Thread by @ellim992

The Heritage Foundation doesn't just write policy: They commit fraud and manufacture evidence used by Republicans in Congress, in courts, briefs to SCOTUS, and by right-wing media. The scam is sloppy, and they often leave their names on it.👇
(This hasn't been reported on.)
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They play a game presenting information without context to make anyone outside their movement look bad— but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Heritage has been committing fraud for 5 decades, manufacturing documents and claiming they’ve retrieved them by FOIA or leaks.
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They often find a similar document, alter it, and present it as the original. These forgeries are provided as evidence against Presidents, evidence in SCOTUS cases, and evidence in the court of public opinion—and because they're similar in style, nobody questions authenticity.
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The smoking gun of fraud Heritage commits is metadata, digital fingerprints.
Sometimes it's so bad they'll stay signed into to their Microsoft accounts on the fakes. I've been hesitant to talk about this because I believe exposure will cause them to lock down their processes.
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Also, as I've been looking into this, Heritage Foundation has (probably just coincidence) locked down their own hosting, many links and documents are now inaccesible. Unfortunately, this coincided with the hack of the Internet Archive. I'll provide what I preserved.
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We'll start small —
In July, Daily Signal (Heritage’s news outlet) posted an 'Individual Transition Plan' they claimed was from a CA School District, with a box to check for keeping the transition a secret from parents.
It's fake. The real one is available online.
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The real plan posted at the district is similar, but the changes point to the narrative Heritage is trying to set. Not only is the date on Heritage's form prior to the law they’re talking about, they actually cite the wrong law.
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The real plan explicitly includes parents.
It state that to protect the students confidentiality, they'll use single stall bathrooms, change in stalls, or waive PE. And the real plan doesn't mention showers because ** the schools don’t have them. **
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The amount of effort the Heritage Foundation went to in manufacturing a form about child nudity, thinking so graphically about the bathroom habits of kids, is perverted and predatory.
These are dangerous people.
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A version of the fake document cites a law about “transition plans” — But it's transition plans from special education back to general education! These get worse.
One tactic they use to hide the origins of these is laundering through affiliate organizations:
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This document first appeared on the California Alliance for Education, which claims to be a community stakeholder group advancing policy (mostly against unions). It was then posted to Capo First Kids, both organizations are owned by the same person:
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Craig Alexander is the General Counsel for the "California Policy Center", a think-tank and "public interest" law group that advances Heritage Foundation's agenda locally. Craig forges documents. This is known, it's expected. Daily Signal knows when they post them.
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These firms like Alliance Defending Freedom or Liberty First, are "public interest" groups.
But review their court submissions. These legal cases simply submit articles from Fox News, Daily Signal and Reduxx as "evidence" in court cases, articles they often wrote themselves.
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For Culture-war lawsuits Plaintiffs are known conservative influencers, not random citizens. Riley Gaines, Brooke Slusser, Kim Jones (ICONS founder). These people didn't come out of nowhere.
The scam is to overburden, say too much, nobody will check everything.
It gets worse-
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The Hunter Biden China story? Heritage posted an earlier version of the "evidence", while the GOP posted one with stripped metadata and flattened images.
It's common for the government to sanitize data, it's questionable how Heritage got an older version. More questionable:
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The metadata on the photos contained within the document Heritage posted are also more recent than the supposed date of the document itself (2017).
It's not known how this tampering happened, but it points to the coordination between Heritage and the House GoP.
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Another odd piece of the Hunter China doc? I've tried to find a way a powerpoint can be exported to a PDF where the system writes the creator name "First Last".
Haven't found it yet. Always "Last, First" This is common for Heritage, I reviewed the metadata on years of files.
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This field is written by the program using the user input when you set it up. So when Heritage shows "Last,First" without the space, it leads to questions of authenticity. Similarly, some documents leave Pythong metadata writing programs in the "creator" field. They're fake.
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Heritage also writes the bills for GoP members of congress. Model legislation is common, lobbying groups will often draft laws. Comparing a bill from Heritage and Marsha Blackburn shows Heritage's was an earlier draft, Marsha's team edited and submitted the document.
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This is not true for JD Vance -
His bills match perfectly, with no evidence they were adjusted or even read.
Heritage even hosts "unsigned" versions of Vance's bills, before they're processed by the S.L.C.
Unsurprising, as Vance's legislative aid is a current Heritage fellow.
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JD Vance has always had strong ties with Heritage and Kevin Roberts. To be clear, Vance repeats the exact Russian propoganda about the war in Ukraine as the influencers from the recent DoJ indictment.
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Heritage was exposed writing bills to restrict voting in various states by a leaked video.
They were telling donors techniques they used presenting the legislation to give it a "grass roots" feel. This has been happening for decades at the state level-

22/motherjones.com/politics/2021/…

You can still find this legislation online:
They don't just write about voting, Heritage drafted the HOPE Acts to over-burden public assistance programs with extra paperwork and difficult accounting—making these systems harder to access and less efficient to run.
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You see, Heritage is on the hook to groups like Council for National Policy for this work. It's how they and their "affiliates" are funded.
Richard Uihlein
Joseph Coors
Richard Gaby
Jay Van Andel
Miriam Adelson
People like Betsy DeVos have gone on the record with this -
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Trump appointed secretary of education Betsy DeVos, wife of an Amway founder, said as much in an op-ed to Washington from 1997:
"My family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the Republican Party . . . We expect a return on our investment."
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Other Heritage affiliates are directly to blame for the strife in Springfield, Ohio. CPI was working on the Haitian migrant story and using Franklin before realizing Springfield was more useful after a car accident.
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They gave everyone a number appeared on official statements— but that wasn’t the number of Haitian migrants. It was the total number of people of foreign birth in the county, which the statement itself said. This shows the power of the narratives these people write.
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And they've done it for 50 years in a coordinated effort to overturn our protections in this democracy. This was the stated plan all along:
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These aren't just campaign lies - They are lying to the Supreme Court, lying to Congress, and lying to the American people. They are committing forgery and fraud that would lead to prison sentences if they hadn’t embedded themselves so deeply.
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@threadreaderapp please unroll the corruption for the people. They need to see the receipts 🧾☝️

Any journalist who wants metadata on Heritage, their affiliates, or Senator Vance is welcome to DM me for it— It's above board, all public data, you could check it too.
I’ll give you the rundown on outputs, signs of tampering, and chain-of-custody between Heritage and the GoP.

@churchlady320 I did see somebody tagged the California AG. As far as laws that have been explicitly broken, he's probably the guy for at least that document- although I have more!

@Claire_Myfanwy @bellingcat @OCCRP I've pulled every economic policy the Republican party has put forward since the 70s. Regular calls for a flat tax, massive handouts to corporations, all while claiming they'll lower taxes on the middle class. They have people convinced they're the party of fiscal responsibility.

@Claire_Myfanwy @bellingcat @OCCRP But they're not - every single tax proposal put forward by the R's for decades has been to cut taxes in half for billionaires and *triple them* for everybody else. Every damn time. You never see it because Democrats stop it.
People are too bad at math to notice.

@Bellalindafox Oh, I'll tag her!
@NancyMacLean5 you might be interested in this thread on some of the evidence of fraud from Heritage and their affiliates.

@lealowe59