The Pattern
The Council for National Policy publishes praise for itself on its own website, in other people’s words. It quotes a description of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” It quotes a line attributed to Vice President Mike Pence calling it “one of the oldest and most effective organizations in the history of the conservative movement.” The group has never disputed either characterization. It has also never confirmed who belongs to it. CNP membership has been treated as confidential since the group’s founding in 1981, and members have historically been asked not to name the organization publicly.
That secrecy has not stopped four decades of leaked recordings, rosters, and reporting from establishing what the group actually does. This piece draws on that reporting, not on any independent review of leaked material by Deceit, to describe a private, invitation-only body that has coordinated judicial strategy, election-season messaging, and personnel across the wider conservative movement since Ronald Reagan’s first term.
A nerve center, built on purpose
CNP was founded in May 1981, when Christian-right strategist Tim LaHaye convened roughly 50 conservatives at direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie’s home in Virginia. Early members included activist Paul Weyrich, Republican operative Morton Blackwell, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, oil heir Nelson Bunker Hunt, and beer magnate Joseph Coors. According to The New Republic, the group met weekly at first and modeled itself on the Council on Foreign Relations: a members-only institution built to shape policy from outside government, except aimed at one side of American politics.
Journalist Anne Nelson, whose 2019 book “Shadow Network” became the research backbone for the 2024 documentary “Bad Faith,” describes CNP’s founding purpose as fusing three interests in one room: rolling back civil-rights-era gains, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and building political power, all timed to Reagan’s 1980 win. The New Republic’s reporting describes the group’s structural role in blunter terms: connecting “the donors and the doers.” CNP rarely writes checks itself. It is where the people who write the checks meet the people who decide where the money goes.
Tax-exempt, and legally barred from politics
The IRS revoked CNP’s 501(c)(3) tax exemption in 1992, ruling the group was not organized for the public benefit. CNP challenged the ruling in federal court and won reinstatement. It has held 501(c)(3) status continuously since. Under federal law, that status legally bars the group from directly or indirectly participating in any political campaign for or against a candidate. It also means CNP is not required to disclose its individual donors, and gifts to it are tax-deductible. Its most recent available filing, reviewed through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, reported $4.09 million in revenue and $4.04 million in expenses for 2024, funded mostly by member and donor contributions.
That budget is small next to the organizations CNP’s own members run. The group’s influence was never about its own balance sheet.
What members said, on tape
In October 2020, the Washington Post published excerpts from internal CNP video obtained by the watchdog group Documented, recorded at February and August 2020 meetings. Election attorney J. Christian Adams told members not to be “afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.” Judicial Watch president Thomas Fitton told attendees, “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do.” Faith and Freedom Coalition chairman Ralph Reed told the group his organization would be “harvesting ballots in churches.” A separate recording from February 2019, reported by the Post that same year, captured Leonard Leo, then executive vice president of the Federalist Society, telling CNP members that “judicial confirmations these days are more like political campaigns” and that the movement needed to run them that way.
None of the people quoted above has been charged with a crime over these remarks. The recordings document strategy talk inside a private group, not a court finding. What they establish on the record is that CNP functions as a room where people who shape national election and judicial strategy say, to each other, what they do not say in public.
After the loss
By February 2020, according to Nelson’s reporting, CNP members were already discussing what to do if Trump lost that November, including having state legislators send letters questioning the result’s validity. Several individuals CNP’s own materials list among its members played documented roles in the run-up to January 6, 2021. Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was killed in September 2025, each took part in organizing or promoting the events that preceded the Capitol attack, in different capacities reported independently by multiple outlets. Simone Gold, a CNP-linked doctor who promoted hydroxychloroquine as a covid treatment, later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering the Capitol that day.
In 2021, CNP Action, a separate lobbying affiliate structured to permit the political activity CNP itself is barred from, turned to a new target: the federal voting-rights bill known as H.R. 1. The Washington Post reported that CNP Action speakers urged a coordinated campaign against the bill using billboards, websites, social media, internet memes, street-level videos of opponents, and “urban art,” and floated protests outside individual Democratic lawmakers’ homes. One speaker called the urban-art tactic “another really exceptional strategy.”
A membership roster obtained by Documented and dated January 2022 showed former Vice President Mike Pence among the group’s newer members. The New Republic’s review of internal material from CNP’s February 2022 meeting, held at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California, described sessions turning Virginia’s 2021 school-board fights over race and curriculum into a national midterm strategy, alongside messaging plans for the abortion case then pending before the Supreme Court, months ahead of the Dobbs decision that would overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
The network beneath the network
A 2025 report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism found that CNP members hold additional leadership roles in more than 20 percent of the organizations affiliated with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s governing plan for a second Trump term. By a network-analysis measure called eigenvector centrality, which ranks an organization not just by how many connections it has but by how influential those connections are, the same report ranks CNP as the third-most influential organization in the far-right network it mapped, and it counts at least 21 instances of Trump-orbit organizations that include CNP members in senior leadership or on their boards. The report also traces CNP as a direct forerunner of Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Center for Law and Justice, and the Federalist Society, the conservative legal network that vets judicial nominees: three of the largest legal organizations on the right. That is how a group with a $4 million annual budget produces influence disproportionate to its own spending. It does not fund the programs. It supplies the people who run them.
Who runs it now
CNP’s current executive director is Bob McEwen, a former Ohio congressman. Its board president is William Walton, a Heritage Foundation trustee. Kelly Shackelford, head of the religious-liberty litigation group First Liberty Institute, serves as vice president. Jenny Beth Martin is secretary. Morton Blackwell, a founding member and head of the Leadership Institute, is treasurer, according to the group’s own IRS filings as compiled by InfluenceWatch. Leadership rotates among a small circle of officers: Thomas Fitton held the presidency as recently as 2022, succeeding William Walton, who has since returned to serve as the group’s current board president, and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins held the role in an earlier term.
This is a piece about one membership organization’s documented conduct: its own leaked recordings, its own tax filings, its own leadership rosters, and the reporting built on all three. It is not a claim about Christianity as a religion or conservatism as a political tradition, and it says nothing about the millions of Christians and conservatives who have never attended a CNP meeting and have no say in what its members decide behind closed doors.
Verdict: Documented apparatus. For 45 years, a private membership organization has connected Christian-right and secular conservative donors to the operatives, lawyers, and elected officials who spend their money and write the strategy, all while its own tax-exempt status legally bars it from campaign activity. Its own members have been recorded discussing voter-suppression messaging, ballot harvesting, and judicial-confirmation tactics in language they do not use in public. Independent reporting ties individual members to the effort to challenge the 2020 result and to the run-up to January 6. None of that is in dispute in the reporting cited here. What remains unresolved is whether any of it has crossed the legal line that CNP’s own tax-exempt status is supposed to enforce, a question no regulator has publicly answered.
The Council for National Policy was not contacted for comment on this piece. Its current officers and the individuals quoted above were not separately contacted either. The reporting above is drawn from the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Documented, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, InfluenceWatch, ProPublica, and CNP’s own public materials, all cited below.