of interests.
I believe the way to a peaceful, prosperous and stable world is through promotion of national sovereignty, allowing different cultures to chart their destinies. In order for the United States to maintain its primacy, we must achieve peace through strength. As with the first rule of rescue, we must rebuild our military-industrial base before we can run to the aid of others. This means avoiding conflicts with no evident endpoint or goal. This is not isolationism. It is realism. It means applying the lessons of our past to reject the folly of nation building, but focus instead on rebuilding this nation first.
Do you think Project 2025 branding hangs over your records, or is that overhyped by the media?
Project 2025 changed history for conservatives, the United States, and even the world. We declared war on the administrative state and slammed the door shut on the Progressive Era. The left launched their disinformation campaign because they realized the existential threat it promised to their established order. Even President Biden on his way out the door begged that Project 2025 not be put in place. After the left tried to pin their demagoguing portrayal of Project 2025 on President Trump, he still won in a landslide. The ideas actually promoted in Project 2025—a transparent, efficient and limited government responsive to the will of its people—are unsurprisingly very popular with voters.
I was humbled to be asked to conceive and lead Project 2025 based upon my leadership success in the first Trump administration. I came into DC with an outsider’s utter refusal to accept the status quo as reasonable or even legal. I maximized the axiom that Personnel is Policy by being unafraid to get in the arena and mix it up. I reclaimed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for executive branch control under the President. With Project 2025, I sought to institutionalize those lessons I learned personally. We made a call for outsiders to come serve in government, and the tech brothers, MAHA moms and Elon Musk answered. Project 2025 is my story and I am definitely sticking to it.
Through the sheer will of President Trump, America is now under a major constitutional renovation on the eve of her 250th birthday. Conservatives are restoring the federal government to [a regime] of, by and for the people by reanimating the principles of separation of powers in a limited government of enumerated powers.
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President Trump just executed the most successful first 200 days in presidential history, and that would not have been accomplished without Project 2025. Estimates by media outlets are that 70–80 percent of the policy announcements and actions of the administration are reflected in the publicly facing materials of Project 2025.
Under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, starting in the spring of 2022, I conceived and led a three-year mission to unite 110 conservative organizations and more than 1,000 top policymakers and former administration officials working as volunteers to crowdsource this work. We took a page from the left to organize when out of power and be ready with a group of aligned, identified, trained and mission-set conservatives ready to flood the zone the first day the next conservative president took power. We taught our side to fight the deep state head-on, and this new term of engagement is seen every day in the unafraid way in which the Second Trump administration approaches the status quo. No matter if the Trump campaign knocked it, or other competitors on the right attacked it, Project 2025 still got put in place. I am extremely proud of this revolutionary effort.
With the help of thousands, I created a global phenomenon that charted the course for the Trump administration out of the gate. Now I plan to free the great state of South Carolina from a 32-year career politician who ushered in the decay that Project 2025 was supposed to fix. As I did with Project 2025, I now humbly ask my fellow conservatives to lend their voices and treasure in this next battle against the deep state.
