Last year, a top official at Project 2025 said that former President Donald Trump is “very bought in” with its conservative agenda and presidential transition program. On Monday, the same Project 2025 official claimed the idea that Trump is attached to the project is a “hoax.”

“What Democrats [have] said about Project 2025 is probably the greatest misinformation campaign since, I don’t know, the Russia hoax,” Project 2025 director Paul Dans said Monday. “They move from hoax to hoax,” he continued. “Somehow that whole squad put all the marbles in vilifying Project 2025, and then making this fake attachment to President Trump.”

Dans is one of numerous former Trump officials who are involved with Project 2025 — many of whom are expected to serve in high-level roles in a second Trump administration if he wins in November. The project’s 887-page agenda, detailing conservatives’ policy recommendations for early 2025, is radically right-wing, including and especially on abortion. 

As Project 2025 has become more controversial, Trump has sought to distance himself from the project. 

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” the former president recently posted on Truth Social — despite the fact one of its authors was chosen as the platform policy director for the Republican National Committee.

Project 2025 is being run out of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank, which hosted a policy festival at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday, as Republicans gathered to once nominate Trump. 

Speaking at the policy fest, Dans suggested that Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025.

“We stood up our project 2.5 years ago, way before anybody even dropped his or her hat into the ring for running for president, but it was to bring our movement together,” he said. “We’re 110 conservative organizations who have really committed ourselves to making America a government of by and for the people.”

During the Republican primary race last year, Dans said on a radio show that Project 2025 is “candidate-neutral,” but he assured the interviewer that “Trump’s very bought in with this.”

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He noted that Trump aide John McEntee, who is expected to serve in an enforcer role in a second Trump administration, is a senior advisor for Project 2025. 

“We’re fortunate to have John McEntee, who many of your listeners may know was — he helmed the Office of Presidential Personnel in what I would call the fourth quarter of the first term of Trump,” Dans said in the interview. “But he is one of our senior advisors.”