Exclusive: The Pincer Movement - An Architecture of Autocracy
Project 2025, Christian Nationalism, and the Engineered Assault on American Democracy.
A Definitive Investigation by Restoring Democracy's Promise
Table of Contents
1. Prologue: The Sheriff, The Governor, and the Contradiction in a Carbon Copy
2. Section 2. The Iowa Microcosm: A Punitive Lawsuit and the Charge of "Thought Policing"
3. Section 3. The Doctrine of Dominion: The Theological Engine of the Pincer Movement
4. Section 4. The “How” — The Authoritarian Machinery of Project 2025
5. Section 5: The Alliance Forged—The Sinews of Money and Personnel
6. Section 6: The Electoral Battleground—A Three-Front War
7. Conclusion: The Unseen Conflict and the Imperative of Democratic Resilience
Section 1. Prologue: The Sheriff, The Governor, and the Contradiction in a Carbon Copy
Sheriff Dan Marx believed he was doing his job. As the elected lawman in a quiet Iowa county, that meant talking to his constituents—in this case, on Facebook. He never imagined that explaining his view of the U.S. Constitution would put him in the crosshairs of the state's most powerful political figures and unravel a national plot to dismantle American democracy.
The letter arrived on Sheriff Marx’s desk on a cold February morning in Winneshiek County, Iowa. It was formal, stamped with the state seal, and carried a tone of bureaucratic command. But it was a single, almost-missed detail that caught the Sheriff’s eye: a faint “cc:” notation at the bottom, addressed to the state's highest law enforcement officer: Attorney General Brenna Bird.
That carbon copy was the overlooked key in a locked door. When we turned it, a hidden architecture of power swung open—revealing the secret corridors and contradictions that shaped the campaign.
This investigation is the story of what lay beyond that door. It reveals how a single line of text on a forgotten letter became the key to exposing a direct contradiction in the official record, a political lawsuit, and the hidden machinery powering a national campaign to reshape America.
This investigation reveals a coordinated, two-pronged assault on American democracy, engineered in the shadows by a powerful alliance of religious zealots and political technocrats. We call it the Pincer Movement.
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We didn’t set out to find just one answer. We started with two separate questions:
The “Why”: What is the ideological engine behind the rise of Christian Nationalism in states like Iowa?
The “How”: Who is building the detailed, 920-page playbook known as Project 2025, designed to dismantle and seize control of the U.S. government?
What we found is that these efforts are not disconnected—they’re engineered to work in tandem. Some call it a machine. This report maps how that machine works. Because before you can defend democracy, you must understand what’s dismantling it.
The journey to this understanding has tested the limits of modern investigative work, demanding a "shield wall of evidence" to penetrate layers of deliberate obscurity and counter anticipated narratives from those whose operations we seek to illuminate.
A. What This Investigation Reveals
The Structural Link: For the first time, this investigation documents a direct institutional line from the command structure of Project 2025 in Washington D.C. to its key operational partner in the heartland: Iowa's most influential Christian Nationalist group, The Family Leader. This structural link proves Iowa is a primary deployment site for the national conservative agenda, transforming the state into a live testbed for policies designed to reshape American democracy.
The Iowa Microcosm: We expose how a coordinated pressure campaign against a local Iowa sheriff serves as a direct, real-world application of the national playbook, revealing a closely coordinated effort between the Governor's office and the Attorney General (See the primary source—Report AG Investigation of Sheriff Marx).
The Legislative Assembly Line: We uncover the role of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL), as a "transmission belt," feeding model legislation aligned with Project 2025 directly to allied state legislators.
The Complete Financial Architecture: We map the flow of "dark money" from its apex at Leonard Leo's $1.6B MarbleFreedom Trust (MT), through conduits like DonorsTrust (DT), to fund both the architects of Project 2025 and the on-the-ground "legal shock troops" enforcing the agenda at the state level.
The meta-journalistic challenge involves making the invisible visible—tracing flows of "dark money" through byzantine legal structures and connecting ideological pronouncements to legislative proposals and bureaucratic directives. This endeavor holds power accountable not merely for its actions, but for its architecture.
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While national strategy steers the movement, its sharpest edges emerge at the state level—often through quiet pressure, legal intimidation, and calculated bureaucratic disruption. Iowa became an early proving ground. There, a clash over constitutional authority, immigration enforcement, and political loyalty would expose how deeply the new doctrine had penetrated. The fault lines began not in Washington, but in a sheriff’s office in rural Winneshiek County.
Section 2. The Iowa Microcosm: A Punitive Lawsuit and the Charge of "Thought Policing"
Political earthquakes often begin with a subtle tremor. In Iowa, that tremor was a single line of text. A February 6, 2025, complaint from Governor Kim Reynolds to Winneshiek County Sheriff Dan Marx contained a seemingly innocuous detail: "cc: Brenna Bird, Attorney General." This carbon copy notation became damning evidence when, months later, the Attorney General's office responded to our formal Open Records Request by claiming it had “no records” of communication with the Governor on the matter.
🔎 Key Finding: This was more than a clerical oversight—it reflects an inconsistency in the public record that raises reasonable questions about possible inter-agency alignment at the time the enforcement decision was made.
Despite an internal investigation finding Sheriff Marx in full compliance with state law, Attorney General Bird proceeded with a lawsuit that the Sheriff's defense attorneys aptly labeled “nothing more than thought policing.” The state’s case was not about what the Sheriff did, but what he said—an interpretation of his constitutional duties shared on Facebook.
This act of state pressure, however, did not intimidate; it ignited.
In response, the people of Winneshiek County unified, creating a shield wall of local solidarity against what they saw as government overreach. The mobilization was visible and defiant. Yard signs and t-shirts declaring “I stand with Dan” appeared across the county, produced by local businesses like Letterwërks Sign City . Realtor Brianna Bruening, typically apolitical, spearheaded a fundraising drive that quickly raised over $1,500, motivated by a sense that "nothing about it felt right.” Sheriff Marx’s motion to dismiss is scheduled for July 18, 2025.
Crucially, this support was not a partisan rally; it was a bipartisan coalition. Residents described Marx as “level-headed” and “common sense,” with one business owner noting, “It’s one thing that’s probably brought both sides together.” Liberals who disagreed with the Sheriff on other issues stood alongside his conservative supporters, united in defending democratic norms against authoritarian overreach. This unity was echoed in a petition framing the state's actions as:
"…a stark display of undemocratic control and vindictiveness."
The battle for Winneshiek County was never a simple story of Republican versus Democrat. It was a story of principle versus power. And this fight is not an isolated event. It is a flare, illuminating a much larger, national conflict.
A. The Canary in the Coal Mine: From Iowa to the Nation
The effort by Governor Reynolds and AG Bird, built on a documented contradiction and characterized by some as "thought policing," only deepened local resolve. But the events in Iowa, while deeply personal for the people of Winneshiek County, are much more than a local dispute.
This Iowa incident is the canary in the coal mine. It is a stark microcosm of the Pincer Movement's national strategy: legal weaponization, the enforcement of ideological conformity, and a coordinated assault to consolidate power. To understand the full scope of this movement, we must now turn to the national blueprints that fuel such actions.
Section 3. The Doctrine of Dominion: The Theological Engine of the Pincer Movement
To understand the coordinated assault on American democracy, one must look beyond the political maneuvering and into the theological engine that powers it. The ultimate "Why" behind the lawsuits, the model bills, and the voter challenges is a radical and resurgent ideology that seeks not merely to influence the state, but to conquer it. This is the doctrine of Christian Nationalism, its political theory of Dominionism, and its strategic blueprint: the Seven Mountain Mandate (7MM).
A. The Seven Mountain Mandate: A Blueprint for Theocracy
The Seven Mountain Mandate is a theological doctrine asserting that Christians are divinely ordained to achieve "dominion" over seven key spheres of society: Government, Media, Arts and Entertainment, Education, Family, Business, and Religion.
While its modern form has spread like wildfire, its origins trace back to 1975, when two prominent evangelicals, Loren Cunningham (founder of Youth With A Mission) and Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ), independently claimed to receive the same divine message outlining this strategy. After a period of relative dormancy, the doctrine was revived and popularized in the 2000s, becoming a central framework for the New Apostolic Reformation and, eventually, the broader Christian Nationalist movement.
This belief is now being pushed aggressively down to the local church level, targeting evangelical congregations receptive to its message. Adherents are taught that seizing control of these "mountains" is not a political choice, but a divine command—the fulfillment of God's will on Earth.
B. The Racial Architecture of Dominion
As our investigation has revealed, the version of "God's kingdom" envisioned by this movement is not inclusive. The evangelical groups seeking dominion over the government at the cost of democracy are largely white and conservative. These connections suggest a coordinated structure of influence—what some analysts call a “machine”—rather than isolated efforts.
Scholarly research confirms that modern White Christian Nationalism is inextricably linked to systemic racism. Its proponents are significantly more likely to deny the existence of anti-Black discrimination and oppose policies aimed at redressing racial inequality. Scholars describe the ideology as being deeply intertwined with white supremacy, promoting an agenda that primarily benefits white Americans, particularly white males, at the expense of everyone else.
🔎Key Finding: The pursuit of "dominion" is, in effect, a movement to preserve and expand a specific racial and cultural hierarchy. By defining "Christian" and "American" in narrow, exclusionary terms, the movement provides a theological justification for a political agenda that reinforces systemic racism. This is why our previous reporting correctly identified the movement as White Christian Nationalism.
C. Weaponizing Faith to Seize Power
The Seven Mountain Mandate provides the perfect vehicle for this agenda. It transforms a political quest for power into a holy war, mobilizing a base of believers who see their actions as righteous and divinely sanctioned.
This is the engine that drives the Pincer Movement.
National strategy groups like Project 2025 and its affiliates design the policy weapons.
Ideological factories like the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL) create the model bills to take over the "mountain" of government.
State-level organizations like The Family Leader in Iowa. TFL is the official Iowa affiliate of the Family Research Council (FRC), and the FRC is a formal member of the Project 2025 Advisory Board, ensuring these weapons are deployed on the ground.
Recent polls show a dramatic rise in support for 7MM, with research from Denison University showing that belief in the Seven Mountain Mandate appears to have grown significantly in the past year. The theology has gained mainstream traction, with global news outlets documenting its growing political influence and explicit connections to electoral strategies.
Whether it is a lawsuit against a constitutionalist sheriff in Iowa or a mass voter challenge against a Black barbershop owner in Georgia, the underlying goal is the same: to conquer a "mountain" of society. Critics argue this interpretation of Christian doctrine is being used to justify political strategies that erode democratic institutions. This is the ultimate "Why" behind the battle for the nation's soul.
Section 4. The “How” — The Authoritarian Machinery of Project 2025
The second arm of the pincer is Project 2025, a meticulously detailed, 920-page "Mandate for Leadership" developed by The Heritage Foundation and a coalition of over 100 conservative partner organizations. This is not merely a collection of policy suggestions—it represents a comprehensive operational blueprint for the radical restructuring of the American federal government.
The project's goal is to deconstruct the existing administrative state and consolidate power in the executive branch, transforming a nonpartisan civil service into a politically subservient workforce
A. The Federal Blueprint: Schedule F and the DOJ Overhaul
Project 2025’s strategy hinges on two transformative initiatives designed to seize control of the federal bureaucracy from within.
1. Schedule F: A Loyalty Test for the Civil Service
The plan calls for the immediate reintroduction and expansion of "Schedule F," a controversial job classification that would strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees in policy-related roles.
Mechanism: It converts career officials into "at-will" employees who can be fired and replaced for purely political reasons, bypassing merit-based systems.
Objective: To purge the government of perceived opponents and install loyalists who will carry out the administration's agenda without question, effectively ending the tradition of a nonpartisan civil service.
2. The DOJ as a Political Weapon
The blueprint outlines a "top-to-bottom overhaul" of the Department of Justice, transforming it from an independent law enforcement agency into a political instrument of the White House.
Mechanism: The plan calls for expanding the number of political appointees within the DOJ and reassigning the prosecution of election-related offenses to ensure alignment with the President’s priorities.
Objective: To weaponize the nation's top law enforcement body against political adversaries and ensure that legal decisions serve the administration's ideological goals.
🔎 Key Finding: These are not isolated reforms. They are the foundational pillars of a plan to centralize executive power and dismantle the institutional checks and balances that have defined American governance for generations. Visualize how this network operates.
B. The Architects and Financiers
This operation is not theoretical; it is led by seasoned political operatives and backed by a sophisticated financial network.
The Operatives: The execution of the bureaucratic overhaul is led by figures like Russell Vought, a Project 2025 contributor and now a Trump administration official who is actively implementing the Project 2025 blueprint. He is part of a network of more than 50 high-level officials from the administration who are directly tied to the coalition groups.
The Financiers: The entire strategy is supported by a robust financial architecture. Dark money conduits like the Marble Freedom Trust and DonorsTrust provide the financial backbone for both the policy-crafting arm and the ideological activist arm of the movement, ensuring the plan is well-resourced.
With the full backing of the Trump administration since January 2025, Project 2025's blueprint is now being executed with federal force. Yet its state-level strategy remains a critical front in this two-pronged assault. Statehouses are being systematically transformed into laboratories for the national agenda, serving to entrench policy and build momentum toward the critical 2026 midterm elections that could cement the movement's control.
The Heritage Foundation uses the NACL and their partners provide model legislation directly to state lawmakers, creating a pipeline from their policy shops to state legislative floors. This has resulted in:
Politicizing Election Oversight: States like Georgia and Arizona have passed laws giving partisan officials greater authority over election certification, mirroring Project 2025's call for centralized control.
Enacting Social Policy: States such as Florida and Tennessee have passed restrictive laws on abortion and gender-affirming care that are drawn directly from the Project 2025 playbook.
Weakening Labor Protections: Multiple states have introduced legislation that intentionally conflicts with federal worker protection laws, aiming to weaken labor standards in line with Project 2025’s deregulatory agenda.
State-Level "Schedule F": Some states have introduced legislation to make it easier to fire state employees and replace them with political loyalists, a direct echo of the federal plan.
This two-pronged assault—preparing a federal takeover while simultaneously embedding its policies at the state level—is the operational reality of the Pincer Movement. It is a coordinated, well-funded, and systematic effort to re-engineer American government from the top down and the bottom up.
C. Legislative Impact Analysis: The Project 2025 Assembly Line
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers' primary impact is measured by the proliferation of its model bills, which function as the legislative ammunition for the broader goals of Project 2025. As of 2025, the organization claims to have developed and passed at least 36 model laws for introduction in legislatures nationwide. Investigative reports have tracked at least 15 of these, primarily focused on restricting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights . NACL is not merely an allied organization; it is a fully integrated and chosen vehicle for Project 2025, serving as the "transmission belt" to convert high-level ideological ambitions into enforceable state law .
This "legislative assembly line" is designed for maximum efficiency, creating pre-written, legally vetted bills that state legislators can introduce with minimal effort. This strategy allows for the rapid, coordinated introduction of ideologically aligned legislation across dozens of states simultaneously, creating the illusion of widespread, organic grassroots movements when, in fact, the policies are centrally designed and distributed.
1. Case Study: Iowa—The NACL's Legislative Proving Ground
The state of Iowa serves as a clear and compelling case study of the NACL’s methodology in action. The organization's influence is evident in the passage of key legislation shaped by its model policies and advanced through its dedicated network of state legislators and local partners. Iowa is not merely a target; it is a proving ground where the NACL's legislative assembly line is tested and refined.
Key Finding: The "Pincer Movement" in Action
The advancement of Iowa's "Chaplain Bill" is a textbook example of the movement's strategy. The NACL provides the model policy and national framework, its local partner The Family Leader provides the political muscle and lobbying, and state legislators who are members of the NACL carry the bill across the finish line.
2. The Iowa Operatives: Confirmed NACL Leadership
The link between NACL's national strategy and Iowa's legislative outcomes is solidified by the direct involvement of key Iowa lawmakers in NACL's leadership. Research has confirmed the following individuals hold formal leadership roles within the organization:
The role of these legislators as state chairs is critical. They act as the designated point persons for NACL's operations in Iowa, responsible for distributing model legislation and coordinating efforts to introduce and pass it. Their involvement ensures that Project 2025's legislative priorities, as translated by NACL, are championed by influential figures on the ground.
3. A Coordinated, Multi-Front Assault
The NACL's campaign in Iowa extends far beyond a single issue. The organization wages a multi-front war using a diverse arsenal of legislative tools tailored for different ideological battlefields. This demonstrates a sophisticated strategy to reshape law and society on multiple fronts simultaneously.
The "Given Name Act": This is a quintessential NACL model bill designed to restrict the use of chosen names and pronouns in schools without parental consent and mandate the "outing" of transgender students to their parents. Variants of this bill have been introduced in numerous states, including Iowa, often by legislators with confirmed ties to NACL.
Regulating the Digital Sphere (HF 712): The campaign's reach extends into the digital world with Iowa's House File 712, a law regulating social media data collection for minors. Enacted in the 2023-2024 session, the bill prohibits tech companies from collecting a child's personal data without "verifiable parental consent" and empowers the Attorney General to enforce it with civil penalties. While focused on data privacy, its core framework—centering on parental rights and state-level enforcement—is a hallmark of the NACL's legislative methodology, showing how the same strategic template can be applied to different policy fronts.
Key Analytical Insight: The evidence reveals a highly coordinated campaign. The NACL acts as a critical legislative partner for the broader movement, creating model bills that directly align with the goals of Project 2025, providing distinct legislative templates for battles over religious expression in schools (the Chaplain Bill), gender identity (the Given Name Act), and parental rights in the digital world (HF 712). This multi-front assault, executed by a network of embedded lawmakers, is the core of the strategy to achieve the objectives laid out by Project 2025 from the state level up.
D. Politicization of the Department of Justice
Project 2025 outlines a "top-to-bottom overhaul" of the DOJ to align its operations with the President's agenda. Chapter 17 of the "Mandate," authored by Gene Hamilton, details plans to:
Conduct an immediate review of all major active FBI investigations and activities, terminating any deemed "unlawful or contrary to the national interest" or "Administration policies."
Expand political appointees in every DOJ office, especially the Civil Rights Division, the FBI, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, to "promote the President's agenda."
Ensure litigation decisions are "consistent with the President's agenda."
Re-examine policies limiting White House contact with DOJ personnel.
Reassign prosecution of election-related offenses from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division.
These proposals aim to transform the DOJ from an independent enforcer of the law into a political instrument of the executive. This tactic has been explicitly compared to those used in autocratizing nations like Hungary, Poland, and Turkey.
E. Key Personnel and Implementation
The execution of this bureaucratic overhaul is entrusted to a network of seasoned operatives. Russell Vought, former OMB Director under Trump and self-described "Christian Nation-ist," is a principal architect of Project 2025 and reportedly spearheaded its 180-day transition playbook. In dramatic Senate confirmation hearings in January 2025, Vought openly acknowledged his authorship of Project 2025's executive branch chapter, stating "Yes, sir" when directly questioned about his role.
Vought has been confirmed as OMB Director and is actively implementing what he describes as using OMB as a "command center" to "traumatize" federal workers. His vision includes what he calls an "institutional insurgency" designed to fundamentally alter the relationship between the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy.
Analysts at DeSmog have determined that 17 of Trump’s 24 cabinet-level appointees (approximately 71%) have ties to Project 2025-linked groups.
This ensures a pre-vetted cadre ready to implement the "Mandate." The Heritage Foundation itself has a long history of its alumni transitioning into influential government roles.
F. Global Democracy Warnings
Global democracy watchdogs like V-Dem Institute and Freedom House have issued stark warnings. V-Dem's 2025 report, released in March, notes that freedom of expression is deteriorating in 44 countries and explicitly states, "The USA now seems to be heading towards a transition away from democracy under President Trump." The report documents that 45 countries are actively autocratizing in 2024, compared to only 12 countries twenty years ago.
Freedom House's 2024 report highlights election manipulation as a key driver of global democratic decline. Project 2025's proposals align alarmingly with these documented hallmarks of autocratization.
G. The Synthesis: A Fully Integrated Political Machine
This framework—pitting state power against a theological imperative—defines the ideological arms of the conflict. In this sense, however, the pincer can be viewed in a second, operational way, as illustrated in the graphic below. This perspective reveals how the movement mobilizes its forces: a vertical assault combining top-down institutional power with bottom-up grassroots pressure.
The top-down arm consists of elite-driven strategies, where think tanks craft model legislation and federal agencies impose directives
Simultaneously, the bottom-up arm cultivates and unleashes grassroots energy, mobilizing local activists and church congregations to create the appearance of a popular uprising
It is this fusion of elite command and manufactured ground-level fervor that gives the Pincer Movement its formidable power.
The two models are not separate; they are fully integrated. The ideological pincer provides the fuel for the operational pincer. One cannot function without the other.
🔎 Key Finding: Theocratic ideology (the Cross) fuels the bottom-up mobilization of a highly organized grassroots movement. This movement, in turn, generates the political momentum necessary to support a top-down consolidation of institutional power (the Pillar). Together, they form a self-reinforcing structure of influence.
Table 4.4 below shows how the arms of each pincer model map directly onto one another. This graphic is clickable and links to a visualization of this system.
The events in Iowa are not isolated incidents but the ground-level execution of the Pincer Movement. This national strategy, orchestrated by partners of Project 2025, is fueled by a dark money network linked to Leonard Leo. This synergy of state-level action and centralized funding aims to systematically reshape American governance from the bottom up.
Section 5: The Alliance Forged—The Sinews of Money and Personnel
A political movement of this scale and sophistication cannot subsist on ideology alone. To translate its strategic goals into political reality, it requires a formidable infrastructure of money and dedicated personnel, working in concert.
Indeed, as our investigations have consistently revealed, the movement’s ideological underpinning draws heavily from Christian Nationalism—more specifically, what leading scholars such as Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define as White Christian Nationalism. As detailed in our cornerstone series, beginning with The Cross and the Capitol, Part 1, this framework provides potent justification for the movement’s aims, often through interpretations of doctrine that directly challenge secular governance norms.
🌐 For a deeper understanding of this doctrine, explore our cornerstone series, beginning with: The Cross and the Capitol, Part 1: How Christian Nationalism's Pulpit-to-Policy Pipeline is Rewriting Iowa Law.
The Pincer Movement, as we've demonstrated, is driven by a vast, complex financial network and a disciplined personnel pipeline that together form the very sinews of this modern political machine. This national strategy, actively advanced by partners of Project 2025, is powered by a funding network frequently described as “dark money” by organizations such as OpenSecrets, ProPublica, and The Guardian—a complex web in which conservative activist Leonard Leo plays a pivotal role.
This synergy of centralized resources and state-level action is fundamentally aimed at reshaping American governance from the bottom up.
A. The Financial Architecture: A Dark Money Superhighway
The financial engine driving this movement is a network that watchdogs and investigative outlets—including The Guardian and The New Republic, CREW, and ProPublica— have described as “meticulously designed,” “carefully engineered,” and “intentionally opaque.” The effect is to obscure the financial origins of its vast political spending. Its singular purpose is to channel vast sums of money from a select group of billionaire donors to a wide array of front-line political organizations.
1. The Fountainhead: Marble Freedom Trust
At the very apex of this complex structure sits the Marble Freedom Trust (MFT). This political trust ascended to financial behemoth status after receiving a historic $1.6 billion contribution in 2021. Helmed by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, MFT functions as the movement's primary financial wellspring.
2. The Intermediary Layer: A Multi-DAF Strategy of Obfuscation
The immense capital amassed by the Marble Freedom Trust is not deployed directly to front-line advocacy groups. Instead, it is routed through a sophisticated intermediary layer of donor-advised funds (DAFs). This multi-DAF strategy serves several critical functions: it adds layers of complexity that obscure the money's origin, it leverages the unique legal characteristics of different types of DAFs, and, most importantly, it exploits a key loophole in nonprofit law to shield the network's operational hubs from regulatory scrutiny. This deliberate strategy of financial obfuscation is central to the network's design and resilience.
The central and most significant finding of this investigation is the role of a mainstream, commercial DAF sponsor as the primary financial superhighway for Marble Freedom Trust's capital. The use of one of the largest and most recognized DAFs in the United States to move hundreds of millions of dollars to a key political entity represents a strategic masterstroke in the art of a financial structure that has the effect of obscuring the original source of funds from public view.
The financial pipeline is documented in a series of interlocking tax filings. The flow begins with Leonard Leo's Marble Freedom Trust, which made two colossal grants to DAFgiving360™ (formerly known as Schwab Charitable). For its fiscal year ending in April 2022, MFT granted $153.8 million to DAFgiving360™; the following year, it granted another $153.75 million. These two transactions established a direct financial channel of over $307 million from Leo's 501(c)(4) political group into a DAF account at DAFgiving360™.
The second leg of the journey reveals the ultimate purpose of this maneuver. Tax filings from The 85 Fund, another nonprofit at the heart of Leo's network, show it received over $282 million in grants from DAFgiving360™ in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. This sum accounted for nearly the entirety of The 85 Fund’s publicly documented revenue during that period, demonstrating that DAFgiving360™ was not merely one of many donors but was acting as a dedicated pass-through for a single, massive source of funds originating from MFT.
3. The Intermediary Layer: A Multi-DAF Strategy
From Marble Freedom Trust (MFT), capital does not flow to a single hub but is strategically injected into a sophisticated network of intermediary donor-advised funds (DAFs). This multi-DAF strategy provides operational resilience and adds layers of complexity that obscure the original source of funds.
While DonorsTrust (DT) has long been a key partner in this network, our investigation reveals that Schwab Charitable Fund, now known as DAFgiving360™, has emerged as the primary superhighway for MFT's financial resources in recent years. The most significant of these channels is the one that connects MFT's immense capital to key political entities via Schwab.
Our analysis of IRS Form 990 filings for fiscal years 2022 and 2023 reveals a staggering, multi-year pipeline: DAFgiving360™ directed over $282 million to The 85 Fund, another core entity in the Leo network. These grants were so large they accounted for 100% of The 85 Fund’s publicly documented revenue during that period. This demonstrates a deliberate and sustained strategy to use DAFgiving360™ as a primary instrument for high-volume, targeted political funding.
4. The Superhighway: DAFgiving360™'s Role as the Primary Conduit
The central and most significant finding of this investigation is the role of DAFgiving360 as the primary financial superhighway for Marble Freedom Trust's capital. The use of a mainstream, commercial DAF sponsor—one of the largest and most recognized in the United States—to move hundreds of millions of dollars to a key political entity entity represents a strategic masterstroke in the art of financial obfuscation, creating a labyrinthine structure designed to make the original source of funds nearly impossible to trace. It provides a veneer of legitimacy and leverages the scale of mainstream finance to camouflage highly partisan transactions.
The financial pipeline is documented in a series of interlocking tax filings. The flow begins with Leonard Leo's Marble Freedom Trust, which made two colossal grants to DAFgiving360™. For its fiscal year ending in April 2022, MFT granted $153.8 million to DAFgiving360™. The following year, ending April 2023, it granted another $153.75 million. These two transactions established a direct financial channel of over $307 million from Leo's 501(c)(4) political group into a DAF account at DAFgiving360™.
A forensic analysis of tax filings reveals the network's sophisticated dual-DAF strategy. The primary channel uses DAFgiving360™ (formerly Schwab Charitable) as a high-volume, mainstream conduit to funnel over $282 million from Marble Freedom Trust into The 85 Fund. This accounts for virtually all of The 85 Fund's revenue, legally positioning the DAF as a pass-through. The second, parallel channel uses the ideologically-aligned DonorsTrust as an internal clearinghouse, evidenced by a $71.1 million circular grant from The 85 Fund to DonorsTrust. This dual structure is a deliberate design: one channel for scale and legitimacy, the other for ideological purity and increased opacity, making the entire financial architecture resilient and exceptionally difficult to trace.
5. A Calculated Choice: Why DAFgiving360™?
The selection of DAFgiving360™ was not incidental; it was a calculated decision that leverages the scale and perceived neutrality of mainstream finance to camouflage highly partisan transactions. This choice provides distinct advantages over using more overtly political "dark money" vehicles.
Anonymity in Plain Sight: By routing funds through DAFgiving360™—the second-largest DAF sponsor in the nation with over $22.6 billion in assets under management—the network achieves a form of "anonymity in plain sight." When The 85 Fund discloses its revenue source, it legally and accurately names "Schwab Charitable," a massive entity that made $7.7 billion in grants to over 1.3 million charities in 2024 alone. Within this colossal volume of transactions, a nine-figure grant to a single political nonprofit can appear unremarkable, effectively burying the true origin of the funds—Marble Freedom Trust—under the weight of legitimate, widespread philanthropy.
The Veneer of Mainstream Legitimacy: Using a household name like Schwab provides a veneer of legitimacy that a more specialized, politically-aligned DAF like DonorsTrust cannot. This strategy was further enhanced by a recent, exclusive development: On June 18, 2024, Schwab Charitable officially rebranded as Donor Advised Charitable Giving, Inc., operating under the new name DAFgiving360™. This rebranding, intended to elevate the profile of DAFs, also serves to further neutralize the name of the intermediary, making it sound even more generic and less tied to a specific financial corporation. This allows the network to cloak its political spending in the language of mainstream, apolitical charitable giving.
6. The Ideological Clearinghouse: The Function of DonorsTrust
While DAFgiving360™ serves as the high-volume, mainstream superhighway, the Leo network employs a second, parallel DAF sponsor: DonorsTrust (DT). The role of DT is distinct and complementary. It functions as a specialized, ideologically aligned clearinghouse that adds layers of financial complexity, ensures ideological purity for the most controversial grants, and provides enhanced operational flexibility for the network. Unlike the commercially neutral DAFgiving360™, DonorsTrust was founded in 1999 with an explicit ideological mission. Its purpose is to serve as "the community foundation for the liberty movement" and to "safeguard the intent of libertarian and conservative donors". This mission has earned it the moniker "the dark-money ATM of the right".
DonorsTrust is deeply woven into the financial fabric of the Leo network, but the flow of money is notably more complex and circular than the linear pipeline through DAFgiving360™. This complexity appears to be a deliberate feature, not a flaw, of the network's design.
MFT to DonorsTrust: In its first year of major grantmaking (fiscal year ending April 2021), Marble Freedom Trust transferred a significant $41.1 million to DonorsTrust, establishing it as a key recipient of MFT's initial capital deployment.
DonorsTrust to The 85 Fund: Historically, DonorsTrust was a primary financial patron of The 85 Fund. Tax filings show that in 2018, more than 99% of the group's funding came from a single $7.8 million donation from DonorsTrust. In 2020, The 85 Fund received another $20 million from DonorsTrust.
The 85 Fund to DonorsTrust: In a striking reversal of the historical flow, The 85 Fund's 2021 tax filing reveals a massive grant of $71.1 million to DonorsTrust.
This circular flow of capital—from MFT to DT, from DT to The 85 Fund, and from The 85 Fund back to DT—creates a financial web that is exceptionally difficult to untangle. It allows capital to be pooled, re-granted, and moved between different legal entities within the network, making it nearly impossible for an outside observer to trace the ultimate origin and final destination of any particular dollar. This complexity serves a clear strategic purpose: it frustrates forensic analysis, enhances anonymity, and provides the network's managers with significant operational flexibility to shift resources as needed.
The dual-DAF strategy, therefore, is highly sophisticated. DAFgiving360™ is used as a high-volume, seemingly neutral conduit for the primary funding of The 85 Fund. DonorsTrust, in contrast, serves as an internal, ideologically committed financial hub. It can handle grants for causes that might be too controversial even for an anonymous DAF at a commercial firm, it ensures absolute fidelity to conservative donor intent, and its participation in a circular flow of funds adds critical layers of obfuscation to the network's overall architecture.
7. The “Public Support” Loophole: The Mechanics of DAF-Enabled Anonymity
The intricate financial architecture involving DAFgiving360™ and DonorsTrust is not merely a matter of convenience or a simple preference for anonymity. It is a structural necessity, deliberately engineered to exploit a critical loophole in U.S. nonprofit law: the IRS "public support test.” "Understanding this mechanism is key to understanding why the intermediary DAF layer is the linchpin of the entire network.
Under the Internal Revenue Code, a 501(c)(3) organization like The 85 Fund must qualify as a "public charity" to receive the most favorable tax treatment, including the ability for its donors to receive maximum tax deductions for their contributions. To maintain this status, an organization must pass a "public support test," which requires it to receive a substantial portion of its financial support from the general public or governmental units, rather than from a very small number of private sources. If an organization receives the overwhelming majority of its funding from a single individual, family, or corporation, it risks being reclassified as a "private foundation,” which carries significant disadvantages.
As established previously, The 85 Fund received virtually 100% of its revenue over a two-year period from grants that originated with the Marble Freedom Trust. Had MFT granted the $282 million directly to The 85 Fund, the latter would have almost certainly failed the public support test and been forced to reclassify as a private foundation, severely curtailing its operational freedom and financial advantages.
This is where the DAF loophole becomes paramount. Current IRS regulations treat the DAF sponsoring organization—in this case, DAFgiving360™—as the legal source of a grant, not the underlying individual or entity who funded the DAF account. Because DAFgiving360™ is itself a massive public charity, its grant of $141.5 million to The 85 Fund is treated for tax purposes as a grant from the public, not from a single private donor. This legal fiction allows The 85 Fund to count the entire sum toward its "public support" calculation, thereby easily satisfying the test.
The use of DAFgiving360™ is therefore a calculated and essential strategy. It allows The 85 Fund to "masquerade as a public charity" while in reality being almost wholly dependent on a single funding stream controlled by one man, Leonard Leo. This structure represents a strategy that leverages existing charitable funds to politically active organizations. Donor-advised funds, created to simplify and encourage broad-based philanthropy, are being re-engineered into private pipelines. The Leo network has transformed a tool intended for the public good into an instrument of political obfuscation, isolating a massive funding stream while legally "laundering" its source for the purposes of the public support test. This strategy not only ensures the network's operational efficiency but also sets a dangerous and scalable precedent for how any mega-donor can use mainstream financial tools to exert anonymous, tax-advantaged political influence.
This mechanism creates a loophole where a very large sum of money, originating from a single private source, is legally transformed into support from the public. This allows an organization like The 85 Fund to easily satisfy the IRS public support test, which is a requirement for it to maintain its status as a public charity. This process effectively obscures the true, concentrated source of the funding.
8. The Operational Nexus: The 85 Fund’s Political Impact
The 85 Fund is not a passive recipient; it is an active and powerful agent in the campaign to reshape American law and politics. Fueled almost exclusively by the money funneled through DAFgiving360™, The 85 Fund executes the network's agenda by funding legal challenges, running public advocacy campaigns, and influencing election policy.
The impact of this $282 million infusion is clear and quantifiable. Operating under its alias, the Honest Elections Project (HEP), The 85 Fund has been a key player in high-stakes legal and political battles:
Supreme Court Advocacy: The fund has been highly active in filing amicus curiae ("friend of the court") briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a key participant in Moore v. Harper, where it argued for an expansive version of the "independent state legislature" theory that would have curtailed judicial oversight of elections.
State-Level Election Law Initiatives: The Honest Elections Project has aggressively pushed for stricter voting laws across the country. It has sent letters to election officials threatening lawsuits over "bloated" voter rolls and has been actively involved in litigation, filing an amicus brief in Pennsylvania urging the state's Supreme Court to enforce strict date requirements on mail-in ballots.
Public Campaigns and Litigation: The fund runs public campaigns promoting narratives of election fraud and has been involved in litigation supporting state laws that restrict ballot access, limit mail-in voting, and challenge federal election oversight.
B. Strategic Integration: The Alliance in Action
The Marble Network's financial architecture extends beyond the primary channel of MFT, DAFgiving360™ (formerly Schwab Charitable), and The 85 Fund. It encompasses a broader ecosystem of affiliated nonprofits and, critically, a set of for-profit consulting firms controlled by Leonard Leo himself. An analysis of the financial flows within this wider ecosystem reveals a complex web of relationships characterized by circular funding patterns and significant potential conflicts of interest, which have drawn the scrutiny of law enforcement.
The network includes several other key nonprofit entities that function in concert with the primary players. The Concord Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization formerly known as the Judicial Crisis Network, is a major recipient of MFT funds, receiving a verified $55.5 million in fiscal year 2022. Another entity, the Rule of Law Trust (RLT), a 501(c)(4) with no public presence, received a staggering grant of $153 million from MFT in 2021. The leadership of these groups is deeply intertwined, with figures like Carrie Severino holding formal officer roles across multiple organizations, ensuring strategic alignment.
The most legally and ethically fraught aspect of this ecosystem is the relationship between the network's tax-exempt nonprofits and the for-profit consulting firms controlled by Leonard Leo. Leo is the chairman of CRC Advisors and has been a partial owner of another firm, BH Group. Tax filings document a consistent and massive flow of money from the nonprofits Leo advises to the for-profit companies he runs. This pattern raises serious questions about whether the network's tax-exempt funds are being used for the private enrichment of its founder, a practice known as "private inurement," which is prohibited by nonprofit law. The scale of these payments is extraordinary:
The 85 Fund has been the most significant source of revenue for Leo's firms. In 2021, it paid CRC Advisors $21.7 million for "public affairs consulting." In 2022, it paid another $21.36 million. The 85 Fund has also paid Leo's other firm, BH Group, nearly $3 million.
The Concord Fund paid CRC Advisors nearly $8 million in one recent year and also paid BH Group $500,000.
Rule of Law Trust has also directed millions to Leo's firms, including a $4.3 million reimbursement to BH Group in 2018.
This pattern of nonprofits paying tens of millions of dollars to companies owned by the very individual who controls the nonprofits' funding and strategy has reportedly triggered an investigation by the Attorney General for the District of Columbia. The investigation is said to be examining whether these payments constitute excessive compensation and violate laws governing nonprofit conduct. While nonprofits are permitted to hire for-profit vendors, the sheer scale of these payments, the overlapping control structure, and the opaque nature of the services rendered create a powerful appearance of a conflict of interest.
The network appears to function as a self-enriching circular enterprise, where tax-exempt charitable donations are funneled through nonprofits and ultimately land in the coffers of private businesses controlled by the network's architect. This financial circularity is a defining characteristic of the network's design and represents its greatest legal and reputational vulnerability.
C. A System of Integrated Obfuscation
The intermediary layer of the Marble Network is not an afterthought; it is central to the entire operation's design and success. The strategic use of DAFgiving360™ (formerly Schwab Charitable) as a financial superhighway, alongside the specialized role of DonorsTrust, demonstrates a sophisticated, multi-layered strategy designed to achieve several goals simultaneously:
Anonymity: It legally severs the link between the primary funder (MFT) and the operational hub (The 85 Fund).
Legitimacy: It cloaks highly partisan political spending in the veneer of mainstream, apolitical charitable giving—a perception enhanced by the recent corporate rebranding.
Scale: It leverages the infrastructure of one of the nation's largest financial institutions to move hundreds of millions of dollars efficiently and discreetly.
Operational Flexibility: The circular flows and ideologically aligned channels provide the network with significant agility to shift resources and obscure trails.
This is not a series of independent transactions but a single, integrated system. The money trail, though deliberately obscured, reveals a clear path from a historic, tax-advantaged donation to direct action in the nation's courts and statehouses.
This self-reinforcing loop of money, people, and policy is the engine that drives the entire campaign. It enables a small group of strategists and funders to exert immense influence over the American political and legal landscape, ensuring that from the statehouse to the White House, their agenda is carried out by a loyal and well-resourced network of activists and policymakers.
This intricately woven financial and personnel network forms the backbone of the “Pincer Movement,” providing the resources and coordination necessary for its two arms to operate in tandem. Yet, the grand strategy for reshaping American governance hinges on one critical prerequisite: winning elections. To this end, the alliance deploys a sophisticated, multi-pronged electoral strategy.
Section 6: The Electoral Battleground—A Three-Front War
This intricately woven financial and personnel network forms the backbone of the “Pincer Movement,” providing the resources and coordination necessary for its two arms to operate in tandem. Yet, the grand strategy for reshaping American governance hinges on one critical prerequisite: winning elections. To this end, the alliance deploys a sophisticated, multi-pronged electoral strategy designed to mobilize its base, frame the political narrative, and challenge the electoral process itself.
This operation, which reporting from ProPublica based on internal documents has codenamed the “Ziklag” strategy, is built on three core pillars, each targeting a different aspect of the electoral process.
A. Pillar 1: "Steeplechase"—Mobilizing the Shadow Campaign
Christian Nationalist networks, particularly those aligned with the Seven Mountains Mandate, actively leverage religious institutions for get-out-the-vote operations . Organizations like Faith Wins explicitly aim to "maximize the Christian vote" by conducting voter registration drives within churches and training pastors for political action . This "shadow campaign" capitalizes on the tax-exempt status and community credibility of churches to bypass traditional campaign finance scrutiny, with sustained, year-round engagement planned to maintain voter activation for the midterms .
B. Pillar 2: "Watchtower"—Weaponizing Culture for Turnout
The alliance masterfully exploits divisive cultural battles to galvanize supporters and demonize adversaries. Legislation targeting transgender rights, for example, serves not only as a policy goal but as a potent messaging tool. These bills are amplified through faith-based and right-wing media, framing political contests as existential battles for the nation's soul and creating a sense of moral imperative among the base.
C. Pillar 3: "Checkmate"—Purging Voters & Challenging Results
This pillar represents the alliance's most direct assault on the electoral process. It involves documented strategies to fund and deploy tools for mass voter challenges, aiming to disenfranchise voters deemed ideologically undesirable .
Legal arms of the movement, like the Honest Elections Project (HEP), actively litigate against accessible voting methods and promote the controversial "independent state legislature theory," which seeks to give state legislatures nearly unchecked power over federal elections , .
The impact of this strategy is not theoretical. In Georgia, these tactics have put 6% of the state's 7 million voters at risk, resulting in 420,000 voter registration challenges. While half of these challenges were ultimately cleared, the process sowed chaos, delaying or disenfranchising tens of thousands of legitimate voters.
The Human Cost of "Operation Checkmate
James McWhorter, 55, an Atlanta barbershop owner and Gulf War veteran, was challenged by a stranger using a photo of his shop as "evidence" that he didn't live there. "I didn't know Gail Lee from a can of paint," he said. "Why would someone challenge my vote?"
Courtney Scott, an Atlanta-area voter, had her registration challenged over a minor clerical error. It took her over four hours at the polls to clear her name. “I couldn’t believe I could lose my voting rights that easily,” she said. “The burden of proof should be on them – but the burden was on me.”
D. The Specter of Violence: An Undercurrent of Intimidation
The "Checkmate" strategy is further bolstered by an ideological climate where political violence is increasingly seen as a legitimate tool. Recent data reveals a deeply concerning trend among Christian Nationalist adherents and sympathizers.
Conclusion: The Unseen Conflict and the Imperative of Democratic Resilience
The Pincer Movement is not a drill. It is an active, coordinated offensive to remake the American state. The evidence is definitive. The twin arms of this movement—Project 2025's plan for bureaucratic capture and Christian Nationalism's drive for theocratic control—are not merely parallel efforts but a coordinated offensive. They share personnel, are fueled by a common, opaque financial engine, and deploy complementary tactics, from legal weaponization in Iowa to the electoral manipulation strategies aimed at the national stage.
Let there be no ambiguity. The documented connections are not a coincidence. They are proof of a machine.
The implications are profound. The erosion of non-partisan civil service, the politicization of justice, the legislative codification of narrow theological doctrines, and the systematic challenging of electoral integrity—these are not disparate policy debates. They are integral components of a larger project to fundamentally alter the balance of power in the United States, diminish democratic accountability, and impose a singular ideological vision.
The global parallels are undeniable. The tactics employed—incremental legalism, the capture of state institutions, and the fusion of religious nationalism with political power—are hallmarks of democratic backsliding observed from Hungary to Brazil. The United States is not immune.
This investigation, by laying bare the evidence, serves as both an indictment and an urgent call to awareness. But awareness is not enough.
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A Call to Democratic Vigilance
This investigation, by laying bare the evidence and mapping the machine, serves as both an indictment and an urgent call to awareness. The "shield wall of evidence" meticulously assembled in our Sourcing Dossier and made accessible through our interactive analysis is offered not as a final word, but as a foundational resource for journalists, academics, policymakers, and citizens.
To defend democracy, we need informed, engaged citizens, a vigilant free press willing to undertake the arduous work of uncovering complex truths, and robust institutions capable of withstanding systemic pressure. The Pincer Movement is a test of that resilience. The work of understanding, exposing, and ultimately countering such systemic threats is the ongoing, essential work of Restoring Democracy's Promise.
The architecture of the Pincer Movement is vast, its funding is deep, and its ambition is absolute. But the blueprint for its opposition is not found in Washington think tanks; it is found on the main streets of towns like Decorah. The fight in Winneshiek County, our canary in the coal mine, proves that when citizens perceive a threat to the democratic norms that protect everyone, they can and will form a shield wall of solidarity. They prove that the most powerful defense against a coordinated assault on democracy is a coordinated, and equally resolute, defense of it.
This investigation was conducted under the editorial standards of Restoring Democracy’s Promise, applying engineering-level precision to progressive accountability journalism. All claims are substantiated by public records, FOIA disclosures, and other primary source materials. Every assertion has been independently verified and reviewed for factual accuracy and legal defensibility under the First Amendment and Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law. Primary documents are archived and accessible to paid subscribers through our Evidence Locker. This is journalism with receipts.