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The man fighting Pres. Donald Trump’s tariff battle with Canada today attended, or planned to attend, the controversial right-wing White House Bible study last year, his calendar shows.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had two sessions of the weekly Bible study on a calendar his office posted online in response to a freedom-of-information request.

In 2025, the Bible study included controversial lessons such as teaching, after the sessions on Greer’s calendar, that the Jews killed Jesus.

Capitol Ministries, the group that runs almost-entirely Republican Bible studies in the White House and Congress, also teaches that immigrants don’t have to welcomed the way other strangers should be, and that God wants the poor tended to by private charity, not by the government.

Capitol Ministries co-founder Ralph Drollinger, who led last year’s Bible studies, has referred to Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and other religions as false. (Believing that one’s own faith is right and others wrong is a common feature of many religions; it helps denominations spread and survive, regardless of the strife it causes).

Capitol Ministries also has rejected Mormonism, Greer’s religion, as a Christian denomination. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), the official name of the Mormon religion, maintains that it is a Christian denomination. Many non-Mormon Christians disagree.

Greer’s calendar shows he was scheduled to attend the following White House Bible studies:

• April 16, 2025: “Does Real Change Begin with the Left or the Right?”

• May 21, 2025: “Why Believers Should Be Involved in Politics.”

Both calendar entries were partially redacted under an exemption permitted by law, regarding invading another person’s privacy. Potential explanations include the possibilities that the location was the office of someone who was named, and that someone specific was named as inviting or attending with Greer.

One of the entries names Capitol Ministries explicitly. The timing also matches that week’s listing in the Capitol Ministries study pamphlet, “Why Believers Should Be Involved in Politics.”

The other session, on April 16, 2025, was about whether the political right or left create true cultural change. Drollinger concluded that real change begins with Jesus.

Those two meetings, however, are the only ones that appear on Greer’s calendar as it was posted by his office. The calendar covers the period from the day after he was sworn in in February 2025 through May 31, 2025. (His office did not respond to emailed questions, including whether he has attended other meetings.)

Drollinger revived the weekly Bible studies in March 2025, at the invitation of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

They and cabinet-level sponsors of Drollinger’s Bible studies are listed in each week’s pamphlet. As I’ve reported, his sponsors include openly theocratic and Christian nationalist officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

Greer is something of an anomaly alongside Drollinger’s sponsors. Greer was raised Mormon and, reportedly, remains devout.

The New York Times reported earlier this year that Greer teaches Sunday school. As a young man, he traveled to Europe trying to convert people to Mormonism.

In pictures his office shared with the Times of his missionary work, Greer resembles the stereotypical image of a Mormon missionary; short hair, clean-cut, wearing office attire, and cheerful.

If Greer gave the White House Bible study a couple of tries and then stopped attending, it might not be surprising.

According to Capitol Ministries, Mormonism doesn’t count as a Christian denomination.

A 2016 post on the Capitol Ministries site denigrates the Book of Mormon as untrustworthy and welcomes a new Utah minister to Capitol Ministries, describing him as having “converted to Christianity” from Mormonism:

A lot of Christians don’t consider Mormonism a Christian denomination. That includes some Drollinger students.

Hegseth not only sponsors Drollinger’s Bible studies, the Pentagon told me he’s attended. Earlier this year, Hegseth offended Mormons with a list of Pentagon-recognized religions that did not designate Mormons as Christian.

Rather than revise the list to include Mormons as Christians, the Pentagon released a new list that simply didn’t specify any denominations as Christian.

Drollinger has a record of hostility toward other religions; not out of animus, he would argue, but stemming simply from the fact — in his mind — that all religions but his are wrong.

He has called Catholicism “one of the primary false religions of the world.” In 2008, he wrote that he was “disgusted” with ecumenical gatherings of Sacramento lawmakers. “I have visited with a Jewish legislator, a Catholic legislator and a liberal Protestant legislator — all of whom reject the Jesus of Scripture.”

Drollinger’s Bible study in June 2025, after Greer’s last scheduled attendance, taught that the Jews killed Jesus. (Evangelicals should still consider Israel under God’s protection, however, Drollinger argues.)

It’s also possible that Greer had ethical concerns about Drollinger’s White House Bible study. Greer was heading the White House Office of Government Ethics (OGE) at the time the Bible study appeared on his calendar.

As a previous White House ethics lawyer told me, the White House Bible study is on thin ethical ice.

Richard Painter, now a law professor at the University of Minnesota, was the top ethics lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office during the presidency of George W. Bush. When I asked about Greer, as the head of OGE, attending Bible studies intended to influence political policy, Painter told me several issues were relevant: Whether the meetings occur on government property, what they’re called, and whether they occur during work hours.

The White House enjoys some exemptions from ethical prohibitions against mixing the personal with the professional. It’s uniquely considered a 24-hour workplace, so employees have some leeway to do personal activities, both political and religious.

That said, Painter said it shouldn’t be referred to publicly as the White House Bible study.

And Painter said he’s “concerned” about Greer’s involvement while he was running OGE, “because of the endorsement rule.” The OGE is supposed to guard against even apparent endorsements, “whether it’s selling Teslas on the White House lawn” or “endorsing a specific religious faith,” Painter said.

Endorsing one denomination over others, Painter said, “brings up Establishment Clause issues.” That’s the clause in the First Amendment barring the government from respecting an establishment of religion.

The Bible study “really is a meeting that should happen off the premises,” Painter said. “They ought to keep this off the premises and then not use the name White House.”

It’s not clear that Capitol Ministries actually holds the advertised White House Bible studies in the White House, or what’s left of it. Greer’s listing has one of the sessions as “virtual,” with no location for the other.

During the first Trump administration, Drollinger got his study group kicked out of the White House after blaming America for COVID, arguing that America had let too many sinners — LGBTQ+ people and environmentalists — into power.

As I reported last week, Drollinger one year later also blamed America for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. It was led by white Christian nationalists, but Drollinger noted that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-MO) had invoked Brahma “and other false deities” three days prior to Jan. 6, in an opening prayer. Which Cleaver ended with “Amen, and a-women.”

This heresy, Drollinger wrote, removed God’s protection from the Capitol Building.

And there’s still another possible reason Greer may have ended his participation.

The mission of Capitol Ministries is to influence how politicians think and govern. But it turns that both Drollinger and the Bible have little to say about tariffs and international trade.

Maybe there simply wasn’t much in the Bible studies that was pertinent to Greer’s job.

Not that evangelical Christianity today has nothing to say on the issue. Some evangelicals believe The Antichrist (a figure who doesn’t actually appear as such in the Bible) will usher in a one-world government. Free trade, in other words.

But as Greer is demonstrating right now, he’s already a devout protectionist.

Capitol Ministries 2025 Annual Report list of Washington Bible-study sponsors:

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I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

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If you think Hasan Piker is a problem for Democrats, meet the GOP’s favorite pastor.

Democratic candidates are getting hammered by the media and the right wing for campaigning with Piker, or just for Piker’s existence. The Twitch streamer’s past comments include, most notably, “America deserved 9/11,” which Piker days later said he didn’t mean.

For years, Republican candidates have gotten much less scrutiny for much worse things said by the actual head of their party, Pres. Donald Trump. Of course, not all Republican candidates chose Trump, and some privately disavow him.

But now it turns out that multiple Republican candidates, including some in close races, choose to officially sponsor the Bible studies of a preacher who said that America brought COVID and the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks upon itself.

“The rapid jettisoning of America’s Judeo-Christian cultural underpinnings was starkly apparent this week evidenced by … the capitol building being accosted,” wrote Ralph Drollinger on Jan. 9, 2021. His Bible-study pamphlets list his dozens of Republican sponsors.

Republican candidates who still sponsor Drollinger include Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), now running for governor, and incumbent Senators Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), and Mike Rounds (R-SD).

House Republicans in close races who still sponsor Drollinger include Reps. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), and Rob Wittman (R-VA).

Two Republican governors up for re-election — Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) and Jim Pillen (R-NE) — sponsor Drollinger’s weekly gubernatorial Bible study.

None of these candidates appear to have been asked about Drollinger, outside of my requests for comment, which did not receive responses.

Also running for re-election is Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX). He’s not in Drollinger’s DC Bible studies, but Drollinger has Bible studies in state capitals, too, and it was Patrick who brought Drollinger’s to Texas.

Drollinger has never publicly retracted his remarks about Jan. 6 or COVID, although he did dispute some characterizations of his COVID statements.

His post from Jan. 9, 2021, is still online, calling it “more than coincidental” that God’s “restraining grace was lifted from the Capitol Building” just “one [sic] day after the House prayer invoked Brahma and other false deities.”

That post came less than a year after Drollinger blamed America for COVID, which as of today has killed at least 1.2 million people here so far.

Drollinger also has a record of derogatory statements, ostensibly based on biblical analysis, about:

• Women

• Catholics

• Jews

• Muslims

• LGBTQ+ people

Similarly, he supports private charity for the needy, but teaches elected officials that God opposes government assistance.

In 2018, Drollinger not only defended federal policies of separating immigrant families, he counseled Trump’s cabinet that the policies had God’s backing.

The first Trump White House called Drollinger’s COVID remarks “disgusting.” But the current Trump White House — and Republican leaders in both the Senate and House — have stood by him.

Three days after the Jan. 6 attack, Drollinger argued that America had brought it on itself.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, II, a Methodist pastor, had delivered the opening prayer for the new Congress on Jan. 3, 2021. With election denial at a pitch and the certifications just ahead, Cleaver asked for peace “in the name of the monotheistic God and Brahma and God known by many names by many different faiths.”

As a joke — he later called it a “pun” — Cleaver added, “Amen, and a-woman.”

Drollinger drew a connection between Cleaver’s irreverent, interfaith prayer and what befell Congress three days later. As Drollinger wrote on Jan. 9:

“The Washington Times reported that with Rep. Cleaver’s prayer, the ‘Democrats set [the] 117th Congress stage for godlessness.’ Indeed. And this will not bode well for our nation…

“I find it to be more than coincidental that one day after the House prayer invoked Brahma and other false deities for the first time in congressional history God’s sovereign, restraining grace was lifted from the Capitol Building.”

Note that Drollinger didn’t say God punished America by sending a mob of violent insurrectionists. (It was, of course, Trump’s imprecations that did that.)

But the Capitol’s divine protection against that mob had been lifted, more than coincidentally, Drollinger argued, after Cleaver’s prayer.

Drollinger also cited the installation of a Muslim chaplain for California’s state legislature. (It’s worth noting that Drollinger is not a standard theocrat; he opposes official government chaplains in any capacity. He supports what he calls “institutional separation of church and state, but not influential separation of church and state.”)

Less than a year before, Drollinger had drawn the wrath of the Trump White House by blaming America for COVID, a charge he disputed without actually denying or retracting his original statement. America, Drollinger had argued, was too accepting of LGBTQ+ people and environmentalists.

According to Drollinger, God doesn’t judge nations anymore. Instead, nations that stray will suffer automatic consequences almost as a matter of physics. Do bad things, bad things happen. You reap, you sow.

That, Drollinger argued in March 2020, was what was happening to America at the time. Morally, the country was far better than Sodom and Gomorrah, he said, because it had so many believers. But that alone couldn’t protect America.

Individuals in the country had incurred what Drollinger calls God’s forsaking wrath upon themselves — meaning, God abandoned LGBTQ+ people and environmentalists. But that’s not what doomed America.

The problem was that America then invoked God’s consequential wrath (the reaping and sowing) by allowing those forsaken LGBTQ+ people and environmentalists to gain influence and power:

“Unfortunately for the vast majority of faithful individuals in America, too many of the unfaithful have been allowed by the faithful to gain high positions of influence in our culture: high positions in our government, our educational system, our media and our entertainment industry. This is tragic, unfortunate, and costly. Those individuals who are rebuked by God’s forsaking wrath are largely responsible for God’s consequential wrath on our nation.”

“Largely responsible for God’s consequential wrath on our nation.”

This, on March 21, 2020, as COVID’s death toll was rising exponentially and the country was frantically transforming itself to face the unknown challenges of a terrifying pandemic turning the world upside down.

The first Trump White House called the statements “disgusting” and distanced the president from Drollinger’s Bible study, saying Trump didn’t attend.

Some of Drollinger’s statements are simply literalist readings of the Bible. That’s where the Christian exceptionalism comes from.

Like texts of most religions, the Bible says its words are correct. Other books and other religions are wrong. You get to heaven through Jesus, only through Jesus, and, well, everyone else be damned.

That includes Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, all of whom follow the wrong religion and false gods in Drollinger’s reading of The Bible. Which, historically, is a reading with considerable precedent.

Drollinger also, like some denominations, opposes some religious leadership positions for women. He has also discouraged women from jobs that might take them from child-rearing.

Drollinger didn’t invent any of these dogmas. There’s misogyny to be found in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other religions.

Likewise, attributing American catastrophes to America’s actions or immorality has been a right-wing Christian preoccupation for decades. Piker didn’t invent blaming America for 9/11.

Embraced by GOP politicians far more heartily than Piker is by Democrats, Republican religious figures for decades have said that America’s policies and freedoms invited God’s punishment or ended his protection. Including on Sept. 11, 2001.

Pat Robertson did it. Jerry Falwell did it. Anne Graham Lotz did it.

Franklin Graham blamed the sins of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina.

In 2016, then-Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) invited Fairview Baptist Church Senior Pastor Bill Ledbetter to the National Prayer Breakfast, documents I obtained show.

Four years beforehand, Ledbetter in his opening prayer at the state Senate said, “God removed his hand and gave us in the hands of plunderers, people of an evil heart. Is it not true that God spoke to us on Sept. 11, 2001?”

Ledbetter blamed America’s secularism. Abortion and LGBTQ+ rights played a role, too.

In 2018, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK) sponsored Ledbetter to address the state Senate again, which he did. This time, Ledbetter blamed America’s ungodly behavior for school shootings and hurricanes.

Brecheen also sponsors Drollinger’s House Bible studies.

Brecheen and other Republican candidates associated with Ledbetter, Drollinger, or other right-wing Christian America-blamers have paid no political price, then or now.

In fact, when I reported last year that Drollinger teaches his congressional and White House Bible studies that the Jews, Israel, killed Jesus, the White House shrugged:

As I reported on Saturday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is such a Drollinger fan that he gave a copy of Drollinger’s Bible study pamphlet with that deicide claim to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Johnson stands by Drollinger and his organization, Capitol Ministries. Unlike Democrats disavowing Piker’s extreme statements, Johnson says openly that he incorporates Drollinger’s views into his political work:

“CapMin is an invaluable resource that I and countless other Members greatly appreciate. The solid weekly Bible studies are always timely and applicable to our personal lives, as well as our vocational decisions.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) also supports Drollinger and praises Drollinger’s influence on elected officials:

“Ralph and Danielle [Drollinger] are there to instruct, admonish, encourage, exhort, and inspire elected officials to lead their lives and conduct themselves in a way that brings glory to God, to remind us of what is important, what our priorities should be, and what we should be treasuring.”

Lower-ranking congressional Republicans also provide endorsements that Drollinger publishes in his study guides and online. Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), for instance, is quoted saying:

“The Biblical truths revealed in our meetings help to keep us grounded in our passion for God and His desire for us to become more like Him as a husband, father, friend, and leader.”

In addition to endorsing Drollinger’s teachings, Republican officials provide government resources for him.

The Capitol Ministries weekly Bible studies are typically held in government offices and meeting rooms. Sponsors who chair committees have made hearing rooms available for the Capitol Ministries morning sessions.

It makes sense that Piker drew journalistic scrutiny, appearing on stage with candidates including Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul el-Sayed.

But soon after saying “America deserved 9/11,” Piker said he didn’t stand by it and explained that he meant American foreign policy had contributed to the conditions that led to 9/11, not that 9/11 was deserved. Years later, Piker’s retraction and explanations haven’t stopped his critics from saddling Democrats with his remarks1.

Republican candidates don’t trot Drollinger out on the trail with them; they go much further than that, endorsing his work in a way Democrats don’t endorse Piker’s. Their endorsements help Drollinger build his profile, influence, and fundraising.

And unlike Piker, who’s supported by his viewers, there’s no public information about Drollinger’s financial backers, let alone their agenda. Capitol Ministries isn’t required by law to disclose the donors who fuel its global influence operations.

And yet, while Democrats are taking heat for accepting Piker’s help, Republicans who actively help Drollinger — and speak proudly about his influence on their public duties — have faced no questions about it. So far.

Capitol Ministries 2025 Annual Report list of Washington Bible-study sponsors:

Related Stories:

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

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Less than a month after the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in Johnson’s Capitol Hill office.

In their private meeting after the photo above was taken, Johnson gave Netanyahu a Bible study pamphlet that contains Jewish tropes and proclaims the foundational antisemitic blood libel of deicide: The claim not just that some Jews were involved in Jesus’s crucifixion, but that all Jews are culpable.

Although the pamphlet and accompanying videos are supportive of Israel, they repeat the antisemitic claim, long renounced by major world religions, that Israel, the Jews, killed Jesus.

The two-part Bible study was a treatise urging U.S. politicians to take Israel’s side. The two lessons had been distributed to congressional and White House Bible-study groups starting the day after Israel launched a sustained attack on Iran last year, when the push was on for the U.S. to join in.

The two-part lessons were posted online on June 13 and 14, 2025. It’s not that the two pamphlets were written that quickly; they were recycled.

Capitol Ministries — which runs Bible studies for the House, Senate, White House, and governors — often reuses previous lessons, or repurposes them in the context of current events. The Israel lessons were resurrected to make a Biblical case for the U.S. to join Israel’s new offensive.

For instance, the June 13, 2025, study guide notes that, “Given ongoing attention to Israel and Gaza, I thought this would be a good time to provide a biblical primer as to why you and our nation should remain staunch allies of Israel.” That language has been in there since at least Oct. 18, 2021.

And the same Bible study pamphlet has been warning about Iran’s “nearly-enriched nuclear threat” since 2011.

So, over the years, many influential leaders in the Trump administration and the Republican Congress may have seen Drollinger’s recycled Israel lessons.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has been involved with Capitol Ministries and its leaders, Ralph and Danielle Drollinger, for more than ten years.

“Ralph and Danielle are there to instruct, admonish, encourage, exhort, and inspire elected officials to lead their lives and conduct themselves in a way that brings glory to God,” Thune said in 2015, “to remind us of what is important, what our priorities should be.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participates in the Capitol Ministries White House Bible studies, the Pentagon confirmed to me last year.

On June 21, 2025, about a week after the Bible studies, Pres. Donald Trump launched three separate strikes against nuclear targets in Iran.

Then, the following month, Netanyahu came to Washington. His itinerary before meeting with Trump at the White House included a stop at Johnson’s office.

Spectrum News reported that, after the meeting, Netanyahu said, “First comes strength, then comes the peace.”

Johnson issued a brief statement about the meeting, but neither man shared everything that transpired. Some details Johnson saved for the 2025 annual report of Capitol Ministries.

In a quotation accompanying the same picture from his office that he used for his social-media post, Johnson gave Capitol Ministries a more substantive account of what happened at the meeting.

“This photo of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s visit to my office last summer was taken right before I shared with him a copy of Ralph’s two-part Bible study on ‘The Biblical Case for Defending Israel.’ We discussed it at some length and Bibi left with a copy.

“CapMin is an invaluable resource that I and countless other Members greatly appreciate. The solid weekly Bible studies are always timely and applicable to our personal lives, as well as our vocational decisions.”

The first of Drollinger’s two Israel study guides argues that the U.S. should help Israel even though it’s in a time out for killing Jesus:

“[T]he spiritual blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant accrue to the Church for a time (until God grafts Israel back in) due to the present apostasy of Israel, having executed the Messiah.”

In a video for Part 2, Drollinger argues that the Bible says Jews were only “sidetracked” by God. For crucifying Jesus.

“Israel has stumbled. They’re on the side track of God’s plan as He grafts in the gentiles into His kingdom. And they’ve been sidetracked because they crucified their messiah.”

The pamphlets for both parts of that lesson list Johnson, among many other Republicans1, as sponsors.

Neither Johnson’s office nor the Israeli embassy in Washington responded to emails requesting confirmation and comment.

You might think Capitol Hill media might have learned about and reported a lengthy discussion between the U.S. House speaker and Israel’s prime minister about the biblical case for the U.S. to side with Israel. Especially when that argument stipulates that the Jews killed Jesus.

And especially when Drollinger has made news before with derogatory statements about women, Catholics, and LGBTQ+ people.

It wasn’t even the first evangelical shadow diplomacy Johnson has engaged in with huge stakes. His meetings with Ukraine’s Fellowship Foundation point man, unreported at the time, led to Johnson supporting Ukraine aid.

Nevertheless, for whatever reason, Johnson bringing Drollinger’s teachings into his Netanyahu meeting has not been previously reported. I only learned about it going through the annual report.

And it’s not the first time this issue has arisen on Capitol Hill in recent years. Johnson has a complicated history when it comes to deicide.

In 2024, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was trying to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act to enact legal definitions of antisemitism. Jewish Insider reported that Schumer, the majority leader at the time, believed an unnamed Republican senator would force a floor vote on an amendment to exempt deicide from the definitions.

Calling Jews Christ-killers, in other words, would not be considered antisemitism under the law.

So Schumer went to Johnson, who had already got the bill through the House, for help. He asked Johnson about attaching the bill to a much bigger one, military spending, to block the deicide amendment from getting a potentially divisive floor debate. Schumer feared such a debate could make things worse for American Jews.

But the bill’s inclusion of deicide had already prompted blowback from the Christian right. Charlie Kirk suggested, falsely, that the bill had outlawed parts of the Bible. Tucker Carlson responded: “Yes. The New Testament.”

Reportedly, Johnson told Schumer no, he wouldn’t add the antisemitism legislation to the military spending bill.

We still don’t know which senator was set to push a deicide amendment, but in April 2025, The Forward reported that Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was pushing one. Cassidy’s been a Drollinger sponsor since 2013.

Without the amendment, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK) voted against the bill because it defined blaming Jews for the crucifixion as antisemitism:

“This statement is not antisemitic; it is a biblical and historical fact, as Jesus was a Jew.

“I sincerely wish I could have supported this bill, as I have always opposed antisemitism, but I cannot approve of any measure that mischaracterizes what the Bible says as bigoted or hateful.”

The bill died when a slew of bipartisan amendments cost it majority support.

As I reported last year, Johnson had only become a sponsor of Drollinger’s House Bible study in May 2025, the month before the Israel Bible lessons. Just a couple months before, Trump administration leaders had revived the weekly White House cabinet meetings of the Bible study.

One of those leaders was Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, now being sued for proselytizing to her staff. The other was Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

During Vought’s 2017 confirmation hearing, he stood by a previous published statement that Muslims “stand condemned” for not accepting Jesus as their savior.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) asked whether Jews also stand condemned, Vought said he was writing about his school, Wheaton, which “has a statement of faith that speaks clearly with regard to the centrality of Jesus Christ in salvation."

There’s no public indication of whether Johnson is being influenced by Drollinger’s teachings, or sponsors the Bible studies because those teachings reflect his own, previously held beliefs.

In 2024, for instance, Johnson was asked whether he believed in a biblical rationale for aiding Israel.

That’s in line with Drollinger’s teachings. Here’s the short version of Drollinger’s biblical exegesis as outlined in the lessons that Johnson shared last year with Netanyahu:

• God made a promise to Israel — the Abrahamic Covenant — that applied to the whole world. Israel’s allies would be blessed, her enemies cursed.

• Some Christians argue that the crucifixion voided God’s promise, meaning nations didn’t have to worry about God anymore when they dealt with Israel. Drollinger attributes this belief, in part, to antisemitism: A rationale for hating Jews and acting against Israel.

• Drollinger teaches an alternate view. Yes, he says, the Jews killed Jesus. In his words, “Israel … executed their messiah.” (Most major religions have renounced this view.) But…

• …God’s not done with Israel, Drollinger argues. God’s merely put Israel in time out until the end of the story, when Jews are prophesied to play a part again (by converting to Christianity or being damned for eternity). So the Abrahamic Covenant, with blessings for Israel’s allies and curses for her enemies, remains in effect.

In other words, Drollinger perpetuates the claim of deicide. He just argues that it shouldn’t be held against Israel.

Drollinger shared his thoughts about Israel killing Jesus in the course of his two videos about his Israel Bible studies.

Drollinger’s Bible study includes other tropes about Israel that are also considered antisemitic, even though they’re superficially complimentary. Israel’s smart, Drollinger says. And good with money.

Drollinger has even written that he was in the gallery when Netanyahu urged a 2015 joint session of Congress to kill the Iran nuclear deal. Drollinger wrote that he “enthusiastically joined in the thundering applause.”

Ironically, the year before Netanyahu’s congressional speech that Drollinger attended, Netanyahu addressed the United Nations, touching on antisemitism.

As Netanyahu explained, “For centuries the Jewish people have been demonized with blood libels and charges of deicide.”

The Anti-Defamation League agrees, calling it a “myth” to blame Jews for Jesus’s crucifixion:

“The myth that Jews collectively murdered Jesus, also referred to as ‘deicide,’ has been used to justify violence against Jews for centuries. Historians as well as Christian leaders have agreed that the claim is baseless.”

A range of Jewish and secular groups and leaders last year condemned the Bible study for repeating the deicide slur.

Related:

Still, Israeli officials have understood for years that evangelical Christian support in the U.S. is based in some measure on the wish to fulfill biblical prophecy. Johnson’s presentation to Netanyahu is only the latest confirmation of how important the Bible is to U.S. foreign policy.

U.S. evangelical Christian politicians may have nothing against Jews personally and may love Netanyahu’s policies. Or they may be fervidly antisemitic, harboring poisonous views of Jewish people. Either way, Drollinger’s theology perpetuates the charge of deicide, antisemitism’s original sin, but also requires Israel to be intact for Jesus to return.

These kinds of belief are wildly underappreciated throughout American culture and government.

After the U.S. joined Israel’s attack on Iran last year, for instance, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation received reports from service members about commanders celebrating the arrival of the End Times:

“…the Commander and his wife spent most of the Bible study yesterday in excessive and extreme glorification and overall celebration of the sudden attack on Iran by American forces and all of the other matters connected to the Israeli attacks on Iran. ... They had big fat grins on their faces as they assured us that the ‘End Times’ were now here just as heralded and predicted in the New Testament Book of Revelation.”

According to Drollinger, his students in Congress and the cabinet are already predisposed toward Israel, often as part of their culturally Christian backgrounds. His lessons just provide a biblical basis, he says.

“[W]e need to buoy the convictions of our members based upon Scriptural truths… so that when push comes to shove, they know why they believe they’re pro-Israel: From what the Bible says.”

Recently, congressional Democrats have proved much more willing to buck Israel’s interests, voting in growing numbers against illegal U.S. arms for Israel.

Republicans, Drollinger says, base their support for Israel on the Bible. Democrats tempt their own ruin abandoning Israel:

“…we see one political party for the most part basing their policies on the Mosaic law, the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20, and we see another one, increasingly — no matter what the matter is — it’s contrary to the Ten Commandments in their basis for reasoning, which is really shaky ground and it could demolish a political party that continues to do that. ... The views that they hold are not tied to Mosaic law.”

Of course, representatives in both parties swear to uphold the Constitution, not Mosaic law.

And Drollinger insists he’s not a Christian nationalist, not a Dominionist. He opposes both, and opposes theocracy, because, he says, the Bible does, too.

He just wants as many elected officials as possible to base their votes and policies on God’s will.

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I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

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Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), now running for governor of Tennessee, invited a Southern Baptist Convention leader to the National Prayer Breakfast just after he was publicly accused of shrugging off sexual abuse in the church.

Blackburn’s guest would later resign from Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leadership after his adulterous relationship was revealed.

For years, Blackburn has been involved in the annual breakfast and the weekly prayer breakfasts in Congress, all organized by the secretive, right-wing Fellowship Foundation. Better known as The Family — also the title of the book and Netflix series about the group — The Fellowship uses its breakfasts to build right-wing political networks around the globe.

Blackburn has been a part of that effort and yet is seldom pressed about her Fellowship ties or the people she meets with, unmediated and unreported, under the shadowy penumbra of Fellowship events.

In 2016, the same year Russian operatives attended the National Prayer Breakfast to pursue right-wing connections, Blackburn invited SBC Executive Committee President Frank Page and his wife, Dayle, to attend.

Fellowship records I obtained show that they were Blackburn’s only guests that year. Both Blackburn and the Pages attended the breakfast but not the lunch or other, ancillary activities.

Two years later, Page announced his retirement. Then, on the same day, he announced that he was actually resigning, not retiring, because he’d been caught in a “recent” adulterous affair.

Blackburn presumably knew nothing about it. But it’s likely she knew about Page’s controversial handling of abuse claims years before she invited him.

Blackburn’s House district at the time included Nashville, home of the SBC headquarters. Nashville media covered the SBC scandal. Page was the SBC president at the time.

In 2007, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said it had received 40 complaints about SBC abuse in the prior six months, with some allegations dating back years.

Page said the SBC would teach individual churches to do better screening, but that the national leadership was powerless to do more.

In the years following, stories came out about individual victims reporting dismissiveness from Page, which he denied, as he and others refused to take steps that might help identify and stop SBC predators.

In 2008, Page endorsed an SBC report that rejected the idea of creating an SBC database, because local churches couldn’t be forced to report abusers. (It later turned out that SBC leadership had a list of their own, but didn’t use it.)

Page also told the media that anyone doubting the SBC commitment to fighting abuse had only to note that the SBC webpage linked to information about abuse.

Details about Page’s internal response would continue to come out even after Blackburn invited Page and his wife to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast.

The day before the event, Blackburn said on the House floor that:

“I want to welcome my guests, Dr. and Mrs. Franklin Page, who will join us this week to recognize this time and to set aside time to celebrate our religious liberty and the individual freedom that becomes the focus of this week.”

That’s not actually what the National Prayer Breakfast is supposed to be about, even according to its own literature. But The Fellowship and its right-wing allies — and Page was very much a conservative — have weaponized the concept of “religious liberty” to leverage religious privileges, legal exemptions from laws other people have to follow.

And Blackburn has been in step with The Fellowship for more than a decade.

Fellowship

In 2009, Politico profiled The Fellowhip’s Capitol Hill townhouse, known as C Street. Blackburn was involved, she told Politico when she was still in the House of Representatives, but honored The Fellowship’s penchant for secrecy. Politico reported:

Members of both houses [of Congress] also participate in outside prayer groups and Bible study sessions. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she attends a weekly Wednesday morning breakfast with several other congresswomen from both sides of the aisle. She said the meeting is off campus, but that’s all she would say.

That same year, journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, included Blackburn in a list of officials “under the Family’s religio-political counsel.”

She’s also a recurring participant in The Fellowship’s annual prayer breakfast. I obtained internal Fellowship documents for three years worth of guest lists. Blackburn attended in 2015 and 2016, both times without her husband, but didn’t attend in 2018.

The Pages are the only guests she invited.

Blackburn has remained active in recent years, including with the smaller, Capitol Hill prayer breakfast spinoff. She was listed, for instance, as part of the 2022 prayer breakfast’s ostensible “Honorary Senate Committee” that doesn’t actually exist in the Senate but gives The Fellowship an official-seeming imprimatur.

In 2023, constrained by new rules limiting who you could bring as a guest, Blackburn took a nonprofit leader who restores Appalachian homes.

Blackburn didn’t set aside religious radicalism entirely at the 2023 breakfast, however, meeting afterward with Kari Lake, who wasn’t supposed to be there. As I reported, the office of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said he brought Lake even though she wasn’t a constituent because Jesus hadn’t checked her address.

Historically, the prayer breakfast has been more about the networking than the praying or the breakfasting. That’s evidenced in the 2015 Fellowship document I obtained.

The spreadsheet included table assignments, providing a snapshot of just how politically unbalanced the guest lists are. Blackburn was seated with tablemates including one mainstream Washington power broker, Sally Quinn, but also a hodgepodge of unfamous Fellowship associates, allies, and prospects from near and far, all on the right.

Bernold Glaser, a wealthy Australian businessman, shared Blackburn’s table. So did right-wing Croatian politician Tomislav Karamarko. Tennessee Republican leader Tommy Vallejos was also seated alongside Blackburn.

Vallejos was a Blackburn supporter in her 2018 Senate campaign, the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle reported. Vallejos also participated in a Blackburn campaign roundtable on Hispanic issues.

But perhaps Blackburn’s most interesting breakfast partner that day in 2015 was Paul Lavelle.

In addition to sitting with Blackburn at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast, the following year Lavelle participated in a Fellowship “breakout session” during which he met a Minnesota pillow salesman. Lavelle was good enough to speak with me about these events a few years ago.

I had reached out to Lavelle because that pillow salesman was Mike Lindell. And as I later reported. the National Prayer Breakfast and Lavelle were a big part of how Lindell became what he is today. It was Lavelle who got Lindell to do his surrender to Jesus just two years after the breakfast and has remained involved in Lindell’s various fringe movements.

This is the world into which Blackburn brought the scandal-ridden president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 2015. (It’s worth noting that Fellowship insiders have a history of using breakfast invitations to help rehabilitate religious right-wingers in the aftermath of scandal.)

That world also includes the underreported connections between Blackburn and the point man for Russian influence operations at the breakfast.

Ave Maria Butina

Blackburn’s connections to a key player in the Russian influence operation seem never to have been fully explored.

A Senate report did examine the ties between Russian covert efforts and the National Rifle Association (NRA). Most famously, Russian operative Maria Butina was convicted of efforts — including attending the prayer breakfast — on Russia’s behalf.

As I’ve reported, however, The Fellowship was an earlier and potentially more pivotal player in that Russian campaign. Butina’s handler, Alexander Torshin, was connected to The Fellowship years before he got connected with the NRA by a Tennessee lawyer named G. Kline Preston.

It’s not clear how, but Torshin met Preston in 2007. Preston was a Blackburn campaign operative and, Preston said, a “family friend” of Blackburn for “a long time.” ThinkProgress reported that Preston was involved in her campaigns from at least 2003 through 2014.

Blackburn has denied allegations that she met Torshin.

But Torshin, too, was at the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast with Butina and a passel of other Russians invited there by The Fellowship’s longtime point person for the former Soviet states: Doug Burleigh.

And the year after Preston met Torshin, Blackburn met with another associate of Torshin. Igor Matveev, an official from the Russian consulate in Nashville, discussed U.S.-Russia relations in 2008, Matveev later said. (In 2012, Matveev joined Preston and Torshin in monitoring U.S. elections.)

Despite her ties to Preston, Blackburn doesn’t seem to have had any significant exposure to the Russian efforts. Preston said Torshin and Butina didn’t even ask for an introduction.

But it’s also not clear anyone’s looked that hard. Mainstream media repeatedly overlooked the role of The Fellowship, with which Blackburn has been very involved. And the Senate report reflects traditional congressional timidity about probing too deeply into anything with a religious veneer.

Still, with three months to go until the general election, Tennessee’s political reporters have a brief window in which to get new information from Blackburn about who her Fellowship connections are, and what they’ve done together.

CLARIFICATION I neglected to include the fact that I emailed Blackburn’s Senate office and gubernatorial campaign for comment on Saturday, prior to the publication of this story, and received no response. My apologies for neglecting to include this information in the initial version of this post. I will update this article if there’s any substantive response.

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The front-runners of both parties in the Minnesota governor’s race have something in common.

Both Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell have had strong ties to a controversial, secretive, Christian organization, and no one’s talking about it.

The Fellowship Foundation — aka The Family — is famous for scandal and for running the National Prayer Breakfast. Increasingly, it’s become known among congressional Democrats for using prayer breakfasts to build right-wing networks opposed to organized labor and reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.

That’s why so few Democrats participate now. But Klobuchar, virtually uncontested in next week’s primary, was for years one of The Fellowship’s few public faces among Democrats.

Lindell was transformed behind closed doors. He went from a casual, barely political Christian several years ago to a religious and political crusader for election denial over the course of about two years orbiting The Fellowship.

Lindell’s ties to The Fellowship remained largely secret until I fleshed out some hints he had dropped along the way. In his book, for instance, he talked about the profound impact of the 2016 and 2017 National Prayer Breakfasts.

The authoritative aura those events were given by the participation of high-profile government officials gave force to what Lindell heard there. That was especially true of the remarks of Senate Chaplain Barry Black, Lindell wrote.

Fellowship insiders took Lindell under their wing. They set up camp on the boards of his philanthropies, charities that soon shifted their focus from veterans and addicts to Christian evangelization. When Lindell did his surrender — on his knees, giving himself to Jesus — it was The Fellowship who got him there.

Most visibly, Lindell became enamored of Pres. Donald Trump, imbuing him and his presidency with religious meaning.

Klobuchar, by contrast, has had a much less exciting sojourn with The Fellowship. But she’s still preferred to keep some of it quiet.

Democrats and Theocrats

I’ve reported before about Klobuchar’s work with The Fellowship, specifically the National Prayer Breakfast, an important tool for Fellowship networking.

Just this year, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, torturer of American deportees, joined in, speaking at the 2026 National Prayer Breakfast. Just a month earlier, Fellowship insiders including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) flew to El Salvador to give him his own prayer network, praise him, and bestow God’s blessing on his work.

Democratic participation in the breakfasts has been a vital ingredient, legitimizing them, dangling the promise of unmediated and unreported access, and lending the events a false but cultivated veneer of official status.

Klobuchar was a speaker as early as 2008 and was there for some of the event’s big moments.

In 2017, when The Fellowship brought in guests who turned out to be Russian operatives, Klobuchar was one of the draws, delivering the closing prayer. Even The Fellowship’s dalliances with Russian spies didn’t dissuade Klobuchar from participating in 2019.

Over the years, she lent her name to the event as co-chair or as a member of the fictional congressional host “committees.” These were just names on the letterhead to impress powerful people in countries where Fellowship allies dangled invitations to leverage their own power there.

But 2019 was also the year of the Netflix documentary series based on Jeff Sharlet’s reporting about The Fellowship. Reporting by me and Ken Klippenstein when we were at The Young Turks (TYT) had showed how The Fellowship was sponsoring meetings between congressional Republicans and Fellowship allies — antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ+ — internationally.

Even Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), for years The Fellowship’s Democratic public face, told TYT in 2019 that he was “concerned about the perception that it [the prayer breakfast] is a partisan event.” That year, Coons, Klobuchar, and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) were the only Senate Democrats to participate.

Klobuchar was on the 2019 invitation. But disappeared in 2020.

As I’ve previously reported, when Klobuchar and other Democrats let their names be used on Fellowship invitations, they facilitate The Fellowship’s right-wing political work.

The congressional names give the event an official imprimatur. That turns invitations into currency, which Fellowship associates then dole out to build their own networks in other countries. Like Uganda, where Fellowship associates pushed through an LGBTQ+ death penalty.

The official imprimatur also lets foreign politicians allied with The Fellowship justify using government funds to attend, again facilitating Fellowship network-building.

As my reporting, and the work of advocacy groups led by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, brought this dynamic to light, some congressional Democrats began bailing on The Fellowship’s breakfast. Seeking to preserve some measure of Democratic participation, The Fellowship split the event in two.

A new breakfast would take place on Capitol Hill, without all the lobbyists and Russian spies who helped make the main event so notorious. The smaller spinoff would be run by a separate nonprofit ostensibly independent of The Fellowship.

Klobuchar and Coons have shown up there, but don’t appear as active with The Fellowship these days.

Even congressional Democratic leaders have stopped going to either breakfast.

The Interfaith Alliance this year published a video in which four House members — secular and religious, including past breakfast participants — said they’re done.

One of those four, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), had co-chaired the 2023 Capitol Hill breakfast with Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI). Walberg’s co-chair role was then cited in a Fellowship congressional filing to justify flying Walberg to Uganda to defend its LGBTQ+ death penalty.

McBath said in the Interfaith Alliance video that “our faith has been hijacked by political ideologies.”

When I asked Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, about Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) co-chairing this year’s Capitol Hill breakfast, he said, “I’m dismayed that some Democrats still choose to play footsie with this scandal-plagued prayer breakfast movement.”

Huffman’s view appears to be prevailing. The 2026 Capitol Hill prayer breakfast that Klobuchar attended seems to be losing traction. Video of the event showed sparse turnout.

And, ironically, the two breakfasts that both claim prayer is unifying are now at odds in a legal battle over the name “National Prayer Breakfast.”

Either way, it appears Klobuchar’s connections to The Fellowship are weaker than they have been, although we don’t know whether she still attends the weekly Senate prayer breakfasts facilitated by The Fellowship.

None of the political reporters covering her campaign appear to have asked Klobuchar about her Fellowship ties. She did not respond to my request for comment.

Neither did Lindell, who called me a “scumbag” the one time we spoke, which was also about his own Fellowship connections. Which are a lot wilder than Klobuchar’s.

A Full Surrender

Not that long ago, Lindell was just your average TV pillow pitchman and recovered crack addict. He was casually Christian, reflexively Republican.

The Fellowship radicalized him on both fronts.

It started in 2014 when Lindell met actor and right-wing Christian activist Stephen Baldwin, whose nonprofit was being run by Fellowship associates. Two years later, those associates got Lindell into the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast.

Dr. Ben Carson was there, and The Fellowship decided to put him and Lindell in a room together, one of the smaller, non-televised “breakout sessions” where the breakfast’s real work happens.

Lindell described it in his book:

“The dozen people in the room gathered in a circle and began talking about the critical importance of the 2016 election. We agreed it was going to be a real spiritual turning point for the country. One path could lead us toward national renewal. The other could lead us down a dark path from which there might be no return, a path that had begun with the removal of God from the public square.”

The conversation with Carson, Baldwin, and Fellowship insiders, he wrote, “opened my eyes to the impact of politics on ordinary people.”

The Fellowship’s spokesperson, A. Larry Ross, also a board member, took a particular interest in Lindell. And during the next year encouraged Lindell to attend a religious retreat run by someone known to The Fellowship.

A few weeks after the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast — where Lindell was awed and moved by the remarks of the Senate chaplain — Lindell agreed to go. The retreat worked.

“I went in there with hope,” Lindell told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “I said, ‘God please, show me you’re real, show me, you know? I want that personal relationship,’ And on the second day, on Feb. 18, 2017, I did a full surrender on my knees.”

There are more diplomatic ways to say that Lindell then went insane, but few more accurate.

With The Fellowship now involved, Lindell pivoted his nonprofits from helping veterans recover from addiction to funding evangelical causes.

He became an acolyte of Trump, who Lindell declared “chosen by God.” After Trump’s 2020 election loss, Lindell became an evangelist of election-denial and wildly unsupported conspiracy theories. Some highlights of his activism include:

• Helped raise bail for Kyle Rittenhouse.

• Said that was an accident and he really meant to fund election denial.

• Donated to the legal defense fund of election-denying county clerk Tina Peters.

• Pushed Trump on unfounded COVID claims about a drug he had a financial stake in.

• Banned from Twitter for election disinformation.

• Banned from Twitter for evading his ban for election disinformation.

• Called for Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to go to prison.

• Predicted I would go to jail.

• Got four votes in his race to chair the Republican National Committee.

Lindell’s bottomless faith in Trump led him to sponsor an election-denial bus tour, to attend the White House rally on Jan. 6, 2021, to blame Antifa for the attack on the Capitol, to take a file on the Insurrection Act into a Trump meeting a week later, to hold a cyber-symposium that failed to prove election theft, to hold a contest daring anyone to disprove election theft and then weasel out of paying the $5 million prize, to predict that Trump would somehow be instated as president on Aug. 13, 2021, and then later on to Sept. 30, 2021, and then to claim that “We have enough evidence to put everyone in prison for life, 300-and-some million people."

Even today, LindellTV continues to provide a platform for the wildest of election conspiracy theories.

That said, like Klobuchar, Lindell’s ties to The Fellowship appear to be more slender lately. The guy who runs the retreat where Lindell accepted Jesus was still on the board of the Lindell Legal Offense Fund as of 2024, but as I reported at the time, he wasn’t really a Fellowship insider.

Ross and other Fellowship insiders no longer occupy positions on his various boards, according to the latest tax filings. Some of Lindell’s nonprofits haven’t even filed returns in recent years, suggesting they became defunct after The Fellowship got involved.

Like Klobuchar, Lindell has not been asked about The Fellowship during this campaign. Neither has spoken publicly about where they stand with The Fellowship today. Neither commented for this article.

But if they do both still maintain Fellowship ties, it would mean no matter who wins, The Fellowship is about to have a friend in the Minnesota governor’s mansion.

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Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) on Wednesday told Semafor, “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue.” She made similar remarks on CNN.

Scholten has endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Semafor Congressional Reporter Nicholas Wu had asked Scholten whether she would support former public-health official Abdul El-Sayd, who’s leading in the polls, if he wins the primary.

Apparently Scholten was referring, as other Stevens supporters have, to El-Sayed campaigning with Hasan Piker1, a controversial left-wing streamer. Piker has made provocative, allegedly hateful statements about America, Israel, and Jewish people. Piker doesn’t stand by all of them, but El-Sayed has stood by Piker.

El-Sayed himself is a target, as well. On Thursday night, Stevens Tweeted to El-Sayed, “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”

It’s fair to hold candidates accountable for who they choose to campaign with. But that accountability is often aimed disproportionately at the left.

Meanwhile, as the left’s public associations draw criticism, the covert right-wing associations of more conservative Democrats go largely ignored.

One of Stevens’s most important supporters is a longtime participant in an antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-LGBTQ+, and misogynistic Bible study sponsored by congressional Republican leadership.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the party’s primary fundraising committee for Senate races.

In theory, Gillibrand and the DSCC aren’t supposed to put their thumb on the scale in primary races. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they recruit candidates to put on the scale.

Gillibrand has been pushing Stevens’s campaign reportedly since at least last July. Just not openly.

Last August, Gillibrand told NOTUS that she attends the weekly Capitol Ministries Senate Bible study. What neither she nor NOTUS mentioned was that her Bible study teaches that the Jews killed Jesus. This toxic canard, denounced by all major religions, is the primal bedrock of antisemitism.

Two months before Gillibrand’s comments to NOTUS, and one month before her support for Stevens was reported, Capitol Ministries leader Ralph Drollinger had taught Gillibrand’s Senate Bible study group that Israel “crucified their Messiah.” This sin has not been redeemed, Drollinger said, referring to “the present apostasy of Israel, having executed the Messiah.”

He made similar remarks in a video and pamphlet for that lesson.

Drollinger also called Israel smart and financially sharp, stereotypes that may sound like praise but perpetuate antisemitic tropes.

In addition, Drollinger has a long history of anti-Catholic, anti-LGBTQ+, and misogynistic statements. He also teaches his White House, Senate, and House study groups that the Bible proves that God doesn’t want government helping the needy.

His Bible studies are sponsored by Trump appointees including Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) sponsor Drollinger’s study groups in their respective chambers.

Gillibrand, who has hedged about whether she’s still Catholic, told NOTUS that she considered Drollinger’s Bible study “rigorous.”

Gillibrand is also a long-time participant in weekly Senate prayer breakfasts facilitated by the Fellowship Foundation, even though faith groups, secular groups, and LGBTQ+ organizations warned that The Fellowship uses prayer breakfasts to build right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+ networks.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), for years The Fellowship’s most prominent Democrat, has also endorsed Stevens. So has former Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), a foe of reproductive rights who once lived in Fellowship housing at C Street.

Gillibrand said of her weekly religious events in the Senate, “It’s just a very good discipline for me to always remind myself why I’m here and why the work that I do matters.”

When I asked Gillibrand’s office to comment in January, there was no response.

Her support for Drollinger, or at least for Capitol Ministries, raises the question of whether she would encourage Stevens to join her right-wing religious meetings.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), for instance, helped Drollinger try to recruit new members of Congress to Drollinger’s Bible study. Not publicly, just in a letter to members that I obtained.

Gluesenkamp Perez tried to keep it quiet, not responding to my reporting about it until her constituents demanded answers.

While progressive Democrats have been under fire about their public, left-wing associations, Gluesenkamp Perez isn’t the only ostensible centrist who’s tried to hide right-wing ties.

Gillibrand, for instance, revealed to a religious podcast, but not mainstream media, that her plan for countering Pres. Donald Trump was to rely on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD).

Thune, she explained, was in her other weekly Bible study. “He is always going to try to do the right thing.”

In May, I revealed that Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) — who just founded a group targeting his party’s left wing — for years covered up his Fellowship-subsidized housing at the group’s controversial Washington townhouse, C Street.

Just as Gillibrand has kept her ties to The Fellowship and Drollinger quiet, she has yet to publicly acknowledge helping Stevens and other favored candidates, even though she heads the DSCC.

At the end of July 2025, about three months after Stevens entered the race, CNN reported that Gillibrand was covertly on board, funneling donor money to Stevens. Secretly.

“[T]wo people involved in Michigan politics said Gillibrand has privately encouraged donors to support Stevens,” CNN revealed.

In September, Politico reported on what it called “the closest link so far between Stevens and the DSCC’s preference for her in Michigan’s three-way primary.”

Gillibrand had invited Stevens to a two-day DSCC “Napa Retreat,” in California’s wine country. Again, secretly. Politico obtained the invitation. The resort accomodations included a spa and a “Tuscan-European vibe.”

As recently as this April, NOTUS reported that Stevens was still “DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand’s private preference,” even though Stevens “had a rough start in the Democratic primary and isn’t gaining any clear traction.”

Keeping her religious associations private means Gillibrand hasn’t had to answer for them. Keeping her support for Stevens secret means Stevens hasn’t had to answer for Gillibrand the way El-Sayed has had to answer for Piker.

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The question isn’t whether Pres. Donald Trump has intelligence proving election theft. The question is, what’s the most plausible-seeming pseudo-evidence his team can gin up into something sufficiently like real intelligence for his political allies to support it.

Trump’s 2020 election denial began almost instantly after his loss in 2020, when he began casting about first for ways to prevent his loss and, almost simultaneously, excuses for losing.

Perhaps most memorably, lawyer Sydney Powell vowed to unleash “the Kraken,” evidence, she said, of election theft.

It consisted of an initially anonymous statement from a former Venezuelan official confirming that Venezuela stole the election. What no one knew at the time, was how Powell found this person.

Then, in 2024, journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman published “Find Me the Votes,” revealing one of the people who first brought Powell and her team a tape of that Venezuelan giving a statement to lawyer Lewis Sessions, brother of Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX).

The Venezuelan was handed to Powell by Gary Berntsen, a former CIA senior operations officer, and an unnamed colleague. Berntsen was a former regular on Fox News, and got to Powell by asking Jeanine Pirro, his former Fox colleague, for help.

This was information even the congressional January 6 committee never uncovered. They knew about the Venezuelan — Leamsy Salazar — but not where Powell got him.

And it wasn’t until last year that Berntsen’s unnamed colleague was revealed, along with the fact that Berntsen’s colleague was the one who got Salazar out of Venezuela in the first place: To carry out a political agenda.

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As I reported last year, Berntsen’s partner, Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil, was working with Berntsen to get rich Venezuelans out of the country and connect them with U.S. law enforcement in the hope of avoiding jail and the seizure of any ill-gotten wealth.

Rodil helped spirit Salazar out of Venezuela specifically because a billionaire there wanted Salazar to take out one of the billionaire’s rivals by feeding info about that rival to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Last year, I found a court filing in which Rodil gave a statement about getting Salazar out, at the request of billionaire Raul Gorrin. Here’s what Rodil said:

“Gorrin had a rival also in the inner circle of Hugo Chavez—Diosdado Cabello Rondon…

“Gorrin wished to have Leamsy Salazar cooperate with the DEA to provide information regarding the narco-trafficking activities of Diosdado Cabello.”

Salazar’s information was, in fact, used to indict Cabello — who was never caught and today is the second most powerful person in the Venezuelan regime now overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

According to last year’s book “Stolen Elections” — by one of Berntsen’s team, Ralph Pezzullo — Berntsen and Rodil took Salazar’s election claims to Powell and Rudy Giuliani in the days after the 2020 election:

Giuliani and Powell were gob-smacked. They retired to an inner office, and Gary and Martin overheard them talking to President Trump. They said, “We have people here we believe are credible, and they’re saying the theft is coming from Venezuela.”

Isikoff and Klaidman wrote that after Powell got the Salazar tape, she called Trump, who called her back. Here’s Isikoff’s and Klaidman’s account of that call:

Hey, the guys came through, they got the stuff, we need to send it to you, Powell told the president about the hot new videotape, according to a source at Tomotley who monitored the conversation. Good job, said Trump, who “seemed excited,” according to the source…

A jet was chartered—and the flash drive with the Venezuelan defector’s account was flown straight to Washington for delivery to the White House.

But Salazar’s credibility lasted less than a day. At 3:38am on Nov. 14, the day after Salazar’s taping, the Trump research team issued a memo shooting down his claims about Venezuela’s ties to Dominion and Smartmatic. That didn’t stop the Kraken.

And it didn’t stop Berntsen and Rodil.

They were on a years-long quest to prove that Venezuela’s then-President Nicolás Maduro was at the top of a global cartel that ran drugs and elections in dozens of countries. Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne joined and bankrolled their adventures.

(You may remember Byrne as a key figure in the December 2020 White House meeting when Byrne, Powell, and others tried — with some appreciation from Trump — to sell Trump a range of conspiracy stories that would justify claims of election theft. Trump’s first-term legal advisors apparently talked him out of it; but they’re no longer at the White House.)

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Going forward, the U.S. officials Bernsten and Rodil approached for help ignored them; scared, Berntsen would later say. Or part of the conspiracy.

But in the runup to the 2024 election, one man listened: The Oklahoma senator who now runs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

As I reported earlier this year, after Trump nominated him to run DHS, Markwayne Mullin was the “hero,” the “stud,” who finally agreed to help Berntsen and Rodil. Berntsen himself said so on The Adam Carolla Show last year.

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The White House never denied any of this when I asked them about it. After I reported Mullin’s involvement, Byrne told Raw Story it was true. And Byrne gave more details, confirming some that had aired previously on Lindell TV.

Mullin, Byrne said, arranged for Rodil to meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, then co-campaign manager, at Mar-a-Lago in October 2024.

Byrne confirmed to Raw Story what I had previously reported, that Byrne, Rodil, and Berntsten got their supposed intel on election theft to the Trump team. Berntsen had discussed this publicly.

Trump himself boosted Berntsen’s interview with Lara Logan on social media.

With Mullin connecting them, Berntsen and Rodil started feeding their Venezuela intel to the top ranks of Trump’s team: The transition and then the administration. (The Miami Herald was actually first to confirm Berntsen’s work with the administration just months into Trump’s second term.)

The three men claim to have spent years, and their own fortunes, traveling the world and gathering witnesses — including Venezuelan programmers — to establish the evidence. This is their narrative:

• Venezuela ran the largest criminal operation in history, in conjunction with Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, and Serbia.

• The Venezuelan cartel consists of drug trafficking and also election interference — attempted in 72 countries.

• Under Maduro, Venezuela effectively invaded the U.S. with thousands of Tren de Aragua gang members led by hundreds of trained paramilitaries with a mission of destabilizing the United States.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has not asserted all of Berntsen’s and Rodil’s claims, but they’re the root of every relevant power grab Trump has attempted. Whatever Trump says now is likely an expansion on information, true or otherwise, that he has previously opted not to make public, presumably due to pushback in an intelligence community that he is systematically purging of non-loyalists.

On March 15, 2025, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deny suspected undocumented immigrants due process on the grounds that they’re soldiers, an invading army. Tren de Aragua, Trump’s executive order said, was on a mission of

“harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

The order’s title referenced “the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua.”

Trump’s own intelligence community refuted that fictional invasion. In fact, it was the Times report on that finding that prompted Berntsen to go public last year.

About a year ago, Berntsen has claimed, Rodil met with the office of then-National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard. Before she stepped down, she testified that her office seized Puerto Rico voting machines at the request of the U.S. attorney there.

That federal prosecutor, The Guardian revealed last year, had been fed “information, documents and witnesses” by Berntsen and Rodil.

The reason the Justice Department concluded last year, in a secret memo, that it’s legal to kill unarmed people in boats without warning or due process is that the U.S. is in a state of armed conflict with narco-terrorists not merely selling drugs, but using the proceeds to fund a military campaign to destabilize America. That’s the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne narrative.

That narrative was also echoed in the grounds given for the attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro was being charged with:

“Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy … and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States.”

Again, a war, armed combat, against the United States.

Now, Trump needs a legal rationale to deploy federal forces at polling places. Federal law only allows federal troops at voting sites when “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” That’s what Trump needs, and that’s what the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne narrative gives him.

Ironically, the Maduro capture may now be complicating things, potentially for both sides. If he’s willing to say he stole the 2020 election, prosecutors will be obliged to demonstrate how. If he refuses, well, why would he if it would help his case?

And Maduro’s not the only Venezuelan in captivity.

There’s Hugo Carvajal, who fled Venezuela in 2017 after heading up military intelligence for previous Chavez. Berntsen was especially public last summer about urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to give Carvajal a deal in return for what he knows.

But what if what Carvajal knows isn’t that Venezuela stole the 2020 election? And what if Carvajal was one of those Berntsen-Rodil clients?

If Carvajal had real evidence, it would have been a slam dunk for him and prosecutors. But it could also expose considerable detail about the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne operation.

In an apparent bid for clemency, Carvajal wrote a letter last year that certainly seemed like an accusation against Venezuela. In fact, Trump’s boyhood friend Peter Ticktin cited Carvajal’s letter in his bid to win clemency for Colorado clerk Tina Peters. Despite not having the power to grant it, Trump did so days later.

But Carvajal’s letter notably doesn’t say anything about 2020. Which didn’t prevent Ticktin from citing it as causal grounds for Peters’s clemency.

Then there was the overlooked trial of former Rep. David Rivera (R-FL), convicted this spring of lobbying for Venezuela illegally and laundering his payments. Gorrin — the billionaire who got Salazar out of Venezuela — was a key middleman.

Who else worked for Gorrin? Ballard Partners, a heavy-hitting Florida lobbying firm with ties to the Trump administration. Ties that include having employed Wiles to work as a lobbyist for Gorrin’s media company.

Wiles was so involved that Rivera tried to get her to testify. His lawyers said she was Gorrin’s “principal point-of-contact” who had “extensive communications” regarding the work for Gorrin.

Wiles ended up not having to testify. Meaning we still don’t know what she knows about Gorrin.

Gabbard was seen in some quarters as not aggressive enough about putative election theft. Now she’s gone.

Trump has nominated U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to replace Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Clayton’s record includes election denial and indicting Maduro.

Other election deniers have been seeded into leadership roles at DOJ and elsewhere.

The DOJ’s new acting voting-rights chief is Eric Neff, a lawyer who represented Byrne as recently as last year and attended an election-denial summit this year along with Ticktin and Byrne.

Kurt Olsen, a past partner of election-denier Mike Lindell, is no longer a White House elections aide. He’s now a federal prosecutor in Miami, another district that’s been working the Berntsen-Rodil allegations.

When the analysis of Puerto Rican voting machines came up clean, Reuters reported, Olsen blamed the analysts in a message to Trump. They were “deep state” contractors paid by George Soros, Olsen alleged without evidence.

This week, MS NOW reported that Olsen’s latest focus has been Venezuelan election hacking. (MS NOW reported that Trump is leaning more frequently on 2020 election deniers, citing an administration official who said “It’s that network that is the real fucking problem.”)

Pirro, who helped Berntsen get an in with Powell, is now the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Andrew “Mac” Warner reportedly has blamed the CIA for stealing the 2020 election.

Reuters reported last year that he attended a meeting in June 2025 with Olsen and an FBI agent tasked to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The meeting was for a briefing by at least three former Smartmatic employees.

Reuters didn’t say where the former workers came from, but they fit the profile of ostensible witnesses Berntsen and Rodil hunted around the globe.

According to Reuters, the Smartmatic veterans didn’t say any elections had been hacked, only that they could be. In theory.

Warner also went to that election-denial summit attended by Ticktin and Byrne. The New York Times reported this week that Warner is now investigating supposed election fraud for the DOJ. He’s known to have sought voter rolls from at least two Missouri counties.

So far, Trump has resisted repeating publicly the wildest claims from the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne axis. But he has also already claimed extraordinary powers wielding those claims just enough to justify what he wants, without igniting public rejection of the false narrative at the base of it or the lack of hard evidence to support it.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) marked the July 4th holiday by sharing a falsehood about America’s founding fathers that’s in lockstep with the Republican Party’s theocratic claims.

On one of the social-media platforms where it appeared, Schumer’s post was edited to correct another error, but the one about God and the founders was allowed to stand.

In a post on Bluesky time-stamped 8:58am, Schumer’s official account published the fictional claim that America’s founders called the country “God’s noble experiment,” without attributing any ostensible source:

Schumer also cited “one nation under God,” without noting that this phrase was only injected into the Pledge of Allegiance, and other previously secular places, in the 1950s, to weaponize Christianity in the effort to stir up anti-Communist sentiment.

Republicans have been trying to stoke anti-Communist fervor since Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani began racking up primary victories. Mamdani was not endorsed by Schumer, who has fielded candidates against DSA rivals.

Multiple people, including some who study the history of Christian revisionism, pounced on Schumer’s post. (Schumer, it’s worth noting, is Jewish and, in fact, the highest ranking Jewish public official in American history.)

Almost 48 hours later, the post hadn’t been revised. Even though a similar post was altered earlier the morning of July 4 to correct a different error.

American Atheists President Nick Fish responded to Schumer on Bluesky, writing:

“…literally the only references I can find to the Founders calling America "god's noble experiment" are from... Chuck Schumer speeches.

“Why is the Senate Democratic Leader carrying water for a right wing Christian lie? And apparently fabricating quotes to do it?”

Fish called on Schumer to revise it. He wrote that his search had been “cursory,” but I couldn’t find any historical basis for Schumer’s claim, either.

I emailed Military Religious Freedom Foundation Senior Research Director Chris Rodda, an author on this topic, asking about Schumer’s claim. She had heard it before, from him:

“[Schumer] has been using this God's noble experiment for years – possibly decades – claiming the founders said it as they were leaving the Constitutional Convention. It's not a founding fathers quote; it's a Chuck Shumer [sic] quote. We need people fighting the Trump 250 historical revisionism, not adding to it.”

Rodda was right: It’s been decades.

In 2003, Schumer used the phrase “God’s noble experiment” in a somewhat jumbled statement that leaves the context ambiguous:

“…[the founders] wanted checks. And in fact, the first thing they did after the Government, this great Government, it was called by the founding fathers, ‘God’s noble experiment.’ I truly believe that still exists today. We are God’s noble experiment.”

Fish posted that he found an example from 2009. That time, Schumer didn’t pin it on the founders. Nor did he say it was “the first thing they did.” Schumer simply asserted that the American people broadly shared this sentiment.

“…people felt at the founding of America that we were ‘God’s noble experiment.’ Judge [Sonia] Sotomayor’s personal story shows that today, more than 200 years later, we are still God’s noble experiment.”

He didn’t explain how her story shows that.

Yale Professor of History and American Studies Joanne Freeman, who specializes in and writes about the revolutionary era, responded to Schumer’s latest reiteration of this story on Sunday:

“In the well-over 100,000 documents written by founders included in the Founders Online database from the National Archives, no one uses the phrase ‘God's noble experiment.’

“No one.”

Nevertheless, Schumer has embellished it over the years. Details come and go, none with any sourcing.

In 2016, a local New York newspaper reported after the election that Schumer said it was time for the nation to come together. It was in the context of healing “bitter wounds,” that Schumer offered this version of the fabricated anecdote:

“When the Founding Fathers finished writing the Constitution over in Philadelphia at Constitution [sic] Hall, they said they had created God’s Noble Experiment. I believe those three words are every bit as relevant today as they were then. We are under God, a nation of faith.”

It’s a specious story on its face. How would “the Founding Fathers” say something collectively other than in writing? Their collective works, after all, are few in number and pretty well known.

And yet on Saturday, Schumer at first offered a version of this falsehood that doubled down with specifics — although still without addressing how multiple founders might have all said the same thing verbally, or how Schumer would ostensibly know about that today.

It’s possible to see how this version was changed on Saturday because, although most social-media platforms don’t let readers see a post’s edit history, Facebook does.

The same language Schumer used at 8:58am on Bluesky had been posted on Facebook at 8:55am. But the Facebook post had been edited from an earlier version, which added the new, also fictitious detail that the founders made their verbal pronouncement as they left Independence Hall:

“Happy 250th, America!

“When the founding fathers left Constitution [sic] Hall, they called America God’s noble experiment. I believe in all three words to this day: we are one nation under God, we have clung to noble ideas for longer than any other nation…”

The Two Versions of Schumer’s Facebook Post:

In other words, someone edited the post not merely to remove the non-existent “Constitution Hall,” but to remove the reference to the founders speaking as they left the hall. But the lie about the founders calling America “God’s noble experiment” was retained.

So was Schumer’s argument for divine American exceptionalism. This is the signature belief of today’s theocratic right wing: That America is different, special, because God decided it is, a concept found nowhere in scripture, written before the authors knew that the Americas existed.

Schumer’s posts came just two days after fellow Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee released a report on Pres. Donald Trump’s politicization of 250th anniversary initiatives and resources.

The Democrats cited reporting (including my own on the Freedom Trucks) about Christian revisionist history and outright falsehoods. As well as the lie that Muhammad Ali renounced Islam.

Schumer and Trump weren’t alone thumping the Bible on Independence Day. It was a core theme for many Republican leaders and commentators. But at least one other Democrat joined in.

Citing The Bible, Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) wrote on July 4 that “Faith is the foundation of patriotism,” which would surely have come as a surprise to some of the signers 250 years beforehand.

“Let’s choose faith,” Moore concluded.

Approximately one third of Maryland is described as “religiously unaffiliated” by the Pew Research Center. Agnostics and atheists make up 13% of the state’s people, equivalent to the population of Mainline Protestants or Catholics.

Nationally, 29% of the country identifies as religiously unaffiliated.

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

This article is one of a series about the members of Congress who live at C Street. To receive future stories, you can subscribe for free or as a paid subscriber.

Secular watchdogs — and a political rival — are responding to the revelation that Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) lives at a controversial Christian boarding house when Congress is in session. Public Citizen also weighed in.

Danielle Welch, a public defender challenging Suozzi in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, said in a statement that Suozzi’s work with the secretive, right-wing group that runs the house “should be disqualifying.”

As I reported last month, Suozzi for years has maintained a room at C Street, the controversial townhouse controlled by the Fellowship Foundation. Better known as The Family, the group uses the National Prayer Breakfast and the C Street house to build right-wing networks around the world opposed to LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

Suozzi was living there as early as 2020, one reverend told me, and tried to keep it secret from the public.

He is also a frequent collaborator of The Fellowship, helping earlier this year to rehabilitate the image of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who partnered with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another C Street alum, to torture U.S. deportees there, and offered to add Americans to their number.

Suozzi’s rent at C Street is just $800 per month. It’s subsidized by dark money funneled through The Fellowship, historically from right-wing Christian millionaires and billionaires.

Secular groups and advocates for LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights have warned for years about the damage Democrats do facilitating the Fellowship’s work, as Suozzi does. Residing at C Street was scandalous on its face almost two decades ago, and the Suozzi news has reignited criticism.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has inveighed for years against C Street specifically, and The Fellowship generally. President and CEO Rachel Laser said in a statement to me,

“Christian Nationalist mega donors secretly own a house where Members of Congress rent rooms at below market rates and where foreign governments hold off-the-record meetings with those legislators. By choosing to live at C Street, Members of Congress send an alarming message to their constituents and all Americans.”

Laser was referring to reports of The Fellowship using the C Street townhouse, just a block from congressional offices, as a meeting place to build networks of rich backers, American politicians, and power players from around the world.

Earlier this month I revealed how members of Congress in the past few years used C Street for secret meetings with politicians from Australia and Kenya.

Previously, I reported on C Street’s role in a clandestine effort to kill a UN anti-corruption task force in Guatemala.

The Fellowship hosted Guatemala’s evangelical president, Jimmy Morales, at C Street. Rubio was a key part of that effort.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) Action Fund called C Street “church/state entanglement you can put an address on.” The townhouse is literally located on C Street, on Capitol Hill.

FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor referred in her statement to C Street’s legal status as partially a house of worship, exempt from some taxes and disclosure requirements. It is not open to the public for worship.

Gaylor said, “A self-described ‘church’ quietly covers the rent for members of Congress and steers them toward one narrow religious agenda, here and overseas. Our representatives answer to voters, not to an unaccountable religious sect.”

Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, who lobbies Congress on ethics and related issues, focused on the benefits Suozzi gets from C Street. Suozzi and his roommate, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), pay only $800 per month. Reimbursement comes out of their congressional budgets, which means low rents free up more funds from the budget for other expenses.

Holman called the rental rates “unusually low” and said standard rates on Capitol Hill are “far higher.”

He added that “the rental fee includes free access to meeting and event spaces in the dwelling.” As author Jeff Sharlet and others have previously reported, C Street lodging also includes menial housekeeping services provided by college-age Fellowship interns and disciples.

“The lawmakers' true living costs are being subsidized by a conservative religious faction that seeks to influence federal policies,” Holman said. While The Fellowship doesn’t as an organization espouse specific policy, its leaders and bankrollers do push similar right-wing agendas.

“Any subsidies above the actual comparable costs on The Hill would constitute an illegal gift by the lobbying entity,” Holman said.

Democrats who have to work with him didn’t weigh in about Suozzi.

The Congressional Freethought Caucus, entirely Democratic and dedicated to championing secular values, declined to comment.

I emailed the office of Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) because she reportedly braced Suozzi on his commitment to Democratic Party positions, including abortion, in 2024.

I asked whether Suozzi disclosed to her his Fellowship work or C Street arrangement. Hochul’s office did not respond.

One Democrat willing to confront Suozzi over his secret living arrangements was Welch, an underdog against him in Tuesday’s House Democratic primary.

“I entered this race when it became clear that Tom Suozzi could not be trusted to stand up to Donald Trump,” Welch said in a statement. “With the new reporting on Suozzi’s residence at C Street and connection to the Fellowship Foundation, it is clear that he cannot be trusted at all.”

Welch referred to the fact that Suozzi has not disclosed his low rent — before or after new reimbursement rules went into effect in 2023 — and addressed some of the Fellowship work that Suozzi specifically has done:

“Associating with a group that opposes LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights should be disqualifying. Praising Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who operates the notorious CECOT prison where ICE detainees were transferred and tortured, should be disqualifying. Failing to disclose rent so low that it may violate the law should be disqualifying. People are tired of corruption.”

As I reported last month, Suozzi told the Rev. Rob Schenck in 2020 that he lived at C Street. At the time, Schenck was a nationally prominent evangelical (he later switched sides).

Schenck told me that Suozzi didn’t want people to know he lived at C Street, but confided in Schenck because “he was kind of assuring me, ‘Hey, I may be a Democrat, but, you know, I’m in the family,’ so to speak.”

Schenck has since become a leading voice warning about the dangers of Christian nationalism and said people should know about C Street. “I think what you’re doing is important sunlight,” he said, referring to my reporting.

“It matters,” Schenck said. “Especially now. It always mattered, but especially now.”

Danielle Welch’s Full Statement

“I entered this race when it became clear that Tom Suozzi could not be trusted to stand up to Donald Trump. With the new reporting on Suozzi’s residence at C Street and connection to the Fellowship Foundation, it is clear that he cannot be trusted at all.

”Suozzi owes his constituents a lot of answers. Associating with a group that opposes LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights should be disqualifying. Praising Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who operates the notorious CECOT prison where ICE detainees were transferred and tortured, should be disqualifying. Failing to disclose rent so low that it may violate the law should be disqualifying. People are tired of corruption.”

FFRF Action Fund Board President Annie Laurie Gaylor’s Full Statement

“C Street is church/state entanglement you can put an address on. A self-described ‘church’ quietly covers the rent for members of Congress and steers them toward one narrow religious agenda, here and overseas. Our representatives answer to voters, not to an unaccountable religious sect. Government belongs to all of us, believers and nonbelievers alike, not to any faith trying to run it from the shadows.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser’s Full Statement

“As we’ve said for years, C Street, the Family, the Fellowship, and whatever other names the shadow network goes by, are deeply problematic, and not simply because they sponsor the National Prayer Breakfast. Christian Nationalist mega donors secretly own a house where Members of Congress rent rooms at below market rates and where foreign governments hold off-the-record meetings with those legislators. By choosing to live at C Street, Members of Congress send an alarming message to their constituents and all Americans. We should all be concerned about the impropriety and influence of this shadowy group.”

Public Citizen lobbyist Craig Holman’s Full Statement

“The standard rent for apartments on The Hill, immediately adjacent to the Capitol, is far higher than the reported few hundred dollars these members with the Family are paying. Not only is their rent unusually low, but the rental fee includes free access to meeting and event spaces in the dwelling. The lawmakers’ true living costs are being subsidized by a conservative religious faction that seeks to influence federal policies. Any subsidies above the actual comparable costs on The Hill would constitute an illegal gift by the lobbying entity.”

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To hear FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche tell it, the five men charged with plotting an attack on Sunday’s White House competitive fighting event were solely politically motivated.

National media have downplayed the plot itself or at least its Christian dimensions, even though messages referred to “factions” and “militias” on alert to join in, targeting a range of famous and political names.

One suspect’s mother said others used Christianity to manipulate him. The group used biblical phrases, “shepherd” and “lions den.” The government, some believed, included demon worshipers who sacrifice children.

The most prominent and explicit references to Christianity and religious beliefs appear in filings by experienced law enforcement. These references fade until disappearing in the public statements of agency leaders.

The plot was to set off explosives at the White House event so that drones and snipers could pick off wealthy and powerful targets as they fled.

The role of Christianity in this plan isn’t to be found in any one document from the Justice Department or the FBI. But across the federal criminal complaints and affidavits, enough details appear to show that the scheme was not only planned, allegedly, by Christians, it was motivated at least in part by their Christianity and religious beliefs.

Some apparently used Christianity to motivate co-conspirators. The first filings in the case are specific and clear about Christianity’s role.

The case started with a tip in Ohio. Nineteen-year-old Tycen Proper’s family was worried about him and called local police on June 10. The FBI were notified the next day.

Chris Betts is a Columbus, OH, police detective also assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’s got a master’s degree in counterterrorism, has given talks on nihilistic violent extremism, and has been a cop for more than ten years. Betts spoke with Proper’s mother on June 11 and his affidavit detailed Christian elements of the group now charged with the plot.

The Shepherd and the Demon

According to Betts, communications in the group began in March. Much of his affidavit is based on his conversations with Proper’s mother.

Subsequent reporting has portrayed her as a religious Christian. According to the Daily Wire, a right-wing outlet co-founded by Tucker Carlson, Proper’s mother has posted two Christian messages online since her son’s arrest.

Even in her eyes, an extreme and manipulative form of Christianity led her son to this moment. Here’s some of Betts’s affidavit:

“She detailed that PROPER had recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based. She didn’t know the name of the group, but they expressed ultra-religious and anti-government sentiments…

“PROPER’S mother detailed that talking with these individuals online has caused PROPER to lean heavily into his religion, and she believed that those individuals were using religion to manipulate and influence her son.”

Proper’s alleged political views echoed far-right Christian views. Betts wrote about Proper “making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook.”

That said, to identify its targets, the group allegedly turned to a left-wing website called TrackAIPAC that lists politicians supported by the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Proper allegedly told his group, “I got a possible target Marsha Blackburn is senator for Tennessee … She’s taken money from the Israel pro Israel lobby and supports them.”

The same day Betts spoke with Proper’s mother, so did FBI Special Agent Mercedes Smith. She joined the FBI in July 2024 and used the same language Betts did to describe the Christian nature of the group and the use of Christianity to manipulate Proper.

Smith’s affidavit was filed to support the criminal complaint against Abraham Alvarez, a 31-year-old identified by the Homeland Security Department as an undocumented immigrant. Alvarez arrived in the U.S. 25 years ago, suggesting he came to his beliefs here.

Smith added details about the plot’s religious nature and Alvarez’s alleged role.

The defendants used biblically resonant phrases as labels. Alvarez allegedly called himself “Shepherd.” “Lions Den” was a group chat.

The “fall back location” was “an old church.” Smith wrote that Alvarez, as “Shepherd,” shared an image of the church with others in a chat:

A third affidavit detailed what law enforcement claim they found in Proper’s journal. Including a demon.

FBI Special Agent Andrew Brown has been with the bureau for more than nine years. In his affidavit regarding a third defendant, Brown said the FBI and local police on June 11 executed a search warrant that yielded Proper’s journal.

Brown characterized the contents of the journal, saying that Proper “wrote that the government wants to control people and that a larger group worships a demonic figure and sacrifices children to it.”

That’s a common refrain among the right-wing QAnon movement.

Mainstream Republican religious views showed up, too, Brown wrote. He said that a third defendant, Daniel Eskridge, told a group chat on May 22 that “our rights are unalienable God given rights not government permitted, controlled or regulated and not to be infringed upon.”

This is doctrine among Republicans; diminishing government by claiming rights were created magically by divine, anthropomorphic intent. (The founders wrote that rights are inherent and humanity arose from some form of supernatural agency not defined in founding documents and, to Deist founders, not Christian.)

I checked what appears to be Eskridge’s X (Twitter) account. He apparently followed a mix of mainstream and even leftie figures, but also theocratic Christian political leaders and commentators. Those included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

But Christianity gets short shrift in a fourth affidavit, submitted by FBI Special Agent Mark Prator. Unlike the officers who wrote the other affidavits, Prator joined during Pres. Donald Trump’s second term, last June. His affidavit covered two California-based defendants.

Jesus-Washing

Prator makes one reference to another agent’s report on Proper’s mother, but softens the language about Christianity used by both agents who spoke with her directly.

Both Betts and Smith wrote that the group was “comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based … [and] expressed ultra-religious and anti-government sentiments.”

But Prator characterized their account by saying the mother described group members “that may share some Christian-based ideology.” Not that the individuals claimed to be “Christian-based.”

Discussing the group’s motives on his own, Prator erased the religious dimension.

“[T]he co-conspirators’ murder plot appears to have been motivated by their anti-government ideology,” he wrote. He referred to them as an “anti-government group” with an “anti-government ideology” or “violent anti-government ideology.”

Prator does cite the journal reference to worship of a demonic figure. But describing his own interview with a California defendant, there’s no mention of a demon being worshipped or having children sacrificed to them. Either it didn’t come up, or Prator didn’t include it.

Instead, Prator wrote that the defendant “believes that the U.S. government is run by an elite group of individuals who sacrifice and consume infants who also were deeply involved with Jeffery [sic] Epstein and are now protected by President Donald Trump.”

Prator writes that the defendant places blame for government corruption “with Jewish people and blames them and Israel for the current war with Iran.” He doesn’t mention antisemitism.

Despite Christian elements throughout the filings, Justice Department officials have made no reference to them. Chrisianity isn’t mentioned in the press release, or in Blanche’s statement.

First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli implies the plot’s solely political: “There is no place in our country for political violence.”

Patel’s Tweet revealing arrests in the plot didn’t mention Christianity.

None of this, however, should be read to mean this right-wing Christian administration is covering up the right-wing Christian aspects of a terrorist plot.

They might well be trying to sanitize the Christian aspects, but it’s not clear whether those aspects are actually right wing. The alleged plot doesn’t easily conform to recognizable partisan or political lines.

The targets were Republican. But so was much of the conspiracy thinking.

Hostility toward Israel, including genuine antisemitism, can be found across the political spectrum. (The leader of the National Prayer Breakfast famously admired Hitler’s organizational skills. The Trump White House shrugged at the antisemitic Bible study sponsored by cabinet members.)

And it’s the left that’s targeted AIPAC. It’s leftie buzzwords that showed up in Smith’s affidavit: “Proper’s associates also noted hating ‘billionaires’ and ‘capitalist elites.’”

Eskridge allegedly said the group should target someone “that both Democrats and Republicans would unite over,” as Brown put it in his affidavit. Eskridge allegedly wrote, “[W]e need to make sure it’s someone that can’t be easily turned into a right vs left thing we want someone both sides would celebrate.”

This administration has explicitly singled out Christianity as a victim of persecution in this country. So it’s not surprising that the official response isn’t addressing Christianity’s role the way it surely would spotlight Islam’s.

But some media, too, are downplaying Christianity.

Spectrum’s local coverage, to its credit, included a Proper family friend describing them as “such a good Christian family.” Likewise, CBS’s local station put the Christian angle as high up as the second paragraph of its writeup.

But the Christianity is tougher to find nationally, in more politicized media. It’s absent in the national CBS article.

And the implications go beyond concerns about journalism.

Consistent neglect of Christianity’s dangers by top officials and national media threatens to obscure how Christian extremism can scramble familiar political vectors.

Like other religions, Christianity when mixed with politics can become outlets for free-floating aggression. “PROPER had been thinking about joining the military or police force with the goal of being able to kill people,” local police wrote.

Despite the dangers, the government for decades has been reluctant to confront Christian extremism.

Quarters of the military have been allowed to become breeding grounds. Under Trump, federal law enforcement has resisted and reduced efforts to track or surveil or investigate Christian extremism. Then-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) opposed focusing on Christianity in the report on the Jan. 6, 2021, white Christian nationalist assault on the Capitol.

In this case, too, top officials don’t seem to be grappling with the full scope of Christianity or the plot itself.

“Every State”

NBC reported that Patel’s post worried and “shocked” law enforcement who were still tracking down some of 26 user names in various chats. Only 14 had been identified, of which five were in custody.

And the law-enforcement filings suggest a far larger, like-minded network potentially willing and able to participate if called on.

In one message, Alvarez allegedly suggested the first attack wouldn’t be the last, and that the scope could include a lot more than the 19 that officials say may have been involved:

“Several factions and militia have been notified. They will be the teeth and the Shepherds. I also sent out a mass call to action to all protest groups, that will bring numbers. (working on arming them). They will engage when they see the signal. Told them they know will know when they see it.”

This message alone raises issues. Which “factions and militia” were notified? Did they, too, share the Christian sentiments of the defendants? Is federal law enforcement tracking them down?

Eskridge allegedly said there was no need to wait for supply lines and other prerequisites for revolution. “That’s what every other group in this movement is working on.” There’s no indication law enforcement was aware of groups working on the infrastructure for revolution.

In one message Eskridge allegedly claimed robbing ammunition might be possible because “I know we have some people in Kansas.” In fact, he allegedly posted that “we have groups in every state.”

Then there’s the issue of whether a degraded federal focus on right-wing or Christian extremism led law enforcement to miss things. If a “mass call” did go out, it seems to have gone undetected, as the plot was thwarted by Proper’s parents reporting him.

In other words, federal law enforcement found out about the plan for June 14 only three days before, only because a 19-year-old shared details with his parents, and only because they called police.

And yet, Alvarez is said to have been recruiting on TikTok. “[M]embers of this group were primarily recruited through TikTok,” Brown wrote. “Once an individual had proven himself to be an established member of the group on TikTok, they were then transitioned to a vetted (and more secure) Signal chat.” Did law enforcement spot this recruiting?

Allegedly, in May the group started sharing a link for a new chat with anyone who might “make a productive addition to the group.” There’s no indication U.S. law enforcement or surveillance picked up this sharing.

Federal records show that Proper bought a gun on June 5, which even a 19-year-old can do without a waiting period or assessment of social media or other telltales.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was still in effect until June 12, but the affidavits contain no hint of FISA power directed at any of the people involved in these chats.

If anything, Trump and some in his cabinet are fertilizing the soil for more of this kind of thing — free-floating hostility harnessed by religion more than by coherent political ideology into politically oriented violence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in particular has endorsed Christian extremism in the military, one of the most fertile areas for its growth. Nor is this likely to go away even with political change in the near future.

Some Democrats are sympathetic to inculcating politics with religion. But neither party’s leadership has indicated a willingness to address the dangers of doing so.

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

The national effort by Pres. Donald Trump to mark America’s 250th anniversary includes a set of mobile museums carrying displays about the nation’s history and prominent figures. One display falsely claims that Muhammad Ali disavowed Islam.

It is a stunning slight to the man — a beloved global icon, ambassador of peace, athletic legend, and cultural titan — and to Islam, a faith under siege by the Trump administration and others and for which Ali was a powerful envoy to mainstream America.

The falsehood appears in a display about Ali on board one of the Freedom 250 organization’s so-called “Freedom Trucks.” Six are traveling the country as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations.

The nation’s leading Muslim advocacy organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), responded to the falsehood about Ali, saying, “We call on the Freedom 250 Mobile Museum to correct the record.”

Earlier this year, a reader of mine agreed to send me pictures from the trucks. As I reported Monday, the pictures capture displays perpetuating falsehoods or, more often, half-truths that feed into Christian nationalist rewriting of American history. Two echoed antisemitic canards about Jews in the Revolutionary War.

Produced with two right-wing Christian organizations — Hillsdale College and the media company PragerU — the Freedom Truck exhibits predictably skew toward Christianity, elevating its role and focusing more on Christian figures, some of them with little relevance to the arc of America’s story and obscure even to history buffs.

Ali is one of the most famous Muslims in the world, and likely the most famous American Muslim in history. His conversion to Islam was a seminal moment of the 1960s, setting up the legal battle over his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War that robbed him of more than three years of boxing at his peak.

A fearless advocate for racial equality and justice, Ali spent much of his life after leaving the ring as an ambassador for peace, especially in the Muslim world, and remained, as CAIR told me, “a devout Muslim.”

The Freedom Trucks erase this history, as I found poring through exhibit photos.

If the falsehood was a mistake, it possibly arose from Ali in 1984 distancing himself from the Muslim organization, the Nation of Islam, with which he was originally affiliated. The Muhammad Ali Center writes that he converted to Sunni Islam in 1975.

Ali never disavowed, renounced, or converted from Islam. He died a Muslim and reportedly had a Muslim funeral.

Here’s what the Freedom 250 trucks say about possibly the most globally recognized and beloved Islamic man in modern history:

After Ali’s death, Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah wrote for the Daily Beast that “Ali was more than a sports figure or a celebrity to our community. He was a source of pride to so many Muslim Americans for so many different reasons.”

Ali, Obeidallah wrote, went to Mecca in 1989. That pilgrimage is one of Islam’s five pillars.

In a statement, CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell told me that “Muhammad Ali was a devout Muslim. Suggesting otherwise distorts both his personal faith journey and the historical record.”

Referring to Ali’s transition from the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam, Mitchell said that Ali “lived the rest of his life contributing to causes of justice and peace, motivated by his faith.”

Mitchell also called on Freedom 250 to fix its false Ali display.

“Any exhibit honoring his life should accurately reflect his unwavering commitment to Islam. We call on the Freedom 250 Mobile Museum to correct the record.”

The lie about Ali has already been seen by untold thousands of people. The trucks are set to continue their tours at least through the end of this year.

In April, White House Task Force 250 Executive Director Brittany Baldwin was quoted saying, “They’ve reached more than 300 schools and welcomed more than 24,000 Americans.” The goal was to reach 20 million people.

Ali himself reached millions of people with his messages about Islam, even in the last year of his life.

One of Ali’s last public statements before his June 3, 2016, death was a defense of Islam in December 2015, responding to Trump’s proposed travel ban on predominantly Muslim nations.

“[O]ur political leaders should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam,” Ali said in a statement.

One month into Trump’s first term, border agents detained Ali’s son, Muhammad Ali, Jr., after his return flight from Jamaica and asked him, “Where did you get your name from?”

Reportedly, they also asked him, “Are you a Muslim?”

Ali spent much of the last years of his life speaking about Islam’s traditions and teachings of peace, especially in response to violence by Islamic extremists or terrorists.

One week after 9/11, Ali went to New York City to denounce the deadly attacks and assert that Islam rejects violence.

In 2006, he was recognized by the World Economic Forum for promoting Islam.

Given the reputations of Hillsdale and PragerU, it seems possible that one or both of them made an innocent mistake and that Freedom 250 failed to catch it. The Freedom Trucks contain multiple errors that are easily checked online, as I reported Monday.

Freedom 250 has not responded to my questions1.

Freedom 250’s corporate “partners” include ExxonMobil, Oracle, Penske, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, John Deere, Palantir, Deloitte, United Health Group, United Airlines, the Blockchain Association, and several right-wing organizations such as the openly theocratic Museum of the Bible.

The traveling Freedom 250 trucks can be requested by members of the public for stops in municipalities around the country. At least one appearance was canceled after local police discovered the role of PragerU, the Hartford Courant reported.

Full CAIR Statement

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

The six mobile museums Pres. Donald Trump sent around the country to commemorate America’s 250th birthday are carrying hidden cargo: Antisemitism and Christian nationalism.

The so-called “Freedom Trucks” present narratives primarily about America’s founding, while also celebrating notable figures from the nation’s history. The exhibits and displays are largely anodyne. The biases are mostly subtle, in the choice of subject matter and what’s said about it.

There are also falsehoods and undocumented stories presented as facts. The trucks carry echoes of a canard about Jews in the American Revolution. Christian nationalist myths peer out from some displays. America is back, the trucks proclaim over an image of Trump, without saying from what.

Christianity is elevated, the founders’ Deism and skepticism are erased. The nation’s origins are given religious emphasis over mercantile motives. The Aitken Bible, an obscure footnote to American history but a key tool for rewriting it, is featured.

Related Story:

QR codes send visitors into the theocratic, right-wing realms of PragerU, which created content for the trucks. It’s not a university but an openly ideological advocacy organization that says it promotes “American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment … while upholding Judeo-Christian values.”

I asked a reader of mine to take video and pictures of one of the trucks (they feature identical displays). Then I asked Military Religious Freedom Foundation Senior Research Director Chris Rodda to review the images she had captured.

PragerU was right: It is creative.

Rodda has years of experience researching and writing about Christian revisionist history portraying America’s founders as building the new nation on a Christian foundation. Although the founders were nominally Christian, many of the most influential were Deists, and the intention to create a secular nation was explicit in their writings and the nation’s founding documents.

This hasn’t stopped a cottage industry, funded by rich, right-wing Christians, from cherry-picking historic quotations and elevating specious, disproven, and unsourced secondary accounts to undermine America’s secular roots and nature.

As others have reported, that cottage industry — organizations such as PragerU and Hillsdale College — was handed the wheel to drive the content of the Freedom 250 trucks.

The trucks are part of Freedom 250, activities and events ostensibly intended to mark in nonpartisan fashion the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A public effort years in the making toward that same goal was effectively sidelined after Trump took office and handed off anniversary events to a privately funded organization led by his appointees.

The private Freedom 250 endeavor has led to multiple embarrassments, with July 4 still almost a month away. A music festival collapsed when performers pulled out, prompting Trump to denigrate them, suggesting the festival would have been low-quality even if it happened.

Freedom 250’s corporate “partners” include ExxonMobil, Oracle, Penske, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, John Deere, Palantir, Deloitte, United Health Group, United Airlines, the Blockchain Association, and several right-wing organizations such as the openly theocratic Museum of the Bible.

The traveling Freedom 250 trucks could be requested for stops in municipalities around the country.

Ironically, New England — site of much of the history found inside the trucks — has shown little interest. At least one appearance there was canceled after local police discovered the role of PragerU, the Hartford Courant reported.

The main page for all the Freedom 250 events is overtly partisan, featuring an image of Trump and his political rhetoric, implying America went away when he wasn’t president.

A Freedom 250 spokesperson told NBC that “Freedom 250 is a nonpartisan organization singularly focused on celebrating America’s 250th anniversary and bringing Americans together around this historic milestone. From the outset, our work has reflected the unifying spirit of this moment.”

But the Freedom Truck is more divisive than unifying. It pressures visitors to identify as patriots.

Exhibits steer obviously and ahistorically toward Christianity, amplifying its role in the nation’s birth and erasing real religious beliefs, and skepticism, of America’s founders and influential figures in its history.

Capitalists and mainstream personalities from arts and sports are featured. Union leaders are in short supply. Political and cultural subversives who challenged convention or fought to make America a more perfect union only appear if smoothed over by time and appropriation.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported that some Freedom 250 donor companies have business before the government that they could be hoping to sway by supporting Trump’s anniversary efforts.

A dozen Democratic senators have pressed the administration for an accounting of $100 million Trump appropriated from Interior Department funds for Freedom 250.

Christian nationalism has already taken center stage in Freedom 250 events. Rededicate 250 was overtly and predominantly right-wing, evangelical Christian. in March, historians and scholars told journalist Nancy Levine Stearns that Rededicate 250 offered a vision of America and its history that falsely paints Christianity as a driving and inherent force.

Less overtly than the Rededicate 250 spectacle, the trucks, bedecked with the word “patriot” and cartoonish imagery of heroic realism, carry a religious message that veers between ignorance and fabrication.

Last month, The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington found that the rolling exhibit credits God for America’s greatness, even though the founding documents have only meager and mostly euphemistic references to God.

“[O]ur rights are a gift from God,” says a computer-generated George Washington like the real one was never documented saying, Pilkington reported.

One placard reads, “The truth that each person is made in the image and likeness of God is the basis of human equality.” This is a claim never advanced in founding documents.

Rodda found more, some subtle, some not previously reported, endorsing narratives that Christian history-revisionists would recognize but casual visitors wouldn’t know as controversial, let alone false.

Perhaps the most notable is a long-standing slur against American Jews: A putative reluctance to fight for their country.

A display entitled “England’s Most Wanted” lists categories of those who aided the colonial cause in the Revolutionary War. Under the mantle of celebrating non-military supporting players, the display ostensibly honors the contribution of colonial Jews1.

“Victory came not from military might alone, but from countless unsung heroes,” it says. Unsung non-military heroes included “Jewish merchants funding the cause.”

Rodda highlights two antisemitic sides of this coin.

The implication, however well-meaning the intent, is that Jews didn’t fight; an antisemitic canard. They handled the money; another antisemitic canard.

While the Revolutionary War still raged, antisemitic slanders began. A Georgia newspaper accused Jews in 1778 of profiting and fleeing, “turning their backs upon the country when in danger.”

In an analysis that Rodda wrote for me, she said, “[T]here were Jews who fought in the Army. They didn’t just fund the cause.” She said, “This plays right into the stereotype of Jews avoiding military service.” Rodda dug into the reality.

Jews weren’t even the biggest funders of the war. People of all denominations contributed.

Financiers Robert Morris and Haym Salomon partnered to supply the Army. They put up their own money and drew on their credit2.

Morris, not Jewish, was the war’s biggest financier, responsible for about $1.4 million. Salomon, who was Jewish, contributed roughly $650,000.

Reportedly, an estimated one third of the colonial Jewish population fought in the war. Some died or were captured. Salomon himself did more than fund the war.

He was captured by the British as a suspected spy. And escaped.

Another placard points again toward Jews not fighting. As the British swept through Manhattan, the placard notes, Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas “made the bold decision to seal the synagogue and flee to Connecticut.”

Jews did more than flee, and contributed more than blood and treasure. They pressed America’s leaders to make sure the new nation was not a Christian nation.

Washington agreed, writing that Jews deserved more than to be “tolerated,” because that implied a lesser claim than others had to “inherent natural rights.”

Atheism, agnosticism, and even mild skepticism toward Christianity and the concept of an anthropomorphic god — common among the founders and other colonial figures — are erased entirely on board the Freedom Trucks.

A display about the Declaration of Independence simply asserts that “The Founders … believed God created humans for liberty,” a concept found in neither the declaration nor the Bible.

The mobile museum simply invents a Christian tradition of human liberty that surely would have come as a surprise to centuries of monarchs who claimed divine authority. Not to mention the crusaders who expanded Christianity through subjugation and torture.

One section on liberty even tips its tri-corner hat to modern libertarianism. “True flourishing comes only with the liberty to make our own way in the world and pursue the happiness of human life,” the display simply asserts, implying the founders all shared this belief.

While Christianity is mentioned frequently in biographical profiles, no such references are made to well-known doubters.

The animus of revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine toward organized religion and Christianity specifically are nowhere to be found.

Deism, the belief in a non-Christian supernatural force behind the universe, is never mentioned despite being a common belief among leaders of the day and far closer to the divine “Creator” the founders invoked than the god of Christianity.

Instead, “The Roots of America” display asserts the existence of “foundational principles of America … rooted in the Western and Judeo-Christian traditions that the colonists inherited through their British roots.”

Setting aside that not all colonists had British roots, the display highlights Jerusalem as a city relevant to America’s roots without even a cursory effort to explain why. The Jerusalem section doesn’t even mention the city. It’s about Christianity. And it’s false.

“Religious faith – especially Christianity – shaped European and colonial thought and tradition, teaching that ‘the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God’ serve as the best foundation for government. The truth that each person is made in the image and likeness of God is the basis of human equality and underscores the principle that governments should protect individuals rights and equal dignity.”

The idea — let alone the “truth” — that people are made in God’s image doesn’t appear in America’s founding documents. Even many of the religious founders rejected the idea that God was an actual being with any kind of likeness.

The phrase “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” comes from the Declaration of Independence, but not as a foundation for government. The Declaration says “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” are what entitle a people to “separate and equal station” to the people from which they’re severing themselves. The basis not for a government but the right to self-governance.

The phrase “Nature’s God” came from Jefferson, a champion of government removed from God and religious faith. Jefferson rejected the New Testament’s miraculous stories so profoundly that he cut out the supernatural parts to create his own version focused on Jesus’s moral teachings. As a man, not as a god.

Jefferson drew on Enlightenment and Greek intellectual traditions of the idea that nature followed set laws due to something other than an anthropomorphic entity. His phrase “Nature’s God” was a rejection of what the trucks claim it proves.

Next to the Jerusalem entry is another artifact of Christian right attempts to rewrite American history. It’s the Aitken Bible, printed by Robert Aitken, the story of which Rodda has been sleuthing and debunking for years.

An accompanying QR code takes visitors to a trove of PragerU videos. They include one specifically about the Aitken Bible, narrated by right-wing commentator and former Fox host Glenn Beck.

The placard that introduces the PragerU QR code says “Congress passed a resolution to print the Bible” and says the Aitken Bible “remains the only edition of the Bible authorized by Congress.”

Rodda has been debunking these claims for more than 16 years.

In reality, Aitken sought all kinds of things from Congress that Congress denied him. All Congress ended up doing was having congressional chaplains affirm that his version was an accurate edition. The purpose, Rodda writes, was to help bolster book publishing in the colonies so the nascent industry might compete with imports after the war.

The congressional resolution did not direct Aitken to print his Bible nor “authorize” it, as selective editing of the resolution implies.

The full resolution affirmed Aitken’s textual fidelity to the King James Bible, recommended the version to American readers, and authorized Aitken to print not his Bible but the congressional recommendation of it. Rodda published the full resolution as early as 2010:

Another story Rodda points out has even less basis in fact.

You probably never heard of Peter Muhlenberg in your American History classes. With good reason. But his inclusion in the mobile exhibit, with his own placard, suggests he was a towering figure in The Revolutionary War.

And yet the sole anecdote presented to justify including him at all has no basis in fact.

The placard says Muhlenberg is “best known” for this anecdote, even though he’s not known outside the circles of history revisionism, and certainly not known for anything else.

Visitors to the Freedom Trucks might well believe the anecdote that Muhlenberg did, in fact, dramatically tear off his clerical vestments after reading the Ecclesiastes verse about “a time of war, and a time of peace.” They might even believe that the colonial military uniform he was wearing underneath, somehow, inspired “several” members of his Lutheran church to enlist while drummers who were outside the church for some reason somehow knew to start playing a martial beat.

They might believe all of that except that, in 2007, the Lutheran church magazine wrote that the story was “deemed a myth.”

That was based on the findings of the PBS show, History Detectives. Rodda already knew this when the show aired, almost two decades ago.

Ironically, given today’s politics around Trump and the right, PBS concludes that the story was most likely invented by Muhlenberg’s nephew 75 years later to bolster the image of immigrants, as a surge from Germany spurred anti-immigrant sentiment.

An interviewee from the German Society of Pennsylvania told the show, “It is quite possible that immigrant groups like the Germans felt the need to explain their contributions to American society, their contribution to the building of the nation and the Revolutionary War. And Peter Muhlenberg would have been a perfect candidate.”

Christian revisionism of American history doesn’t just elevate obscure figures on whom inspiring if questionable tales can be hung. There are also fables spun about the known giants.

One of PragerU’s Glenn Beck videos to which the Freedom 250 trucks direct visitors depicts one such tale about the father of the country, George Washington.

The story of Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge has such currency on the Christian right that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cited it in his Rededicate 250 appearance. It’s no more legitimate than the Pulp Fiction prayer he recently offered.

As Rodda explains, it’s a posthumous invention about Washington’s life by Mason Weems, inventor of the cherry-tree story. Weems was a bookseller who peddled fiction by marketing it as non-fiction, right down to the lie that he was once the rector of Mount Vernon Parish, which he wasn’t, because it didn’t exist.

There are other, less blatant examples. Rodda caught religious quotations about seminal moments included for no reason relevant to the history of those moments.

Important events are portrayed as of solely religious motivation. The landing at Cape Henry. The Mayflower.

The role of mercantile funding is not mentioned. Freedom 250 would have visitors believe these expensive, risky ventures were motivated solely in service to Christianity.

The majority of the verbiage and text are anodyne, to be sure, if embarrassingly simplistic, sanded smooth, and, frankly, nowhere near as interesting as the full, flawed, complex reality. The effect of cartoonish truth and created lies is the same, however.

They reduce the American story to a matter of God’s will falling neatly into place, rather than flawed humans fighting each other and the worst human impulses. Ultimately the Freedom Truck mobile museums erase what America truly can claim as inspiration for humanity: The endless effort to recognize the nation’s flaws, improve upon them, and pursue a more perfect union; and the recognition that the road there is paved on secular values.

MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda contributed essential research and expertise to this article. You can find more of her work debunking Christian nationalist history lies at The Original Source.

This article would not have been possible without the work of Jessica Allen, who shared photos and videos from inside one of the Freedom 250 trucks.

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

Incoming acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte’s family has had extensive ties over two generations to leaders and financial backers of a secretive Christian organization that conducts shadow diplomacy around the world, according to public records and documents I obtained.

Pulte’s grandfather, at one point one of the wealthiest men in the world, built a Fortune 500 company and gave tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to charity before his 2018 death. He was also friends with Doug Coe, died in 2017 after decades leading the secretive, controversial Fellowship Foundation that built and sustained a global right-wing network including dictators, lobbyists, and corrupt millionaires largely united against labor, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

Better known as The Family, The Fellowship runs the National Prayer Breakfast and the congressional residence on Capitol Hill called C Street.

Pulte’s father, Mark, like others of the patriarch’s progeny, has kept a hand in the grandfather’s work, including funding religious charities with Fellowship ties.

It’s not clear whether Pulte’s grandfather, after whom he’s named, passed on any of his Fellowship relationships to his grandson.

If Pulte is personally connected to The Fellowship, he’d hardly be alone in the administration’s upper ranks.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to live at the C Street townhouse, as did Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD). Pres. Donald Trump’s special envoy to the United Kingdom, former “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett, is a regular at The Fellowship’s National Prayer Breakfast.

That said, I found no public indication that Pulte has direct, personal ties to The Fellowship. Coe died in 2017 and even before that, Pulte’s philanthropy focused primarily on giving cash to individuals rather than charities pushing the theocratic vision common among Fellowship recipients.

But Pulte also claimed to have been uniquely close to his grandfather, Coe’s close friend.

It’s not surprising that the Pulte family, based in Michigan, has ties to Fellowship insiders and funders. The Fellowship has had a strong presence among Michigan’s wealthy for decades.

But the ties extend beyond overlapping at religious charities in the orbits of Michigan philanthropists. Pulte had a significant personal relationship with Coe, who hobnobbed with presidents of both parties and leaders of nations around the world.

A 2019 tribute after the elder Pulte’s death, in a publication of one of his charities, said:

“Bill had a global vision rooted in his deep faith in Jesus Christ. He connected his vision and faith, joining with other philanthropists and leaders (including former President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. for prayer breakfasts where they prayed together for world peace.”

In an interview just last month, Rabbi Jack Bemporad recalled “we used to go to Doug’s place,” presumably referring to Coe’s Arlington, VA, home.

Bemporad was a collaborator with the elder Pulte on a project of profound personal importance: Crafting a prayer for peace so universal it would foster world peace. (It has yet to achieve progress toward this aim.)

Coe assembled a group of eight to craft it, so the finished prayer would be inclusive enough to be universally unifying. The group is pictured in the screengrab at the top of this article1.

The tallest figure, to Pulte’s immediate right, is A. Larry Ross, a Fellowship spokesperson and past board member. Ross was one of the key figures I identified a few years ago as part of The Fellowship’s radicalization of Mike Lindell.

The smiling group of eight at some point found themselves at odds with each other over their unifying prayer.

According to Bemporad in his interview last month, the elder Pulte took his idea for a prayer to Clark Durant, an occasional Republican candidate and former vice president at Hillsdale College, an oasis for theocratic right-wing academia. Durant brought in Coe. Coe brought in the others.

Some on the team of eight felt the prayer should be Christian. Pulte and Bemporad, the rabbi, did not, Bemporad says. “[T]hat was something that divided us.”

They worked on it for more than a year, with weekly prayer group meetings. (You can read the final prayer at Bemporad’s website.)

Whatever divide arose between Coe and Pulte apparently wasn’t deep or permanent.

Fellowship spreadsheets I obtained several years ago list Pulte as attending the 2015 and 2016 prayer breakfasts, one year with his wife.

The 2016 spreadsheet identifies who invited each guest, and the Pultes were invited by Coe.

Back home, Pulte’s circle included another Coe disciple, a Michigan business leader named Mike Timmis, who facilitated Fellowship mission work known as Cornerstone Development in Uganda. The Fellowship liaison backed by Timmis helped lead a parliamentary prayer group that ultimately enacted the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people there.

Timmis and Pulte helped get Cornerstone Schools off the ground in Michigan in the early 1990s. Durant, who knew Coe, approached both of them for help.

The 1991 articles of incorporation list Durant, Timmis, and Timmis’s wife as incorporators. Timmis and Durant raised $1.2 million. Pulte kicked in the final $22 million, according to a story told by Mark Pulte.

The elder Pulte, Mark’s father and grandfather of the incoming acting intelligence director, poured “tens of millions” into the schools over the years, reportedly. (He also sold a home to Timmis’s son — another disciple of Coe’s — after building a development in Ave Maria, FL, when Timmis’s son chaired the board of Ave Maria University.)

By ten years in, The Fellowship itself had begun donating to the schools, tax records show. The Fellowship’s 2002 tax filing shows $2,000 going to Cornerstone Schools.

In 2003, someone at The Fellowship appears to have confused Timmis’s Cornerstone Schools in Detroit with Timmis’s Cornerstone Development in Uganda. Another $2,000 is listed for Cornerstone Schools that year “to assist the inner city schools in Uganda,” which is what Cornerstone Schools does in Detroit and Cornerstone Development does not do in Uganda’s inner-city schools.

By 2005, the regular $2,000 Fellowship donation to Cornerstone Schools in Detroit was back. And by 2012, two generations of Pultes were involved. Bill Pulte’s father, Mark, appears on the board that year.

Outside of Michigan, there’s little sign of Pulte family financial involvement in Fellowship endeavors. Pulte’s grandmother, who’s still living, has donated reliably to Republican political campaigns, but her only notable Fellowship recipient is Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), who got $1,000 in 2010, years before The Fellowship flew him to Uganda to bolster allies there under international pressure for their LGBTQ+ death penalty.

Pulte the grandson hasn’t donated to any prominent Fellowship candidates. If anything, the younger Pulte’s donations veer more toward the bombastic right. There’s a distinct gap between grandfather and grandson donations.

The older, ecumenical Fortune 500 billionaire donated more than $30,000 in 2012 to committees supporting Mitt Romney. They were his last. The next donation by a William Pulte came in 2019, when only the grandson of that name was left. He gave $35,000 to the Trump Victory committee.

There is one intriguing thread that leads to a largely invisible Fellowship leader said to be influential with Michigan Republicans and, allegedly, unnamed Democrats.

In his 2022 book, Timmis wrote about a Fellowship associate named Charles McLeod. “He is responsible for bringing reconciliation to the Democrats and Republicans in the Michigan legislature and in the US Congress,” Timmis wrote.

In practice this suggests that McLeod doesn’t have what most workers would recognize as a real job. Supported by unnamed donors, he offers encouragement and religious-based morale boosts to politicians or their mutual benefactors.

As I’ve written before, McLeod is connected to Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI). Moolenaar said in 2024 that McLeod, Coe, and Timmis taught him “this idea of devoting my life as a follower of Jesus, his teachings, to being available for his purposes.”

That puts McLeod at the heart of The Fellowship’s Michigan nexus.

The Pulte connection to McLeod is a charity called Angels’ Place. Pulte and his wife began supporting it in the early 1990s. Multiple Pultes have served on the board and the family foundation continues to support it.

The Fellowship, too, has donated to Angels’ Place. More to the point, the address The Fellowship listed for Angels’ Place in a 2007 tax filing was McLeod’s home address. That address has also shown up in Michigan obituaries advising mourners how to donate to The Fellowship on behalf of the deceased. (McLeod’s wife, too, has been a paid associate of The Fellowship, according to federal campaign disclosure forms.)

Whoever’s supporting McLeod’s activities — whatever they might be other than supposedly bringing reconciliation to Republicans and Democrats — they appear to have money to spare.

In 2003, McLeod’s patrons funneled more than $100,000 through The Fellowship to compensate him. In 2024, the most recent year for which tax forms are available, McLeod was paid $180,507, making him The Fellowship’s highest-paid associate.

Bill Pulte, the 38-year-old now prepping to run America’s entire intelligence community, doesn’t have any direct connections I could find to Pulte, Timmis, or other Fellowship leaders or organizations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) did not respond to a request for comment.

But, especially in Pulte’s new position, The Fellowship could be just a phone call away, given its intense focus on relationships with global leaders, and given Pulte’s ostensible closeness to his grandfather. The Fellowship already has a history of working with and inside the State Department.

That closeness between grandson and grandfather became public as part of an extraordinary battle over the leadership of the Pulte patriarch’s company, after he had stepped aside.

The Pultes were pissed when new leadership began moving the company out of Michigan, to Georgia, in 2013. That’s what multiple business outlets reported in 2016, when the elder Pulte, grandson tagging along, tried to push out the company’s president.

What the business press didn’t report was the timing of another issue much tighter than the three-year lag after the move.

In mid-March of 2016, Pulte Homes (now PulteGroup) President and CEO Richard Dugas was taking a public stand on religious freedom. Against it, it might appear to some on the right.

Dugas spoke out against a state bill to allow discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs, according to an article in Atlanta’s Saporta Report on March 17, 2016.

Four days later, Pulte summoned Dugas to a meeting. To Dugas’s surprise, Pulte had brought his grandson. The press release from the board about their meeting didn’t say anything about religious freedom. It was all about the move to Georgia and various other simmering issues. It didn’t explain the timing.

Then, on April 4, 2016, Pulte wrote to the board, seeking to push Dugas out.

It’s possible the religion bill had nothing to do with it. The senior Pulte, after all, had for decades worked ecumenically with a wide variety of people.

On the other hand, The Fellowship, too, celebrates diversity — sometimes via lip service — while simultaneously advancing the conceit of a legal or moral right to discriminate based on religion.

Whatever the cause, the turf war churned up inside information about Pulte and his grandson.

The younger Pulte alleged in one suit that, out of his grandfather’s 39 heirs across two generations, he was the only one “recruited” to work in the company and “the only descendant to receive an inheritance from his grandfather.”

The suit also claimed that the elder Pulte was for years “a valued member” of his grandson’s venture-capital firm. And that the two partnered to combat urban blight in Detroit and elsewhere, “a project he [Pulte] started with his Grandfather.”

His grandfather, Pulte said in 2021, was also “very involved” in his countertop company.

The following year, Pulte even produced a slim volume annotating some of his grandfather’s sayings and quotations. Some of Pulte’s annotations might give pause to those already worried about him overseeing America’s intelligence community.

Three years later, Pulte seems to have rejected fully some of his grandfather’s principles.

“Humility is a sign of self-confidence,” he wrote in 2022, three years before joining the Trump administration. “Humble leaders can accomplish more than egotistical leaders.” Pulte has not publicly advanced this principle recently.

At other points in the book one can spot glimpses of Pulte’s coming transition from a Pulte grandson to a Trump mercenary.

“What actions can we take today that are genuine, good, whole, and abiding by God that can result in good outcomes instead of hate-filled vindictiveness?” wrote Pulte, yet to become famous attacking Trump’s enemies, with bad outcomes.

This was in response to his grandfather’s quotation: “You can never succeed when you have hate on your mind.” The grandson added a caveat that effectively rejected the late patriarch’s thinking.

The exception that Pulte claimed may have come in handy later, while serving Trump. “I think there’s something to be said, and I know he would agree, which is if somebody hit you, you got to hit him back.”

One accusation revealed in Pulte’s suit may resonate today, as even Republicans recoil at Pulte’s utter lack of experience relevant to overseeing America’s sprawling intelligence community.

A former PulteGroup board member told the Detroit Free Press in 2021 that many board members “didn’t think his experience was extensive enough” when his grandfather installed Pulte on the board. After his grandfather died, Pulte was kicked off the board.

At the time, Pulte told the newspaper he wasn’t interested in politics.

“I tell people, don’t bait me into politics,” he said. “I stay apolitical for everything I'm doing right now.”

The cover of his book touts his grandfather’s credo of God first and family second. But today Pulte is known for putting Trump first, ginning up prosecutions against officials who sought to hold Trump accountable. None have yet borne fruit.

And while Pulte’s star rises — for however long it lasts — Trump’s presidency has hit his family and the charitable endeavors his grandfather built.

In March of last year, two months into Trump’s second term, Mark Pulte discussed how the family’s Pulte Institute for Global Development at Notre Dame goes to Washington to “educate our government how they can make the world a better place, where their foreign aid money should be going, where it shouldn’t be going.”

The institute works with governments and private entities to fight poverty and improve health and education. A month after the interview, Trump funding cuts forced the institute to lay off two thirds of its staff.

Update: Substacker Greg Conners spotted an eyebrow-raising early intersection between Trump world and the Pulte family.

The notorious bidding war for a Palm Beach estate between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein involved a third party. It was Mark Pulte, who veered off from the Pulte home-building business to focus on luxury properties. As Connor notes, Pulte, father of Trump’s appointee, outbid Epstein and was the one who actually bid up the price Trump ended up paying.

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

This article is one of a series about the members of Congress who live at C Street. To receive future stories, you can subscribe for free or as a paid subscriber.

For years, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) has lived at a Washington townhouse run by the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family, the secretive group behind a global, right-wing Christian political network.

Known as the C Street Center, C Street house, or just C Street, the building is home to members of Congress who enjoy below-market rental rates and the services of college volunteers, all provided by The Fellowship. Suozzi has assisted The Fellowship’s work, publicly and privately, for most of his time in Congress.

One religious leader told me that Suozzi tried to keep his C Street lodgings a secret. Suozzi’s roommate is Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), who has only discussed living there in one religious podcast, but is known as a Fellowship insider and staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

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Suozzi is a frequent facilitator of Fellowship network-building, including recently in El Salvador, where he and Moolenaar praised the president, Nayib Bukele, who joined The Fellowship’s ring of prayer breakfasts. Suozzi and Moolenaar sing at Fellowship events with Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), who was flown by The Fellowship to bolster Ugandan politicians who enacted an LGBTQ+ death penalty there.

Suozzi’s and Moolenaar’s vague public references to their Washington lodgings match known details about life at C Street. One detail they haven’t mentioned is their rent, $800 each per month. Neither responded to emailed questions about the reporting in this article.

An analysis of House reimbursement disclosures shows that their rent is consistent with C Street rents, and lower than what other Washington renters pay, even in less expensive neighborhoods. One ethics watchdog told me the low rents could constitute illegal gifts.

Suozzi has been a vocal advocate for cooperation and reconciliation with Republicans, working often with Fellowship Republicans. He takes an opposite tack toward Democrats on his left. In The Fellowship, reconciliation typically involves everyone from conservative Democrats to right-wing dictators; seldom journalists or the left.

It’s not known who subsidizes the low rents at C Street, which is technically a church and doesn’t disclose its backers. The C Street Center nonprofit that owns and runs the house is controlled by four Fellowship insiders, all Republican donors, including Moolenaar’s millionaire mentor.

The three-story residence has spawned a variety of scandals over the years. Those include not just ethics complaints about the low rent, but three political sex scandals.

U.S. and other government records suggest C Street remains a hub for international lobbying to this day.

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So, for most of his congressional career, Suozzi’s involvement has helped The Fellowship build right-wing political networks working around the world against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights and, in some places, democracy. Fellowship leaders and donors have promoted election denial for decades overseas and, more recently, here in the U.S.

Most visibly, Suozzi has been a leader of The Fellowship’s National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) as The Fellowship used it to bolster friendly dictators, right-wing allies, accused human-rights abusers, and others.

Fellowship politics are seldom overt, and sometimes not even intentional. But operating in secrecy, among like-minded people, the results are inevitable. Secular and LBGTQ+ groups have warned Democrats for years about the dangers of helping The Fellowship.

As one of very few Democrats still publicly associating with The Fellowship, Suozzi helps preserve the tattered bipartisan facade essential to its work. (At this year’s Fellowship prayer breakfast, only two Democrats spoke, Reps. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), son of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Lou Correa (D-CA); Suozzi joined an on-stage singalong.)

Having even just a few token Democrats gives events official-seeming status that The Fellowship exploits, especially in countries where access to members of the U.S. Congress is a liquid commodity.

Leveraging that access, The Fellowship grows regional ministries and prayer networks that quietly glide politicians and nations toward right-wing policies and even theocracy.

Suozzi and Moolenaar co-chair the weekly U.S. House prayer breakfasts, also ostensibly bipartisan but also facilitated by Republican Fellowship associates1.

In January, Suozzi accompanied Moolenaar on a committee junket — even though Suozzi’s not on the committee — as part of The Fellowship’s campaign to boost Bukele.

Accompanied by Fellowship leaders, Suozzi and Moolenaar helped The Fellowship launch a new Salvadoran prayer breakfast there. They lauded Bukele — whose violations of human and civil rights are well documented — suggesting God supports Bukele and urging the nation’s leaders to start their own prayer groups.

“[Y]ou’ve achieved a miracle,” Suozzi said, addressing Bukele directly, “the miracle that’s taken place in El Salvador.”

Civil-rights groups say Bukele’s miracle entailed suspending civil rights and imprisoning thousands of people.

Suozzi met with dissidents the day before his remarks at the Salvadoran National Prayer Breakfast but doesn’t appear to have articulated their concerns publicly.

Meanwhile, deportations from the U.S. to El Salvador in the first three months of this year roughly doubled from 2025, the Associated Press reported. Investigative reporters this month said Bukele has frozen their assets to punish them for reporting on administration corruption.

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Suozzi’s also given time to The Fellowship’s National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values (NSLF).

And he follows in the footsteps of past Fellowship Democrats who seemed less comfortable with progressive Democrats pushing economic and social justice than he is with far-right Republicans cutting benefits for the needy and stripping LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights along with voting rights and civil rights.

Last year, Suozzi and Rep. Tracey Mann (R-KS), a Fellowship veteran, appeared together on Fox to call for bipartisanship and reflect on Charlie Kirk’s death.

In 2024, as Fellowship evangelicals pressed Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to support aid for Ukraine, Suozzi pushed Democrats to help Johnson survive as speaker for that purpose. He has assisted the efforts of The Fellowship’s right-wing Ukraine point person, who has floated the dream of a biblically based Ukraine.

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Suozzi last year told Roll Call that the last book he read was “Turnaround” by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), another longtime Fellowship insider. “He’s a good guy,” Suozzi said.

Suozzi frequently co-sponsors legislation with Mann and other Fellowship Republicans. Outspoken against his party’s left flank, even opposing Democrats’ defensive gerrymandering, Suozzi stays mum about the right-wing efforts of Moolenaar and other Fellowship Republicans.

Suozzi last year wrote an entire Wall Street Journal op-ed about then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. “For Democrats, Mamdani is a Wake-Up Call—and a Bad Example” has since been deleted from Suozzi’s campaign website.

Instead of leveling public criticism against Fellowship Republicans, Suozzi in private lets them use his name on coveted breakfast invitations that empower oppressive right-wingers overseas. And he keeps The Fellowship’s secrets.

That includes the right-wing shadow diplomacy that C Street residents carry out there and at prayer breakfasts around the world.

At the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast, Australian Member of Parliament David Hodgett got to meet Suozzi and Moolenaar, Hodgett disclosed in an Australian filing. Hodgett reported that he “received an invitation from The National Prayer Breakfast Host Committee.” In fact, Fellowship associates choose most guests.

Government filings show that the C Street Center is known by foreign nations as a nexus for lobbying, and has been used for that purpose, including during Suozzi’s time there.

The C Street donors who subsidize Suozzi’s low-cost living arrangements remain unknown, but The Fellowship has supported C Street financially while getting millions of dollars from right-wing evangelicals. Franklin Graham’s organization Samaritan’s Purse link has reported donating to The Fellowship, but at the C Street address.

Suozzi’s Fellowship History

It’s not clear how long Suozzi has maintained a room at C Street.

He came to Congress in 2017, living at first in an apartment with other members of Congress and staff. A Fellowship document I obtained shows he was at the National Prayer Breakfast by February 2018.

In October 2019, he and Moolenaar co-chaired the NSLF, the Fellowship student program that churns up potential congressional interns and Fellowship stars.

Four months later, co-chairing the February 2020 National Prayer Breakfast, Suozzi and Moolenaar referred to rooming together.

The Rev. Rob Schenck, a former Christian nationalist who once ministered to the right in Washington, told me that Suozzi said at the time that he was living at C Street. And didn’t want people to know it.

This was the week after the 2020 breakfast.

Schenck met Suozzi on Feb. 10, 2020, on a train. Schenck spotted Suozzi reading a book by the prayer breakfast’s keynote speaker. (It was Arthur Brooks’s “Love Your Enemies,” the command of Jesus that Pres. Donald Trump publicly rejected at the breakfast.)

Suozzi and Schenck discussed C Street. Suozzi confided that he lived there, secretly. “He said to me, I don’t tell anybody this,” Schenck told me.

Schenck paraphrased Suozzi’s remarks: “I don’t tell anybody this, but, you know, I’ve been, I bunked up at C Street.”

At the time, Schenck hadn’t publicly broken with the right. (Two years later, Schenck would make headlines as a “dissenting evangelical” revealing how he and his “stealth missionaries” had ministered to Supreme Court justices; pushing the court to the right.)

But on that day in 2020, as Amtrak sped them from New York to Washington, Schenck was still known as an evangelical minister to powerful conservatives. That’s why Suozzi shared his secret.

I asked Schenck whether he thought Suozzi used living at C Street to establish his bona fides with a minister known then as a right-wing evangelical.

“Oh, yes,” Schenck said. “He knew i was an evangelical minister. He knew what I had done on the Hill. And he was kind of assuring me, ‘Hey, I may be a Democrat, but, you know, I'm in the family,’ so to speak.”

Suozzi said Schenck wanted to keep C Street quiet, to have it both ways. “He said, you know, I don't talk about it, but: ‘Good experience,’ or words that effect,” meaning: Life at C Street.

Schenck said, “It was just, he was trying to assure me, you know, ‘I'm in. I'm in the family; good people, you know. I live both worlds.’ That sort of thing.”

Suozzi wanted to keep it that way. He was “guarded” about C Street, according to Schenck. “He was protective of that information,” Schenck said. “He definitely didn’t want that order of, you know, publicity. He wanted just to say to me, ‘I’m a good guy.’

The men stayed in touch for a bit, by email. “He was surprising to me,” Schrenck said. “I thought of him as, you know, stereotypical, progressive Democrat, and then realized, wow, he’s got some conservative sensibilities.”

As for C Street, Schenck said, “He was connected there.”

In 2022, Suozzi opted not to run for re-election, running instead, unsuccessfully, for New York governor.

By the time he returned to Congress in early 2024, the House was reimbursing members for lodging expenses in Washington. A House disbursement report shows Suozzi paying $800 per month for lodging starting in March 2024.

It’s possible Suozzi never gave up his C Street bunk while he was out of Congress. Or he found an open room there within two months of returning to Washington. Or C Street kept his old room vacant for him.

Whatever happened, he and Moolenaar are still roommates.

House rules don’t require members to disclose where they stay in Washington or to whom they make out their rent checks, but the quarterly disclosures show Suozzi paying what others at C Street pay, including Moolenaar.

The Michigan Republican also paid $800 per month the last two years. But an earlier House report shows Moolenaar paying just $600 per month in 2023, suggesting that Suozzi, his roommate, paid a similar rate prior to his hiatus.

According to his alumni magazine, Suozzi got involved with the prayer breakfast specifically to connect with Republicans.

“You can only solve complicated problems when you have people of goodwill who are willing to sit down with one another and work together to try and find common ground,” Suozzi claimed, although American history is replete with counter-examples and Suozzi’s own history reveals a different approach toward the left.

(The myth of prayer yielding productive unity is a long-standing canard of The Fellowship, a one-way ratchet used to move moveable, or sympathetic, Democrats.)

Suozzi’s ties to The Fellowship don’t appear to have lapsed at any point, even during his year out of Congress.

Suozzi’s Breakfasts

The Fellowship document I obtained, a spreadsheet of attendees, shows that Suozzi attended the 2018 National Prayer Breakfast solo. (Every member of Congress is invited.) And it lists who else was there.

The spreadsheet shows that Suozzi shared his table with four guests invited by Doug Burleigh, a longtime Fellowship leader focused on Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics. (Burleigh achieved brief notoriety when it came out that his 2017 guests included Russian operatives Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin.)

By 2019, Suozzi’s roommate, Moolenaar, was part of C Street in some fashion. A picture posted online that year shows Moolenaar hosting Ohio Christian University students at C Street, along with Donna Rice Hughes.

When Suozzi and Moolenaar co-chaired the 2020 breakfast, Suozzi wasn’t just reading a script. He helped The Fellowship put together the program; he said he had asked Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) to participate.

It fell to Suozzi and Moolenaar that year to address Trump using the event to flaunt his acquittal by the Senate, reject the teachings of Jesus, and eviscerate Fellowship claims about the unifying power of prayer. The first-hand evidence of Trump’s performance left Suozzi unswayed in his certainty about faith.

The Fellowship’s religious claims are never disproved, history suggests, just yet to be proved.

“Not everybody seems to get it yet,” Suozzi said after Trump left. “But we’re not gonna give up, are we? … [W]e’ve gotta keep on pushing the message of love.”

That was six years ago. Suozzi’s prayer prescription appears even less supported by evidence today.

Not only has Trump — and arguably The Fellowship — made religion in America more divisive, The Fellowship itself is now in a legal battle with its own breakfast spinoff. The fight is almost funny: Two Christian groups, who claim prayer breakfasts are unifying, now divided by them.

Also in 2020, Suozzi and Moolenaar hosted a Zoom meeting for that year’s NSLF, speaking with foreign students. One posted on LinkedIn about being sponsored for the event by Fatmir Mediu, an Albanian government official and longtime Fellowship insider.

The two roommates also co-chair the weekly Capitol Hill Fellowship prayer breakfasts. “Today’s breakfast is really an extension of what John and I do every Thursday morning at 8am in the Capitol,” Suozzi said at the 2020 NPB. “We gather with our House colleagues … for our weekly House prayer breakfast.”

Belying the ecumenical veneer of their breakfasts, Suozzi and Moolenaar made their prayer sectarian: “Christ, our lord.”

Suozzi would co-chair the national breakfast again, on video in 2021 due to COVID.

In 2022, he and Moolenaar were listed as part of the sham House committee on the annual invitation that makes it appear that Congress runs the event. Those invitations help Fellowship allies overseas convince local media of their importance in the U.S., building their prestige at home and increasing their value to monied interests seeking connections to U.S. members of Congress.

Things got interesting in 2023. Suozzi was no longer in Congress. The prayer breakfast had split in two. Nevertheless, The Fellowship’s iteration of the breakfast — same place, same time — was once again co-chaired by Suozzi.

Suozzi didn’t co-chair in 2024, but the invitation bore his name again, a federal filing shows. His name, too, graced the card attendees got.

Guests got that welcome card the day after Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) issued a press release demanding answers from The Fellowship about its prayer breakfasts and ties to Uganda’s LGBTQ+ death penalty. Some of the people behind that law were among the guests Suozzi invited and welcomed to that year’s breakfast.

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The same thing happened the following year: Suozzi didn’t co-chair in 2025, but his name was on the invitations, which aren’t made public unless they’re obtained by journalists or appear in government filings related, for instance, to visa applications or foreign-agent registrations.

As usual, Fellowship insiders in other countries puffed up their status at home last year by saying they’d been invited by Congress or even the president.

When local media in Bangladesh followed up, the U.S. embassy issued a denial. Journalists trying to sort it out ultimately identified Suozzi and others as signing the invitation.

This year, again, Trump used the breakfast to reject the unifying power of prayer that Suozzi swears by. Religious people, Trump said, shouldn’t vote for Democrats.

All but three congressional Democrats had already got the message. Jackson co-chaired. Correa read from Scripture. Suozzi joined the choir. That was it.

The prior month, though, in El Salvador, Suozzi and other Democrats were front and center at Bukele’s breakfast. That trip had The Fellowship written all over it, literally, in the case of an itinerary I obtained.

One event was explicitly listed as “‘C Street’ format.” The trip’s travelers presumably knew what that meant.

Suozzi wasn’t the only member of Congress who didn’t sit on the committee but did sit down for Bukele’s prayer breakfast. As I’ve previously reported, the itinerary included non-members of Congress active in The Fellowship.

Lobbyist Manuel Espina, a past ambassador from Guatemala to the U.S., was there. (The Fellowship tends to stick with official honorifics for its insiders, long after they become lobbyists.)

Espina, as the itinerary indicates, is now a lobbyist for Continental Strategy. That firm is part of ongoing efforts, orbiting The Fellowship, to pump U.S. money into regional companies that have supported The Fellowship.

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Espina’s also the founder of Guatemala’s National Prayer Breakfast and a key architect of Fellowship machinations that rescued Guatemala’s evangelical president by taking out a UN anti-corruption task force.

Here’s Espina and then-President Jimmy Morales, along with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and other Fellowship insiders, at C Street in an undated photo:

Suozzi posed with Espina the following year, as Fellowship efforts to gut the UN task force was under way.

If Suozzi didn’t know at the time that Morales’s government was working to undermine the task force, he probably should have. The subject came up more than once at House committee hearings Suozzi attended prior to his picture with Espina.

Espina’s colleague from the Guatemalan branch of the National Prayer Breakfast, Willy Gómez, appears in the January 2026 trip itinerary as a “member” of the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, as highlighted in the excerpt above. The other two members are straight from C Street.

Marty Sherman is the guy who runs C Street. Tim Coe is Sherman’s college buddy and the son of deceased Fellowship leader Doug Coe. Together with Tim’s brother, David, TimDavidandMarty are practically spoken of as one word as Fellowship leaders, a Fellowship source once told me.

Why was half the C Street leadership at a congressional meeting ostensibly about China in El Salvador with the president? The itinerary doesn’t offer even a token explanation. But it’s not hard to guess.

The Salvador leg of the junket had little to do with China. China wasn’t mentioned at the breakfast. The Fellowship members of Congress didn’t sing the praises of America’s influence.

The real influence was Jesus. And C Street.

Moolenaar said “we treasure” the Declaration of Independence, but didn’t say why, and spent more time extolling the virtues of prayer breakfasts.

Suozzi told Bukele and other Salvadoran politicians — except opposition leaders barred from the breakfast — not about the beauty of dissent and free speech or the wonders of checks and balances, but about the importance of praying together.

“This is such a wonderful occurrence that you are celebrating this first prayer breakfast like this, bringing together so many people of different faiths and different political beliefs2, all united in the spirit of prayer to make your country and our world a better place…

“Don’t underestimate the power of getting together with each other in small groups, of spending time with each other, of getting to know each other, of building relationships.”

That’s the Fellowship model for building influence; unaccountable, outside public view.

As Schenck explained to me, the U.S. prayer breakfast is for spotlight-seekers, while C Street is for the publicity-shy. The Salvadoran breakfast blended the two, a stage outside the U.S. spotlight, with Suozzi navigating the overlap awkwardly as he and his fellows sang The Fellowship’s praises, without naming it or divulging many details.

“We live in the same house in Washington, DC,” Moolenaar said, without saying which house, “and we also have dinner together on Tuesday nights and some of our colleagues will tell you more about those dinners.”

C Street is known for its Tuesday group dinners, but not much was said about them after Suozzi redirected Moolenaar, saying: “I think you should tell everybody about our prayer breakfast and what happens in the United States.”

After that, the closest anyone came to the Tuesday dinners was Lee, the Utah Republican. He said, “When we meet every Tuesday night, we cease to be senators or congressmen. We cease to be Republicans or Democrats. We gather as children of Jesus, as brothers and sisters in Jesus.” It was a C Street telltale, but Lee only shared it in Spanish.

No one said “C Street” in any language.

Jan. 19, 2026, El Salvador National Prayer Breakfast

Suozzi’s Jan. 20 Instagram post about the trip didn’t mention the previous day’s prayer breakfast or Bukele.

A week later, amid horror over the death of Renee Good, Suozzi apologized for funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but said nothing about having just celebrated Bukele, who provided ICE with torture cells, offered to hold Americans there for Trump, and taunted a U.S. judge who tried to block deportation flights.

Moolenaar’s committee only issued its press release about the trip after I inquired.

The Power of Prayer

Suozzi and Moolenaar kicked off the 2020 NPB with a running shtick — juxtaposing their backgrounds. Typically in these Fellowship comedy routines, the Democrat is the punchline; urban weirdness juxtaposed with wholesome Republican normalcy.

“I have 15,000 farmers in my district,” Moolenaar told the audience.

Suozzi took the handoff: “I know a guy named Farmer.” (Suozzi represents parts of Queens and Long Island, which has farmers.)

There were no jokes about Suozzi’s constituents making twice what Moolenaar’s do. But there were more jokes at the expense of Suozzi and his constituents.

Moolenaar: “In my district, the kids have the first day of deer-hunting season off from school.”

Suozzi: “In my district the kids have off for Yom Kippur.”

Moolenaar redeemed Suozzi, absolving him of any New York weirdness. “Despite all of our differences,” Moolenaar said, “Tom and I are good friends. In fact, we’re roommates.”

Suozzi added, “We even share a bathroom together. He’s very neat.”

Without Suozzi telling us, it’s virtually impossible to know whether C Street Republicans have moved Suozzi further right. History suggests they’ve tried, as they have with others.

According to Suozzi, Moolenaar’s politics — stripping reproductive rights, expanding anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, not to mention immigration policies, voting rights, election denial, and Trump’s illegal wars — come from a good place.

“I know that everything John does, he does from his heart,” Suozzi said as they celebrated Bukele’s presidency, “because he wants to do the right thing.”

Suozzi is also friendly with Bishop Robert Barron, a Fox pundit who’s on a Trump religious commission and spoke at Trump’s “Rededicate 250” event celebrating theocracy and Christian nationalism.

Barron has also appeared with Ben Shapiro and on a Tucker Carlson episode about “the foolishness of atheism.”

In an April 14 op-ed, Barron lamented persecution of Christians by secularists. (That same day Barron found himself defending Pope Leo XIV against Trump calling the pope weak on crime.)

Suozzi responded to Trump’s critique of the pope by blaming normalization of Trump, without noting his own normalization: Celebrating Trump at prayer breakfasts and claiming prayer will bring unity.

Suozzi’s defense of the pope offered an illuminating contrast with Suozzi’s call for Democrats not to defend much less powerful people here in the U.S.

He blamed 2024 Democratic losses on Democrats defending transgender people. He called transgender girls “biological boys” and lamented the party’s attempts to be “politically correct.”

In the same interview, Suozzi amplified Republican narratives about “anarchy on college campuses, defund the police, biological boys playing in girls' sports, and a general attack on traditional values.” He didn’t say whose traditional values.

Before Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) endorsed Suozzi in 2024, she reportedly grilled him on his commitment to reproductive rights and got him to pledge not to run ads against his own party.

The 2024 Democratic National Convention tapped Suozzi to talk tough about the border and undocumented immigrants. Suozzi then backed the 2025 Laken Riley Act that weaponized Trump’s immigration enforcement.

Later, of course, Suozzi joined in the right-wing fear-mongering about Mamdani, even after his own party chose Mamdani as its mayoral candidate.

Suozzi does reliably defend one group: Christians. In a video during the Jan. 6 attacks, as self-described Christians rampaged through the Capitol brandishing Christian imagery and slogans, Suozzi fretted about “anarchists on the left.”

“We have a major problem in our country with white nationalism, white supremacy, and far-right militia groups, and we have concerns about anarchists on the left, as well.”

He didn’t mention Christian nationalism.

I asked Schenck whether his gradual shift, seeing Suozzi as more conservative than he did at first, might have been due to C Street’s influence. Schenck told me he couldn’t say that.

“I didn't know him long enough to see a trajectory,” Schenck said. “I read it as just getting to know him better.”

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I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

This article is one of a series about the members of Congress who live at C Street. To receive future stories, you can subscribe for free or as a paid subscriber.

The fact that Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) lives at C Street isn’t too surprising. Certainly less so than a New York Democrat, Moolenaar’s roommate, Rep. Tom Suozzi, living there.

The three-story church-slash-boarding-house-slash-frat-house is convenient, politically, religiously, and logistically. It’s just a block from Moolenaar’s office and squarely in line with Moolenaar’s right wing, theocratic leanings.

But Moolenaar is much more intimately connected than was previously known to C Street’s foundation, the Fellowship Foundation, the group also known as The Family and made famous by the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet.

Moolenaar hasn’t publicized his life at C Street. He hasn’t said publicly that his rent was $600 per month until 2024, when it went up to $800. Or that college students keep C Street tidy for him and the other members of Congress who live there.

He hasn’t discussed the foreign lobbying there or how C Street helps The Fellowship nudge Democrats to the right.

But as I wrote in my companion piece on Suozzi, Moolenaar has been a prominent public face for The Fellowship for years.

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Moolenaar also seems to go farther than other Fellowship insiders have in utilizing the resources of his public job for Fellowship ends. And while other, louder extremist Republicans make headlines pushing America toward theocracy, Moolenaar goes about it The Fellowship way, quietly, gradually, effectively.

Which makes sense. The Fellowship got him early.

The origins of Moolenaar’s connection to The Fellowship remain unclear, but his own remarks put him in their orbit, and literally on their grounds, while he was still in his 20s.

Today, Moolenaar chairs the House select committee on China and is a solid supporter of Pres. Donald Trump, even signing the 2020 amicus brief supporting Texas’s attempt to block state votes for Pres. Joe Biden.

In the 1980s, however, Moolenaar’s path was far from clear.

Like his dad, he studied chemistry, and even worked for Dow Chemical for a couple years after college. After 1985, though, there’s not much out there about what Moolenaar did. His resume has him next getting a master’s degree from Harvard in 1989. The years in between are a question.

Several years ago, a source close to The Fellowship told me that when Moolenaar was 23 — so in 1984 or 1985 — Moolenaar came to The Fellowship’s headquarters in Arlington, VA, known as The Cedars.

“Moolenaar came in as a baby intern,” the source told me. “He came to The Cedars when he was 23, spending time getting discipled.”

At some point, Moolenaar apparently lived at Ivanwald, the Fellowship housing for young volunteers and disciples down the street.

In 2021, longtime Fellowship insider Chris Halverson — who claims he was once the Senate’s acting chaplain — recalled Moolenaar regaling a dinner with “his story about being at Ivanwald and being discipled, and then coming to Washington, D.C.” Halverson added, “the full circle of the impact of our ministry just was wonderful.”

I couldn’t find any record of Moolenaar publicly discussing his formative years at Ivanwald or The Cedars and he didn’t respond to my questions or request for comment. But in a 2024 religious podcast interview, he shared some details.

The discussion centered on Moolenaar’s relationship with Mike Timmis, a wealthy Michigan businessman who funds Fellowship activities. Moolenaar says he met Timmis during his 1990 state Senate run, asking Timmis for a campaign donation.

The interviewer says Moolenaar and Timmis were brought together by Doug Coe, the Fellowship leader who died in 2017. Moolenaar says yes, without saying how he had come to know Coe.

Moolenaar lost the campaign. Then, he says, “I will never forget, a mutual friend of ours invited me to spend some time with some of the leaders of the National Prayer Breakfast down in Washington, DC.”

The Fellowship runs the breakfast, so perhaps that mutual friend was Coe. Moolenaar doesn’t say. But here’s what happened next:

“I went down there — and it was really a pivotal time for me and my faith — and actually started helping out, caring for a, basically a building called The Cedars, where Mike [Timmis] had been involved. And one day he drove up, and he saw me out there. I was taking care of the lawn … I was raking leaves and trying to figure out what I was gonna do next in my life…

“Here I was, 29 years old, lost a campaign, didn’t know what I was gonna do next… I’ll never forget him [Timmis] saying, ‘Y’know, John, I don’t know what God’s doing in your life but God’s economy is different than our economy and I’m just so glad you’re here and doing what you’re doing’ and gave me a hug and I thought that was amazing.”

At some point, Coe arranged for Moolenaar to spend two years under Timmis’s tutelage, an hour every day, according to the podcast. It was Timmis and Coe, along with a Fellowship associate named Chuck McLeod, Moolenaar says, who led him to “devoting my life as a follower of Jesus, his teachings, to being available for his purposes.”

That includes making public resources available.

As I reported in January, Moolenaar led a delegation of his congressional committee — ostensibly dedicated to combating China’s influence — on a trip to Central America that included Fellowship events and people, some public, some secret.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, told me in January that “Since Moolenaar has taken over the committee, it’s been run as an arm of the Family.”

Conversely, Moolenaar also uses C Street for congressional business. Secret congressional business.

A 2024 meeting, for instance, only became public record — though it hasn’t been reported previously — due to a foreign-agent filing by Kenya. (The meeting was at C Street, arranged by The Fellowship’s Kenya liaison, Sam Owen, who appears in Timmis’s book.)

As I explained in a deeper dive on C Street, Kenyan politicians correctly assessed The Fellowship as an effective diplomatic path for lobbying efforts that stalled elsewhere.

Through Owen, the Kenyans got a meeting just two days before the 2024 U.S. National Prayer Breakfast. Not in congressional offices, the filing reveals, but a couple blocks away.

“This meeting took place on Tuesday, 30th January, 2024 at the C Street where the Chairperson, Sen. Daniel Maanzo and the Prime Cabinet Secretary were able to meet Congressman John Moolenaar and Senator for Kansas, Jerry Moran and brief them ... They also presented the two with a legislative brief on the proposed amendments.”

Like Suozzi, Moolenaar has assisted Fellowship-affiliated organizations such as the National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values (NSLF), which gets Fellowship interns into congressional offices.

Seven years ago, Moolenaar hosted the forum and “spoke on faith and values being the core of who we are,” participant Dilan Maxfield wrote on LinkedIn. “I had to decide for myself who I wanted to be, how I wanted to serve the world.”

Today Maxfield is communications director for Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), one of the few consistently non-MAGA Senate Republicans.

Moolenaar has also handed out tickets to the National Prayer Breakfast.

In 2016, according to a spreadsheet I obtained, he invited just one couple: A now-deceased Michigan state representative, Colleen House, and her husband, Newsmax’s John Gizzi. The previous year, another spreadsheet shows, Moolenaar and McLeod shared a table with other Fellowship guests.

Moolenaar has managed to steer clear of The Fellowship’s most egregious controversies, but there are some threads.

Another Fellowship insider, then-Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), tried to conceal just how close his campaign-finance scandal came to The Fellowship.

The middleman for the illicit cash in that case was a Washington, D.C., businessman named Toufic Baaklini with ties to The Fellowship. Moolenaar was in no way implicated, but he was friends with Baaklini.

In a Tweet from the 2019 NPB, Baaklini appears in a picture with Moolenaar, referring to the senator as “my friend.” (Baaklini deleted the Tweet, but an archived version survives.)

The religious nonprofit at the center of the case, In Defense of Christians (IDC), noted in 2019 that Moolenaar and Baaklini were “good friends.” The IDC had other Fellowship leaders on board, too.

One was Stan Holmes, spiritual counselor to Fortenberry and Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), a Fellowship envoy to much of Europe.

Holmes “definitely” knew Moolenaar, a source close to The Fellowship told me several years ago. That would have to be true today, as Holmes facilitates The Fellowship’s weekly House prayer breakfast, now co-chaired by Moolenaar and Suozzi.

When I asked that source whether Moolenaar was a Holmes guy, they said, “Yes, but he [Moolenaar] is sort of an everyone guy since he was around before being a member [of Congress].”

Jerry Jonker, one of three Michigan business partners who have sat on The Fellowship’s board, is a reliable Moolenaar backer. Over the past 15 years his only federal donations have gone to Moolenaar: $8,500 worth.

Jonker’s partner Grant Ellis gives primarily to Fellowship members of Congress, even a few Democrats years ago. Ellis first donated to Moolenar in 2014 and since 2020 has given to no one else.

I’ve written elsewhere about who’s known to have supported C Street and The Fellowship financially. For that same article, Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, a federal lobbyist on ethics, lobbying and campaign finance rules, told me that the low rents could violate the law.

“When rental properties are provided below market value,” Holman said, “that quickly adds up to possibly exceeding the limits and may constitute illegal gifts or contributions.”

Whoever’s subsidizing C Street, Moolenaar’s only paid $800 per month there for the past two years, House disbursement reports show. An earlier House report shows Moolenaar paying just $600 per month in 2023, and presumably prior years, as well.

The House disbursements weren’t in place early enough to tell us when Moolenaar moved in. But a picture posted online in 2019 shows Moolenaar hosting Ohio Christian University students at C Street, along with Donna Rice Hughes.

Timmis, as I also wrote, has been a Fellowship supporter and is one of the four Fellowship insiders who control the C Street Center nonprofit that runs the building.

Whatever people might expect of a Republican millionaire backing covert Christian theocracy and right-wing policies, Timmis defies easy caricature.

Yes, he’s an elderly, white, Christian millionaire who watched only Fox News, according to 2008 remarks. But he wasn’t blind to what Fox is. “I watch probably only Fox News now,” he said, “but you watch this and you think, we don’t have a clue what God is doing around the world.”

By 2021, he told a podcast, “If you watch the news — Fox News, MMSB, MN, uh, SBC, whatever it is — I mean, I don’t watch those programs because all you’re hearing is dark, and I don’t wanna fill my mind with it.”

Coe was one of three men who changed Timmis’s life decades ago, at the age of 40, a success in business whose marriage and family were slipping away:

“I met three men in 120 days: Doug Coe, in Washington, that’s somebody you might know; Bill Bright … and Chuck Colson. And each man had a profound effect on my life. Each one to this day puts on a [piece or peace] of Jesus into my life. And so the next two years were probably the happiest years of my life.”

Colson was Pres. Richard Nixon’s general counsel, famously born again before going to prison. He later founded the proselytizing organization Prison Fellowship International and ultimately turned the reins over to Timmis.

Bright, the most openly right-wing of the three, founded Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) to evangelize religiously and politically. One early hire was Ralph Drollinger, the pastor now preaching a right-wing Bible to the White House, House, and Senate.

Drollinger, Timmis, and Moolenaar share a hostility toward government helping people in need. That support, Drollinger in particular argues, should come from the private sector.

Which is what appears to have happened with Moolenaar, when he was in need.

“Every day he would sit at a table in the corner of my office as I went about my daily duties,” Timmis wrote in his 2022 book. “I asked some dear friends if he could live with them.”

Timmis has more to say, about Moolenaar today:

“He is a great example of a man possessing strong Jesus-centered values as a public official, while not alienating himself from people who disagree with his views. Consequently, this Republican has made many friends across the aisle. He and his close friend Tom Suozzi, a Democratic Congressman from New York, have been cochairs of the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington for the last two years. John is the best example I know of friendship through reconciliation.”

Timmis doesn’t say which friends he had provide Moolenaar with lodging back in the 1990s. But that arrangement seems little changed today, although the location now is C Street.

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This article is one of a series about the members of Congress who live at C Street. To receive future stories, you can subscribe for free or as a paid subscriber.

The New Yorker called C Street “Frat House for Jesus.”

Bestselling author and journalist Jeff Sharlet wrote an entire book called “C Street.” The subtitle is “The Fundamentalist Threat to Democracy.”

It’s a three-story Washington, DC, townhouse just a couple blocks from offices of members of the House of Representatives. It’s been home to some of them, and even some senators, for roughly three decades. The Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters is just around the corner.

I just revealed that Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and John Moolenaar (R-MI) are roommates at C Street, and upcoming reports will identify other residents. But even some of today’s political reporters may not understand the implications or even have heard of C Street.

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Fifteen years ago, every political reporter in Washington knew the C Street house. Millions of Americans knew who lived there, thanks to one, two, and then a third political sex scandal.

Since then, C Street has been eclipsed by more strident, undemocratic, Christian extremism. It’s been years since the public knew which of their representatives live there. Once, residents reportedly included South Dakota Republican John Thune, now the Senate majority leader, and Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state.

The secretive house, subsidized by dark money, is a Capitol Hill nexus for the group that runs it, the Fellowship Foundation (aka The Family) and the powerful politicians in their orbit. The Fellowship was even the subject of a Netflix documentary series, “The Family,” co-produced by Sharlet and based on his work.

As of 2024, according to a religious podcast at the time, ten members of Congress lived there. Half Republicans, half Democrats.

The Fellowship’s primary mission is relational: Sharing Jesus — not Christianity, they’ll tell you, but Jesus — around the world. The result of this work is to boost the right-wing ideologies most Fellowship insiders share, like bolstering the Ugandan politicians who enacted an LGBTQ+ death penalty. But most Fellowship work stays secret.

At C Street, the walls blur between church and state and personal life. Members of Congress meet with lobbyists and leaders, pray with each other, watch football together. It’s a convenient spot to hang out and, for a handful — while Congress is in session — to live.

Suozzi isn’t the only Democrat to take advantage of the convenience, camaraderie, and low cost of C Street residency. He’s definitely not the first Democrat to benefit from rents so low that an ethics watchdog says they may be illegal.

Then-Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) were named as residents in 2003, by the Associated Press. At the time, the C Street Center had barely begun its scandals.

The history of the property itself is messy, marbled with a literary sense of irony. Built in 1880, it was once a convent, once an environmental group’s headquarters, and once the offices of Public Citizen, a public-interest group that would later criticize the goings-on that followed after their departure.

The property first came into The Fellowship’s portfolio in the 1980s. Reportedly, Michigan millionaire Mike Timmis put up the money.

C Street’s Genesis

In his 2022 memoir, Timmis wrote about Fellowship leader Doug Coe, now deceased, saving Timmis’s son from a life of dissoluteness and heavy-metal music by putting him on a path with Jesus over the course of just four days. Having already lost a daughter to suicide, there was little Timmis wouldn’t do for Coe.

At Coe’s request, Timmis mentored a young Moolenaar. He also bankrolled a Ugandan mission that became the cornerstone of The Fellowship’s work there. The Fellowship liaison there helps with the Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast, run by parliamentary prayer group leaders who passed the LGBTQ+ death penalty into law.

Coe told Timmis that his own sons — Tim and David Coe — and their college buddy, Marty Sherman, could use help starting their ministry in Washington. So Timmis, according to the New Yorker, bought a nonprofit called C Street Center, which owned the townhouse where Tim, David, and Marty would start their ministry.

A new House rule on travel allowances made weekly commutes more feasible for members, and hundreds sought part-time accommodations in DC. The New Yorker reported that Doyle was among the first to move in, along with Reps. Steve Largent (R-OK) and Zach Wamp (R-TN) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). Stupak followed soon after.

As early as 1994, then-Rep. Tony Hall (D-OH) was using the C Street house as the address for his Congressional Hunger Center. (The Fellowship doesn’t get much credit for its good works, especially a focus on third-world hunger, in part because of the proselytizing that accompanies it.)

The Rev. Rob Schenck told me that C Street was recommended to him almost instantly after he arrived in Washington in 1994 with a mission of ministering to members of Congress. At the time, he was on the road to Christian nationalism, a road he has since renounced and for which he has sought to make amends.

“You're gonna need everybody over there,” an evangelical Hill aide told Schenck. “You gotta get over to C Street.”

That aide, Ed Buckham, was chief of staff to then-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) (and most recently to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) before she left). Schenck got over to C Street.

“It was a hub of Christian activity for not just members of Congress, but other influential officeholders,” Schenck said. “Frequently I saw Ed Meese,” who had been Pres. Ronald Reagan’s ethics-challenged attorney general. “He was almost a constant presence there.”

According to the Associated Press, Wamp was one of the Fellowship insiders who set up living arrangements at C Street in 1997. As of 2000, the AP reported that four Republicans and three Democrats lived there.

Schenck said Wamp was “fully engaged, in the operations of not just C Street, but fully engaged in Fellowship activities.”

Wamp claimed to the AP that the C Street setup “leads to civility, that leads to tolerance, that leads to good governance.”

(Much like the National Prayer Breakfast has yet to unify the country through prayer, history has not been kind to Wamp’s claims about C Street and civility. Wamp himself called me a “snake” in 2023 after I asked for comment about the breakfast.)

At El Salvador’s prayer breakfast this year, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — who reportedly has lived at C Street — said, “When we meet every Tuesday night, we cease to be senators or congressmen. We cease to be Republicans or Democrats. We gather as children of Jesus, as brothers and sisters in Jesus.”

Lee is known for distinctly different behavior outside the setting of C Street’s Tuesday dinners.

The Los Angeles Times reported on C Street’s ties to The Fellowship in 2002, along with the fact that C Street was technically a church. The Fellowship likes to downplay the ties, which are easier to hide behind the legal opacity afforded to churches.

One Fellowship associate — a sort of pseudo-employee who funnels donations from benefactors through Fellowship administrators — told Roll Call in 2010 that The Fellowship doesn’t own C Street.

“It isn’t owned by us. It has kind of a different agenda,” Stan Holmes said. “I don’t have meetings there. … We don’t provide funds for it. There is no official link, though we are clearly relationally linked.”

They remain relationally inextricable today.

Landlords of The Lord

The property is still owned by the C Street Center. But the C Street Center is now run entirely by Fellowship people. Washington tax records list Sherman as its beneficial owner and Tim Coe as one of three directors. The others are Timmis and Denny Pearce, a Houston businessman who sat on the Fellowship board from 2003 through 2017.

They’re all Republican donors, with the few exceptions being donations to a handful of Democrats connected to The Fellowship.

Sherman’s federal donations are exclusively Republican, with most — $1,000 worth years ago — going to Rep. Tracey Mann (R-KS), who’s spent much of his adult life in The Fellowship. Tim Coe also gave mostly to Mann, $500 in 2009. The previous year, he gave $200 to the Senate campaign of former Rep. Jim Slattery (D-KS), a longtime Fellowship insider and now a lobbyist who still helps lead the breakfasts.

Pearce, the Houston businessman, has made more than 100 federal donations. They go all the way back to 1989, with $1,925 to support then-Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), whose financial deregulation would later contribute to the global economic meltdown of 2007/2008.

In 1992, Pearce gave $500 to former Rep. Mark Siljander (R-MI), vying to return to Congress. Siljander is probably best known for his later conviction on charges related to lobbying for an Islamic group with terrorist ties, which allegedly paid Siljander via a $25,000 check to The Fellowship.

(Trump’s 2020 pardon of Siljander was pushed by Meese and prayer breakfast emissary Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL).)

Pearce also donated to former Rep. Bob McEwen (R-OH), a Fellowship ally who’s now executive director of the far-right Council for National Policy.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Pearce started off backing Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), then Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and finally Trump, who got Pearce’s support again in 2020 and 2024.

Democratic donations in the federal records on Pearce include Slattery and the successful 2000 Senate campaign of then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D-FL). Nelson and his wife have for decades helped The Fellowship in its work. As I revealed in 2024, The Fellowship helped their son get off easy after one of several drunken encounters with the law.

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Pearce’s 2008 donation to Slattery was his last to a Democrat.

Timmis, too, is a prolific Republican donor, going back even further.

In 1979, Timmis gave $500 to John Connally, the former Democratic governor who had switched parties and was seeking the Republican presidential nomination. Timmis also gave to Siljander and Gramm.

Timmis supported political organizations opposed to reproductive rights, as well as campaigns of then-Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and then-Sen. John Ashcroft (R-MO), who both had deep ties to The Fellowship.

Like the other C Street officials, Timmis’s Democratic donations went to Fellowship insiders, in his case, Stupak, a rare Democrat opposed to reproductive rights. Not surprisingly, Timmis has donated at least $12,250 to Moolenaar, his protege.

And, of course, Timmis bought the building where Moolenaar and his Democratic friend, Suozzi, pay only $800 a month.

Regardless of who technically owns it, The Fellowship runs it, has funded it, and supplies labor for its upkeep.

The L.A. Times described the building as having 12 bedrooms, with plenty of other rooms, a chapel among them, along with five living rooms. Descriptions since then have varied, either due to error or shifting uses of different rooms.

Some accounts have mentioned large-screen TVs and a stained-glass window. And football. Football comes up a lot.

Fellowship attorney Chip Grange told the L.A. Times, “There are prayer meetings, fellowship meetings, [and] evangelical meetings." Grange said, "Our mission field is Capitol Hill."

C Street provided an off-campus space for congressional fellowship, but also Fellowship work, which includes networking. Seen through stained glass, though, networking can be hard to distinguish from lobbying.

The Rev. Louis Sheldon, who chaired the conservative Traditional Values Coalition, told the L.A. Times he met with West African ambassadors at C Street. “It’s a real hideaway for congressmen and senators and ambassadors,” he said.

Rent at the time began at $600, which covered not just lodging but housekeeping. Eight Fellowship college volunteers kept the place tidy and a "house mother" washed towels and linens.

Dirty Laundry

The Fellowship’s idea of accountability doesn’t involve third parties, let alone government or other institutions answerable to the public. Secrets stay secret. Even murderous dictators aren’t asked to do penance.

Which leads us to how C Street played at least a bit role in three political sex scandals.

Understandably, the journalistic focus was the politicians, all in the C Street circle. But the coverage — and even a Senate investigation — shed light on C Street’s dynamics.

A Senate Ethics Committee report identified the Coe brothers and Sherman — said collectively as one: TimDavidandMarty — as spiritual counselors at C Street. It also said they went beyond counseling Sen. John Ensign (R-OK), telling him to end his extramarital affair (with an aide’s wife), and actively worked to make the problem go away without it going public.

When it did go public, Ensign accused his betrayed aide of seeking a financial payoff for Ensign destroying his marriage and costing the couple their jobs (the wife worked for Ensign’s campaign). The Ethics Committee, however, concluded that the idea to pay off the staffer came from Tim Coe and Sherman.

The committee report described Tim Coe as “one of the spiritual leaders of the International Foundation, the organization that counseled Members of Congress and others at the C Street Center and organized the annual National Prayer Breakfast.” (“International Foundation” is a d/b/a for The Fellowship.)

The Fellowship considers itself a mechanism for accountability, but Sherman and the Coe brothers didn’t demand that Ensign tell the Ethics Committee what he’d done and face the committee’s accountability. Or the voters’ accountability. The Fellowship helped Ensign try to make it go away, the Senate report said.

There was also Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MI), in some accounts sounding as if he used C Street itself for his trysts. But it was Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) who shined the brightest spotlight directly on C Street, volunteering its name and details in an extraordinary press conference about his infidelity.

Fellowship accountability may also find expression in an anecdote Schenck tells about another member of Congress, then-Speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL). The two were introduced at C Street (which is more convenient for House members than for senators, given its location).

Schenck inferred that Hastert’s presence there wasn’t unusual, describing Hastert and the C Street crowd as “quite comfortable” with each other.

Hastert bought Schenck’s pitch to accept a Ten Commandments display for his Capitol office. At the presentation ceremony, Hastert gave a glimpse of his thoughts on accountability.

According to Schenck, Hastert referred to the Ten Commandments, saying, “You know, we're no longer held to these laws, because of God's grace.” Meaning: all bets were off after Jesus’s sacrifice redeemed human sin. A member of Schenck’s group responded, “Has anyone informed Mrs. Hastert of this?”

Some measure of accountability came for Hastert in 2016, when he was convicted of financial crimes intended to cover up his abuse of four boys 17 and younger while he was their wrestling coach decades earlier.

For a while, there were rumblings within The Fellowship that more transparency might allay suspicions about C Street. The recurring pushes for more transparency haven’t won out.

There were ethics complaints about the low rents for members of Congress, subsidized by C Street’s unknown donors. And a lawsuit. Members of Congress, after all, are required by law to disclose gifts.

There were, around the same time, Sharlet’s remarkable accounts about The Fellowship supporting Christian Ugandan politicians pushing for an anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty.

Protesters called on Pres. Barack Obama to boycott the National Prayer Breakfast. He didn’t, but he did lecture the event.

It reached a point where even Doug Coe, the Fellowship leader, gave public interviews.

The Fellowship denied supporting the death penalty for LGBTQ+ Ugandans. Unaddressed was the bigger issue, that The Fellowship would support and aid allies who did. But not those who spoke out of school.

After Schenck cooperated with Sharlet, his relationships with Fellowship insiders cooled.

“It was so secretive,” Schenck told me. While the National Prayer Breakfast gave Fellowship publicity-hounds the spotlight once a year, C Street offered shadow every day.

Despite the secrecy — and the nonpartisan façade of the breakfast, the C Street house, and The Fellowship itself — the politics were unmissable.

Evangelical right-wing crusader Franklin Graham has been a reliable Fellowship supporter.

Both of his organizations routinely gave to The Fellowship1. As recently as 2019, one Graham organization gave $50,000 to The Fellowship but listed the address as the C Street address.

GOP megadonor Ronnie Cameron has given millions, as well as serving on the board, which still includes one of his executives.

Timmis’s family foundation in its most recent disclosure lists $11,500 to two Fellowship entities.

And it’s not hard to see why Republicans support The Fellowship.

The Fellowship’s global network nurtures the notion that politics and governance should be undergirded by Christianity — or Jesus, they would say. Sharlet recounted any number of foreign leaders carrot-and-sticked into right-wing politics and Protestant Christianity.

In response to my reporting about Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA) legitimizing the National Prayer Breakfast in Ukraine, a European LGBTQ+ advocacy group issued an intelligence briefing to congressional Democrats explaining what their support for The Fellowship does.

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The Fellowship does the same thing in the U.S.: Shift national politics, and individual politicians, to the right.

In 2003, Fellowship board member Richard Carver, a former Air Force assistant secretary, told the Associated Press that the goal for C Street was to “assist” members of Congress “in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs.”

Sharlet has reported on The Fellowship’s successful evangelization of African rulers and others, whether they came to Jesus genuinely or pragmatically. More recently, I revealed The Fellowship’s work bolstering right-wing theocrats in Central America, notably Guatemala and, just this year, El Salvador.

Sharlet also chronicled the political journey of Hall, a Fellowship Democrat who, Sharlet wrote, “in The Family's care, became pro-life, anti-gay rights, and simply confused about the separation of church and state.”

Schenck recalled Avon Williams III, a Pentagon official and Fellowship insider, reflecting that “Tony's getting better.”

The political transformations weren’t aberrations. “[T]he cultural tone of C Street,” Schenck said, “of course preferred Republicans in every way. In every way.”

The nonprofit that runs C Street hints at its objectives in government filings. Its mission statement says C Street seeks to:

“…establish, nurture, disciple, house, and equip a community of believers in Jesus who share a common calling to serve and show Biblical hospitality in the name and Spirit of Jesus to those who are living and/or working in the Capitol Hill community.”

Those who live there, the filing says, are “committed to making themselves and the C Street Center available to serve the Capitol Hill community in the name and Spirit of Jesus.”

Some Fellowship Democrats even fight for Fellowship Republicans in their campaigns, or lay down their arms.

Stupak supported Wamp’s campaign. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) refused to back a Democrat running against a Fellowship Republican.

At last year’s prayer breakfast, Brownback discussed Slattery, the former Kansas Democrat turned lobbyist. Brownback joked, not dishonestly, “I’ve been trying to get him to be a Republican for years.”

The Fellowship has a history of insiders masquerading as something they’re not. “Messianic Muslims” in The Fellowship, for instance, don’t publicly convert to Christianity. They preserve their community standing by remaining nominally Muslim, while still pursuing Fellowship ends.

Similarly, The Fellowship needs at least token Democrats who are nominally still Democrats. Their involvement is vital to The Fellowship’s work.

Attending a bipartisan- and therefore official-seeming Potemkin breakfast, The Fellowship’s far-flung guests can pass the cost of attending on to their taxpayers.

In 2020, Australian Member of Parliament David Hodgett got reimbursed for about $8,000 in expenses “to attend the 68th Annual National Prayer Breakfast with The President of the United States and other national leaders in the Executive, Judicial and Legislative Branches of the United States government,” he said in a filing. His meetings included Fellowship members of Congress — Moolenaar, Suozzi, Coons, and Aderholt — and even Stan Holmes.

Most people don’t know it, but the multi-day annual breakfast event isn’t the only time The Fellowship serves breakfast to Congress. Members of both parties gather every week they’re in session for The Fellowship’s prayer breakfasts on Capitol Hill. Unlike the annual breakfast, these aren’t televised.

Breakfast on the Hill

While still in Congress, Hall told Politico in 2009, the weekly prayer breakfasts held in the House itself were “probably some of the best moments I had during the week” because they “closed the doors.”

Those breakfasts also open doors to C Street and The Fellowship.

Doyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat, told the AP in 2003 that he moved into C Street in the late 1990s after getting involved with The Fellowship through its weekly prayer breakfasts.

Hall said even staffers were barred from the breakfasts, let alone reporters. “[N]obody from the outside, only members.” That’s not exactly gospel.

In 2023, Wamp reminisced about the late Jordanian politician Aqel Biltaji, “a friend of this Fellowship,” bringing Jordanian royalty to the weekly House prayer breakfasts.

Other Fellowship insiders are involved.

Look at the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation’s biography for board member Stan Holmes:

“He has been connected to the US Senate and House Prayer Breakfast Groups since 1981. He has traveled to over 60 countries with or on behalf of the Members of Congress who meet weekly in the Breakfast Groups, maintaining relationships in over 100 countries.”

What qualifies Holmes to be involved in congressional prayer breakfasts? Or to travel on behalf of members of Congress?

Holmes is a Fellowship associate, according to prayer breakfast spreadsheets I obtained. A Fellowship source told me years ago that Holmes was thick with Aderholt.

Like other Fellowship insiders, Holmes has helped place people inside congressional offices, including a Fellowship chief of staff in the office of then-Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-OK) who helped hush up Fellowship connections to his campaign-finance scandal.

Who else does The Fellowship have inside the weekly Capitol Hill breakfasts?

After the 2023 National Prayer Breakfast, Croatian tennis impresario Feliks Lukas outed one as Bill Wall, “leader of the Senate and U.S. House Prayer Breakfast Group.”

Like Holmes, Wall is a Coloradan, but Wall is also a businessman, who’s tried his hand at various athletic licensing companies. The defunct XPTees, for instance, “strives to tell people about Christ and the love he have for us through Apparel such as t-shirts, hoodies, jackets, and hats.”

For some reason, Wall has traveled with Aderholt, like Holmes, and attended meetings with foreign officials (on trips The Fellowship helped fund) to meet with like-minded Fellowship allies in other governments.

Whether Wall or Holmes use the weekly prayer breakfasts to shepherd members of Congress downhill to C Street, those members continue today using the secretive townhouse for personal fellowship. And for the people’s business.

Today

Despite past scandals, or because they blew over, members of Congress still hold work-related meetings in the privacy that C Street affords them. Some of these meetings are revealed through disclosures made under sometimes stricter rules of other governments.

There was Australia’s Hodgett, for instance, holding meetings around the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast.

In 2023, when Mike Gallagher was still a member of Congress, chairing the select committee on China’s influence, he requested a meeting with Australian diplomats at C Street, another Australian government filing says.

According to that filing, Gallagher requested a meeting for June 13, 2023, at 7:15pm at the C Street house address. That was a Tuesday, traditionally the night of the house’s weekly group dinner.

The agenda for that meeting, with Australian Ambassador Kevin Rudd, according to a briefing package for Rudd, says, “Recommend no social media.” Secrecy.

The briefing treats C Street and The Fellowship as synonymous. And political.

“The Fellowship, known as ‘C-Street’ for its Capitol Hill location, is a US-based non-profit religious and political organisation. Its stated purpose is to provide a fellowship forum for decision makers to attend various religious activities, including bible study and prayer meetings. It sponsors the annual National Prayer Breakfast each February in DC where every president since Eisenhower has attended at least once. With this exception, the Fellowship avoids the spotlight. We understand membership includes Republicans and Democrats of various Christian persuasions. It also has a broad international network.”

That’s pretty accurate, as far as it goes. It elides The Fellowship’s partisanship, but confirms that C Street was still the “Capitol Hill location” of The Fellowship’s “broad international network” as recently as 2023.

(That network includes Australia’s Jock Cameron, who as a Fellowship associate in 2016 invited Rudd to that year’s U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, when Rudd held no public office, according to guest spreadsheets I obtained several years ago.)

The 2023 Rudd-Gallagher meeting apparently wasn’t about fellowship or football. The Australian briefing was released in response to a request for records about “discussions with members of the United States Congress concerning AUKUS2, proposed Australian procurement of Virginia-class (SSN-774 class) submarines, and/or the United States submarine industrial base.”

In the days after the meeting, Gallagher backed legislative language, as one released document said, “allowing Australian contractors to work in American submarine shipyards.”

The following year, Gallagher joined military contractor Palantir as head of defense3. C Street kept going, with The Fellowship, prayer breakfasts, and lobbying.

The Kenyan Lobby

Schenck told me he remembers “ambassadors being in the mix” back when he knew C Street, especially in early February, when diplomats came to Washington for the prayer breakfast. “[I]t was an anchor for all of that activity, for guests who were in town and certainly foreign delegations of different sorts.”

An internal Kenyan government report last year suggests that’s still the case.

For years, Kenya has sought U.S. reparations for al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi that killed 213 people. A 2025 Kenyan filing with the U.S. Justice Department included a Kenyan government report portraying C Street as still a known hub for international lobbying.

The chair of the Kenyan Senate committee seeking U.S. compensation reported that the 2024 prayer breakfast offered an effective alternative after normal channels failed.

“…though the Committee was unable to secure appointments with the US Ambassador to Kenya and with the US Congress, [Kenyan] Sen. Daniel Maanzo and I were able to attend the National Prayer breakfast at Washington DC where we were able to meet various Senators and Congressmen and put forward our case.”

The Kenyans got those congressional meetings not via the State Department, which offers guidance for these things, but via The Fellowship, which has its own guidance. The meetings took place on Capitol Hill, but also at the Washington Hilton, where National Prayer Breakfast events take place before and after the breakfast itself. At least one meeting was held at the C Street house.

Beforehand, a Kenyan senator briefed the delegation “that the Prayer breakfast will provide a good platform for the [Kenyan] Members to lobby.”

The suggestion was: “[U]se the opportunity to get Sen. [Chris] Coons [D-DE] agree to sponsor the amendment and also to host Sen. Cory Booker [D-NJ].”

Coons was a longtime Fellowship insider and one of its few public Democratic faces, at least until this year. He wasn’t the only Fellowship insider described as helpful.

Fellowship associate Sam Owen is a longtime Nairobi resident who runs the Kenyan prayer breakfast and was known, a Fellowship source once told me, as “Mr. Kenya.” He also appears in Timmis’s book. The Kenyans reported meeting with Owen in Virginia, on the Monday before the 2024 U.S. prayer breakfast.

Owen, the report said, would “arrange for the [Kenyan] Senators to meet their [U.S.] counterparts.” The first meeting was at C Street.

Whether it was through Timmis originally, or someone else, Owen apparently had an in with Moolenaar or Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), a longtime Fellowship insider, because that’s who the Kenyan delegates met with at C Street. The Kenyans gave the two a “legislative brief” on their pitch.

The next day, Jan. 31, the U.S. prayer breakfast events had begun, sprawling through the Hilton with breakout sessions and seminars and closed-door meetings.

The Kenyans got in to the International Women’s Coffee, “requesting” the support of congressional spouses, including the wives of Fellowship insiders Mann and Tim Walberg (R-MI), who was still in the headlines for boosting Uganda’s president at that country’s prayer breakfast after blowback against the Anti-Homosexuality Act death penalty.

On the day of the breakfast, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, the Kenyans got followup meetings with more Fellowship insiders. They briefed Aderholt on the reparations issue in his office at 11am, shortly after the breakfast.

By 4pm, the Kenyans were back at the Hilton to meet with Coons and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD). This time, the agenda expanded beyond compensation to trade. The Kenyans wanted to sell more tea and coffee in the U.S. and protect sales of textiles and fabric to the U.S.

In short, Kenyan politicians unable to get congressional meetings on their own turned Fellowship connections into meetings — at C Street, the prayer breakfast, and Capitol Hill — with four House members and at least three senators. None of it was public.

Regardless of the merit of their causes, there’s no reason to think special interests in the U.S. and elsewhere aren’t still working similar angles, networking their way to U.S. politicians through The Fellowship, out of the public eye. That’s what the New York Times found in its profile of the National Prayer Breakfast back in 2018.

And The Fellowship has multiple means of keeping U.S. politicians in its network. In previous decades, Democrats were publicly shamed into attending the prayer breakfast and displaying obeisance toward religion. C Street offers simpler incentives.

While there’s genuine fellowship among the residents, there are material benefits, too. Convenience is one.

There’s scarce lodging available so near Capitol Hill, let alone on a reliable, long-term basis, where you can leave your stuff or skip a month for campaigning or recesses.

C Street also has a “house mother” who oversees the logistics of the house. “The living accommodations include housekeeping services provided by eight college-age volunteers,” a 2010 complaint filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said. Some live in single-sex houses near The Fellowship’s Arlington, VA, headquarters, The Cedars.

Sharlet told me he was at C Street at least once while still in The Fellowship’s good graces.

“Young men and young women,” Sharlet said, “would go over there, and the idea was: Isn’t this exciting for you, you get to meet a lot of members of Congress.” And pray with them.

Sharlet said, “The idea was that you would develop relationships and mentorships” while doing menial tasks for the members of Congress. Driving, maybe. “Serving coffee, like a waiter,” a luxury offered by few other rooming houses so close to the Capitol.

To provide this luxury, C Street has The Fellowship’s youth groups to draw from.

The National Student Leadership Forum (NSLF) is a Fellowship program that molds leaders in part by having them clean up after members of Congress. Mann, a former intern of Moran’s, went on to lead the NSLF. There’s also the Cornerstone Intern House.

In the June 2011 issue of Sojourners, Lucy Bryan Green described life as a young woman in this world. It included cleaning Ensign’s C Street bedroom, among other things:

“…scrubbing toilets, stripping beds, folding hospital corners on freshly cleaned sheets, polishing the brass knobs on either side of the entryway, cleaning air vents, vacuuming carpets, and wiping and waxing the considerable number of wood surfaces in the house.”

In turn, the interns could seek counsel from political and religious leaders on burning issues.

Schenck recalled one intern launching into “a very intense conversation about masturbation.” Was it a sin, the intern wanted to know. “He seemed really beset by it.”

C Street was also, Sharlet said, a way station for Fellowship leaders. “I ran into Doug there.”

Referring to Tim, David, and Marty, Sharlet said, “That was where those guys did some counseling.” And network-building.

Sharlet said, “The vibe is very much, ‘drop in all the time; let’s be in relationship.’” Oliver North would swing by.

Arguably, the biggest material advantage to living at C Street was money.

The rent was so low at C Street that CREW filed ethics complaints. A group of clergy sued.

Nothing came of it. C Street rents have barely budged. But one thing has changed.

New House rules mean Congress reimburses members for lodging during travel, including to Washington.

In theory, this should eliminate the low-rent temptation of C Street. However, those lodging reimbursements still come out of individual member budgets.

This means that the ones who can find low rents somewhere have more money left in their budget to pay for things other members might not be able to afford; more travel, or an extra aide.

It also means that now, if they get reimbursed, their lodging expenses are public.

Still Standing

House members don’t disclose where the rent goes, but the year-to-year consistency of C Street rates revealed itself in a data analysis done by some of my readers4.

Schenck told me that he heard directly from Suozzi that he lived at C Street and didn’t want people to know about it. But Suozzi’s and Moolenaar’s own remarks at events like the El Salvador National Prayer Breakfast confirm their C Street residency.

Between praising accused human-rights abuser President Nayib Bukele, and pushing the legislature to form their own prayer groups, Suozzi and Moolenaar discussed living together and sharing Tuesday night dinners, a ritual at C Street.

They didn’t talk about the advantages of renting from The Fellowship.

Back in 2010, C Street’s monthly rental rate of $950 was so scandalously low that a group of clergy pushed the IRS to investigate. The market rate was $1,700 at the time, they said.

In fairness, the members of Congress shared rooms at C Street, so they could have made the case that they were in that range. But that wouldn’t account for the free housekeeping and coffee. Not to mention utilities and other expenses.

Those include taxes. Although it’s legally a church, the C Street Center does pay some taxes on the residential spaces. The city decided only 34.37% of the property is tax-exempt, common areas ostensibly for religious use (it is definitely, however, not a church open to the public).

The New York Times reported that some C Street rents at the time were lower than $950, as low as $600 a month. Six-hundred dollars was a steal even back in 2010.

It’s also the same rate Moolenaar reported paying through the end of 2023.

In January 2024, rent at C Street bumped up to $800 each for Moolenaar and Suozzi. That’s where it stayed, the most recent disclosure report shows, through at least the end of 2025, despite rising energy bills that drove up housing costs for other people.

The Washington Department of Human Services pegs the fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the C Street Center’s zip code at $3,020. Cutting that by half, since Suozzi and Moolenaar share a room, they’re still paying well under the $1,510 that’s half of fair market rent.

According to Craig Holman, a Public Citizen federal lobbyist on ethics, lobbying and campaign finance rules, “Government ethics as well as campaign finance laws require that goods and services provided to lawmakers by outside parties be provided at market value.”

That means C Street residents are legally obliged to disclose below-market rental rates, in addition to their reimbursement filings.

Holman told me that, “When rental properties are provided below market value, that quickly adds up to possibly exceeding the limits and may constitute illegal gifts or contributions.”

Holman is familiar with The Fellowship’s previous ethical issues. He knows the history well enough to know that his organization, Public Citizen, was once headquartered at the C Street house. Holman still refers to The Fellowship as The Family, the name The Fellowship shunned after Sharlet made them famous.

“The Family's dealings as providing room and board … has ever since been mired in controversy,” Holman said. “If The Family is also providing lawmakers with below market value rent, these controversies may go beyond scandal and into violations of law.”

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While pushing for U.S. aid in early 2024, the head of Ukraine’s National Prayer Breakfast traveled the U.S., meeting with evangelicals, and telling them they could shape his nation’s future if they helped save it.

Pavlo Unguryan, a former member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, also met with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in early 2024. Unguryan is well connected, the Ukrainian point man for The Fellowship Foundation, better known as The Family, cultivator of a global political network anchored in parliamentary prayer groups and breakfasts.

Unguryan’s lobbying, and his connections, led Johnson to reverse course and allow the 2024 House vote approving $61 billion in desperately needed aid for Ukraine.

Two years later, with war still raging, U.S. evangelicals are already seeing the dividends of their investment in Ukraine, even as the nation’s still fighting for its survival.

In a new post today, Ukrainian writer and human-rights advocate Svitlana Iukhymovych identifies right-wing elements of a sweeping new Civil Code the Rada has approved in draft form but that is not yet law.

According to Iukhymovych, the Civil Code draft was released on April 27, its 800 pages got 17 minutes of discussion in the Rada, and it then passed 254-2 the next day.

Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk is identified by Iukhymovych as “The man behind the draft law,” who advertised it as moving the nation closer to the European Union. Civil rights groups and protesters say it does the opposite:

• Same-sex partnerships and marriage are illegal in the draft.

• Women’s divorce rights are cut back.

• Children’s rights are reduced.

• Rights of the disabled are reduced.

• Media censorship is increased.

• Public lands could be stolen or privatized.

• Flouting “good morals” could be punished by a judge.

An earlier draft reduced the age of marriage, for girls, to 14, if they’re pregnant.

That language was struck, but if the revised Civil Code is approved, even the remaining changes will present new barriers for Ukraine to join the European Union, which has rules about social justice and equal rights.

Human Rights Watch says the Civil Code draft violates the European Convention on Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Ukrainians largely oppose aspects of the Civil Code draft. Seventy percent of Ukraine supports equal rights for LGBTQ+ people. Hundreds turned out a week ago in Kyiv, staging a mass protest in the middle of a war.

So, how is this happening?

As I reported back in 2024, as part of the campaign for U.S. aid, Unguryan promised U.S. evangelicals a Biblical oasis in Europe’s wasteland of atheism. He said so in personal appearances.

At a Feb. 5, 2024, event in Plano, TX, the week after the Washington prayer breakfast, Unguryan addressed a crowd of evangelicals.

According to the Baptist Standard, Unguryan told them that “If Ukraine can prevail against Russian aggression and protect its freedom” then, afterwards, “Christians will have both the responsibility and opportunity to rebuild the nation and shape its future direction.”

Unguryan also had access to right-wing U.S. media. Unguryan was the source for an April 10, 2026, Newsmax report on why Russia’s persecution of Christians justified supporting Ukraine.

And as a guest of Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, on April 17, 2024, Unguryan said Ukraine was “to be the Bible Belt for the European continent, such a liberal continent.” He also said:

“Let’s create strategic partnership between Christians, evangelicals, conservatives in U.S. and Christians and conservatives in Ukraine to do our missionary ministry, global missionary ministry, and to protect our values.”

Perkins responded, telling his viewers, as Washington debated Ukraine aid, “We will stand with you.”

The same day, Unguryan met in Washington with Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), “to discuss the critical importance of the United States sending additional aid,” said Fitzpatrick, who has worked with The Fellowship. He didn’t mention Unguryan’s designs on Ukraine’s future.

How can Unguryan, a private citizen, promise such drastic regression, let alone in a modern, pluralistic nation like Ukraine? As I’ve reported, Unguryan has had the help of powerful Christian allies and partners in the U.S.: Members of Congress affiliated with The Fellowship.

He’s been associated with The Fellowship for years. Five years ago, I revealed Unguryan’s status as The Fellowship’s point man, choosing which Ukrainians get to hobnob with U.S. politicians at the prayer breakfast in Washington.

Many of his guests, I reported, were fellow crusaders against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. His parliamentary group’s website said explicitly that its mission included “organizing the National Prayer Breakfast in Ukraine; [and] protection of the institution of family and marriage as the basis of society.”

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) backed that up in his own message at Unguryan’s Ukrainian prayer breakfast in 2019, traveling there on Unguryan’s dime. (More recently, Walberg supported Fellowship Ugandans under fire for enacting an LGBTQ+ death penalty.)

And although The Fellowship is quiet about its networks, some of the connections can be seen online in the websites of foreign governments, or social media posts. One depicted Unguryan with then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in 2023. Rubio has lived at The Fellowship’s notorious C Street house and maintains ties with Fellowship lobbyists.

In an April 14, 2024, Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) urged Democrats to vote for Johnson — a far-right, theocratic Republican — as speaker, in order to ensure Ukraine aid would get a vote. Suozzi said he had just returned from Ukraine. And he had.

Suozzi met with Zelenskyy on April 4, 2024, just after Zelenskyy’s meeting with religious leaders. (His disclosure filing shows that the trip was paid for by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.) Today Suozzi is one of a small handful of Democrats still publicly participating in Fellowship events.

Some leaders of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus have Fellowship ties, including Fitzpatrick and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH).

Before the war, Unguryan’s parliamentary prayer group, a Fellowship affiliate, paid to fly Fitzpatrick and Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA), to Unguryan’s 2021 prayer breakfast in Kyiv. As a member of the far-right Polish group Ordo Iuris posted later, “we had the opportunity to share our experiences in defending of conservative values.“

That’s still true of prayer breakfasts today, even after a European LGBTQ+ advocacy group, Forbidden Colours, told me in 2021 that they had sent briefings to Democrats warning them about prayer breakfasts and The Fellowship. (Vargas appears to have distanced himself since from The Fellowship.)

A 2021 report on LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights by European parliamentarians singled out Unguryan and his prayer breakfasts. The report called European prayer breakfasts part of an effort “to form cross-party alliances on Christian values.”

The report said that an international Christian group to which Unguryan belongs “socialises politicians onto regressive agendas through parliamentary prayer breakfasts.”

Unguryan himself has said that he’s supported by multiple Christian organizations on the right. It’s not just The Fellowship.

In April 2024 he told CBN, “many organizations from America help us, like Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, Baptist World Alliance, Southern Baptist Convention.”

So Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has every reason to listen to Unguryan. Under fire, even a Jewish atheist stand-up comic will make concessions to Christian lobbyists. And Unguryan has his ear.

Unguryan wasn’t named publicly as attending an April 2, 2024, meeting with Zelenskyy, but I spotted him in a picture of it shortly afterward.

As I wrote the following week, Ukrainian media reported that the Ukrainian religous figures in that meeting had a single ask: They wanted Zelenskyy to initiate a formal, government-sanctioned National Prayer Breakfast with his participation and imprimatur.

Not noted by Ukrainian media was how the breakfasts and affiliated parliamentary prayer groups are key to right-wing political evangelizing around the world.

Desperate for aid, Zelenskyy didn’t hesitate, agreeing on the spot, acknowledging his need for the help of religious allies in other countries.

“This dialogue is very important for us now,” Zelenskyy said. “After all, the church has a great influence on society, on state leaders.”

Two months later, at Ukraine’s first official National Prayer Breakfast, Zelenskky championed the values of “normal people.” Zelenskyy’s government has continued to speak a language in which America’s Christian right is fluent.

For this year’s Ukraine Week — Unguryan’s annual Washington events around the National Prayer Breakfast — the Ukrainian embassy in the U.S. struck a Trumpishly false and theocratic note: “Independence is born from faith…”

The speakers list at Unguryan’s own prayer breakfast in DC that week was dominated by Fellowship insiders: Rep. Robert Aderholt (R–AL), former Reps. Jim Slattery (D-KS) Bob McEwen (R-OH), and former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.

Also speaking: Trump White House Faith Office advisor Paula White. And Doug Burleigh, The Fellowship’s leader on Russia and former Soviet republics, including Ukraine.

On Feb. 6, 2026, the day after the big event, the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, Unguryan held a press conference with congressional Fellowship friends including Suozzi, Kaptur, and Fitzpatrick.

Like Unguryan, Stefanchuk’s Fellowship ties go back years. A 2021 Rada press release touts a meeting between Stefanchuk and Burleigh.

It was Burleigh who brought Russian spy Maria Butina and her handler Alexander Torshin to the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast a decade ago. A picture with the release doesn’t identify the two other men surrounding Stefanchuk as Fellowship insiders, but they are.

One is Unguryan. The other is Michael Zhovnir, a Fellowship insider who lives in Washington state but has ties to Ukraine.

The meeting was about Ukraine’s National Prayer Breakfast.

"The value of prayer breakfasts is that they are a platform for dialogue between countries,” Stefanchuk said, despite their notoriety for backroom lobbying and sanitizing right-wing policy.

Stefanchuk also repeated The Fellowship’s claims of diverse prayer breakfasts, repeatedly refuted by “The Family” author Jeff Sharlet and reporting by me and others. Stefanchuk said, “Representatives of different faiths, people of different professions and views have the opportunity to meet and discuss political, economic, environmental and other challenges. And dialogue is a way to understanding."

In fact, the breakfasts are populated by those close to The Fellowship, those who support Fellowship associates financially or might, and those hoping to get close to The Fellowship’s U.S. politicians.

More recently, Stefanchuk has participated in Unguryan’s “Ukraine Week” activities in Washington, not coincidentally held the same week as the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, traditionally the first Thursday of February.

In 2024, both Stefanchuk and, for some reason, Unguryan were on the itinerary of a congressional trip that included members with Fellowship ties.

This year’s Ukraine Week welcomed Stefanchuk, Kaptur, Fitzpatrick, and longtime Fellowship insider Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).

And this year, according to Iukhymovych, Stefanchuk refused even to meet with LGBTQ+ advocates about the Civil Code draft.

Stefanchuk blames complaints about the bill and opposition to it on “misinformation.”

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Friday’s clemency announcement for the Colorado county clerk who breached election systems in service of false claims about fraud carries serious implications far beyond what mainstream media coverage would suggest.

The lawyer for Tina Peters made a case for clemency last year to President Trump. He said Peters had to go free to serve as a witness to a conspiracy theory most media have ignored but that is driving decisions inside the Trump administration.

The decision by Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) to commute the remainder of Peters’s sentence sparked scathing criticism and serious questions.

For one thing, Polis said in his letter to Peters that her application for clemency demonstrated “taking responsibility for your crimes and a commitment to follow the law going forward.”

But Peters only said it was wrong for her, in the course of the breach, to mislead Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Peters has never recanted the underlying action of breaching county election machines.

Her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, says she has no remorse: “She's proud of what she's done.”

In his commutation letter, Polis wrote to Peters that her nine-year sentence was “an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.” That may be true, but Polis doesn’t address whether the sentence was proportionate to how unusual Peters’s crimes were.

Polis also said he agreed with the state Court of Appeals that it was a free speech issue, saying Peters had the right to say she didn’t believe the 2020 election. But that wasn’t merely speech, it was motive. Committing a crime to provide a basis for sedition and violence made the crime more serious, not the expression of beliefs.

And the state Court of Appeals had already addressed this early last month by ordering Peters to be re-sentenced without consideration of her statements. Polis said he agreed with the court but didn’t explain why he then rendered the court’s remedy moot, circumventing her re-sentencing with the commutation.

The Colorado Times Recorder called that decision “notable,” along with the timing of acting after the state legislature ended its session for the year.

Polis also didn’t address the claims made in December by Peters’s lawyer, Ticktin, when he asked Pres. Donald Trump for a pardon that Trump lacked the power to issue because presidents have no jurisdiction over state convictions.

Polis’s intervention has now given legitimacy on the right to Ticktin’s claims, claims that the public at large remains largely unaware of.

When Trump issued his “pardon” on Dec. 11, 2025, it didn’t come out of the blue. But the reasoning behind it was absent from the media coverage of it.

In a social-media post, Trump explained that he thought Peters deserved clemency because her crime was part of an attempt to prove that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. He wrote,

“Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”

Trump then tried to force Colorado to release Peters, cutting funds for the state and vetoing laws beneficial to it, as well as launching investigations targeting the state.

The 2020 rigging claims have been so thoroughly debunked that most media don’t bother litigating them, perhaps assuming that they’re just generic, vague allegations. But they’re not.

Trump doesn’t identify the supposed “Voter Fraud” in the “Rigged” election, which his own Justice Department declared virtually pristine and free of fraud. But the appeal from Ticktin that preceded Trump’s post does.

An online search suggests none of the news media addressed this, but the theory Trump endorsed with his “pardon,” the claim advanced by Ticktin, is the same narrative that’s been pushed by a team of right-wing Venezuela hard-liners who’ve been circumventing the administration’s intelligence community to feed Trump anti-Venezuela info.

They claim that Venezuela stole the 2020 U.S. presidential election as part of nearly global election-system infiltration.

It’s the same claim they gave to Trump attorney Sidney Powell — who used it to try to overturn state election results in the aftermath of the 2020 election — by supplying her with a mystery witness whose claims were almost immediately refuted even by Trump’s own campaign.

Those claims emerged from former CIA official Gary Berntsen and a right-wing Venezuelan expatriate named Martin Rodil. The two were bankrolled by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne.

All three have pressed the case for Peters to be freed. The connections are so close that Byrne himself, who reportedly helped fund the Peters legal defense, claims he was in touch with the unindicted co-conspirator during the breach for which Peters was convicted.

Last year, Peters’s Rumble channel featured Rodil and other purveyors of his Venezuela story. Peters herself promoted Berntsen’s appearance on her channel, in which Berntsen implicated Justice Department personnel and the CIA as conspiring with Venezuela.

Then, on Dec. 6, 2025, just days before Trump’s “pardon,” Ticktin wrote to Trump making the case for clemency. Ticktin didn’t claim that Peters was innocent or remorseful. Instead, Ticktin said, she’s a key witness to “the most serious crime” ever against the U.S.

“Tina Peters is a critical, and necessary witness to the most serious crime perpetrated against the United States in history. They stole our whole country for 4 years.”

Ticktin, reportedly a longtime Trump friend and ally, explained that “they” is Venezuela.

He accused Griswold of complicity, alleging falsely and without evidence that she “aided and abetted Dominion and foreign countries in targeting” Peters. And names other ostensible conspirators.

Ticktin also cited Smartmatic indictments from last year on money laundering charges. The charges have to do with alleged bribery and kickbacks, but Peters supporters say it’s really about election theft.

There was also the release of a letter by former Venezuelan military intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal, now in U.S. prison and also seeking Trump clemency. Carvajal’s letter alleges that Venezuela has stolen elections but doesn’t say which.

Trump’s own 2020 election team rejected the accusation of Venezuelan election theft when it was first offered to them, even as the legal team publicly pushed it. Berntsen and Rodil have said countless organizations also dismissed their claims.

They attribute those dismissals to fear of Venezuela and corruption. Even Fox News was in on it, Berntsen has said.

But their push has not relented. And now, former Venezuelan officials in U.S. prisons, like Carvajal and former President Nicolás Maduro, have every incentive to support those lies in hopes of cutting a deal or, in Carvajal’s case, getting clemency.

As Ticktin wrote to Trump in December:

“The third domino fell on December 2, 2025, when Carvajal’s public version proffer was made available, announcing the criminal investigation including to [sic] United States election companies.”

Ticktin appears to be referring to the Dec. 2 letter from Carvajal that lit up online corners of the right wing. Carvajal this summer pleaded guilty, without even getting a deal, on charges of narco-terrorism that will keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Maybe.

Why Carvajal wouldn’t cut a deal in return for his cooperation remains unclear. But it does suggest that prosecutors may not have thought that Carvajal’s ostensible evidence was worth a deal. Carvajal, after all, hasn’t been an insider since 2017, when he split with the regime and fled Venezuela.

Instead, Carvajal may have calculated that his best bet was not to make a deal with prosecutors but to appeal to a higher power less fussy about evidence.

With his Dec. 2 letter, Carvajal circumvented the Justice Department and made his appeal directly to Trump, an appeal amplified by Ticktin on Dec. 6.

On Dec. 8, the Justice Department says, planning for the Venezuela raid began. On Dec. 11, Trump issued his “pardon” of Peters, now legitimized tacitly by Polis’s clemency.

Despite having been an outsider for eight years, Carvajal made a number of claims in sync with those being pushed to Trump by Berntsen, Rodil, and Ticktin. These are from his letter to Trump:

• “Every crime they [Tren de Aragua] commit on your soil is an act ordered by the regime.” [U.S. intelligence concluded a year ago that there’s no evidence of this and considerable evidence refuting it.]

• “For twenty years, the Venezuelan regime sent spies into your country—many are still there, some disguised as members of the Venezuelan opposition. Cuban intelligence showed me their networks inside your naval bases on the East Coast. They bragged about having sent thousands of spies over decades, some now career politicians.
  ”U.S. diplomats and CIA officers were paid to assist Chávez and Maduro in remaining in power. These Americans acted as spies for Cuba and Venezuela, and some remain active to this day.”

• “Regime operatives maintain relationships with election officials and voting-machine companies inside your country. I do not claim that every election is stolen, but I state with certainty that elections can be rigged with the software – and has been used to do so.”

Those last two items mirror the story told by Berntsen and Rodil — that officials in government and the private sector who rejected their claims were working for Venezuela.

With Carvajal providing evidentiary testimony — there’s no sign of any paper trails —these claims could be hugely consequential, as predicate for prosecuting those who defied Trump simply by casting their rejection of election denial as participation in a vast, invisible Venezuelan conspiracy.

In his letter, Carvajal assures Trump that every accusation against Maduro was true, and every measure taken is justified. “The regime I served,” Carvajal concludes, “is not merely hostile—it is at war with you, using drugs, gangs, espionage, and even your own democratic processes as weapons.”

It’s a falsehood that could be used, however improperly, to justify painting, or prosecuting, those who rejected the falsehood as Venezuelan agents. And to justify emergency measures that suppress voter turnout or ballot access.

It was Ticktin who in February of this year circulated a proposed draft executive order to that effect. Ticktin said that “The President has power to take charge [of elections] in an emergency” and that “we know that this emergency exists.”

In early March, I emailed Polis’s office about all of this, asking specifically about the scope of Ticktin’s premise for pardoning his client. Polis Communications Director Shelby Wieman replied, asking where my story would appear, but after I said that I publish on Substack never responded to my questions or followup emails.

Unlike Polis, other state Democrats presumably are unaware of the full narrative his clemency has advanced. But even they are livid.

Griswold said: “We condemn Governor Polis’ clemency grant. It is a gross injustice to our elections, election workers and democracy with far-reaching consequences.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser called it "a sad day for Colorado.”

District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, a Republican, who prosecuted Peters, said Polis’s commutation “undermined accountability and eroded confidence in the integrity of the system itself.” Rubinstein highlighted Peters’s “lack of remorse” as “greatly understated,” and said Polis “greatly overstated” the First Amendment issues at play.

Others echoed concerns about what Polis has done.

Center for Election Innovation & Research Executive Director David Becker told Democracy Docket that Polis had “thrown state and county election officials, Republicans and Democrats, under the bus after they resisted the corruption Ms. Peters engaged in.”

Colorado County Clerks Association Executive Director Matt Crane, a former Republican clerk, told the outlet that Peters’s actions “became a rallying point for election conspiracy movements that fueled hostility and distrust towards the very people responsible for administering free and fair elections.” Crane said that Polis’s clemency “carries consequences far beyond this single case.”

Ticktin responded to the commutation by saying that “even” Polis recognized the sentence was too harsh. And used it to smear other state officials.

“[T]his is one of those situations where we have a captured state. When you have a captured state, you have captured judges,” Ticktin said in an appearance with Steve Bannon. “[S]he [Peters] was incarcerated by this judge … to let the clerks of all the counties of all the United States to know that when you see something, you better not say something because you could end up in prison like Tina Peters.”

Peters is scheduled to be released June 1, after having served roughly half of her nine-year sentence. She said in a statement that after her release, “I plan to do my best through legal means to support election integrity.”

Polis is term-limited and will leave office at the start of next year. Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Bottoms said if he wins he will grant Peters a full pardon on day one and enable her to sue the state.

Correction: This article originally mistakenly identified the court that ordered the resentencing for Peters as the state Supreme Court. It’s been corrected to identify the court as the Colorado Court of Appeals. Sorry about the error.

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Pres. Donald Trump said on Fox about the accused shooter at Saturday’s White House Correspondents Association dinner that, “When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians.”

In fact, the alleged gunman’s “manifesto” reflects a Christian grappling with what his faith calls on him to do and not do.

And postings I found from his college Christian group show that Cole Allen wasn’t merely a member, he was a leader.

In the message that Allen reportedly sent shortly before the shooting, he writes, “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

Allen’s view appears to have been that resorting to violence to stop violence was Christian behavior. It’s almost a variation on the “just war” theory that Pope Leo XIV and Vice President JD Vance recently debated regarding Iran.

Allen’s alleged message appeared to refer to the Iranian girls school demolished by a U.S. missile, killing 180 people, most of them children. He also cited other violence carried out by the U.S. government and, allegedly, individuals in it:

“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.”

Ten years ago, Allen was a student at the California Institute of Technology, and a member of the Caltech Christian Fellowship (CCF). But not just a member.

In June 2015, he was announced as a new large-group coordinator. The blog posting read, “Pray that Cole will be able to manage his time well, especially since he is taking ME 72 next year.”

In October that year, Allen and another coordinator led a discussion on “God the Father.” It was, the notice said, part of a series about the Apostles’ Creed, the fourth-century affirmation of basic Christian beliefs, including the trinity, the resurrection, and the forgiveness of sin.

The following month, Allen brought his pastor to meet with CCF members. The subject was “the forgiveness of sin.”

Another post indicates that Allen was still a large-group coordinator almost a year later, in September 2016.

Despite Allen’s alleged attempt at a moral defense of his actions, the message he’s said to have sent falls short morally and in Christian terms.

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” the message says. But after listing the dinner staff and guests as not at all targets, it also says they’re acceptable collateral damage.

“I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”

That’s a justification that neither Christianity nor any moral code accept for murder. It’s possible, however, that Allen, if he’s guilty, understood and accepted that.

The message he allegedly sent Saturday night says, “I don’t expect forgiveness.”

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.

A State Department employee says some colleagues were upset by the department’s and Secretary Marco Rubio’s sectarian Easter messages.

On the X.com social-media platform, Rubio and the State Department’s official account shared the traditional Christian Easter exchange known as the Paschal greeting or Easter acclamation.

At 9am eastern time, Rubio posted on his account, “He is Risen.” Within seconds, the State Department responded, “He is Risen, Indeed!”

The State Department employee, a long-timer who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said they were “outraged” and told me that other workers expressed dismay when they learned about the posts.

Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) Founder and President Mikey Weinstein, whose organization assists State Department workers in certain categories, called the posts “disgusting” and “repellent.”

The State Department did not immediately respond to my questions or request for comment. It is not the first government agency in which Trump administration officials have alarmed workers with sectarian proselytizing.

As I reported last month, the MRFF says it received complaints after some commanders characterized the Iran War as a holy war fulfilling biblical prophecy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s proselytizing has become so overt it’s now drawing mainstream media attention.

Rubio’s post Sunday included a video of unclear origin that concluded with an image of the Great Seal of the United States, which is restricted by law for official use only. The audio, of Rubio speaking, appears to come from his remarks at last year’s memorial for Charlie Kirk.

The video does not disclose that Rubio was addressing Kirk’s Sept. 21, 2025, memorial event. The video overlays Rubio’s 2025 audio with some generic video and some explicitly Christian, a crown of thorns and crucifix.

The video does not include Rubio’s preceding comments, from 2025, in which he explained that this was what Kirk wanted people to believe. Here’s the text of the section of Rubio’s audio, which appears to be unedited, used in today’s video:

“[W]e were all created, every single one of us, before the beginning of time, by the hands of the God of the universe, an all-powerful God who loves us and created us for the purpose of living with Him in eternity. But then sin entered the world and separated us from our creator, and so God took on the form of a man and came down and lived among us, and He suffered like men and He died like a man. But on the third day He rose unlike any mortal man, and then [sic], and to prove any doubters wrong, He ate with His disciples so they could see. And they touched His wounds. He didn’t rise as a ghost or as a spirit, but as flesh. And then He rose to Heaven, but He promised He would return. And He will. And when He returns — because He took on that death, because He carried that cross, we were freed from the sin that separated us from Him — and when He returns, there will be a new Heaven and a new Earth, and we will all be together and we are going to have a great reunion there again…”

The video’s audio fades out just before Rubio says “…with Charlie and all the people we love.”

As Weinstein noted, the Constitution doesn’t just separate church and state, barring the government from respecting an establishment of religion. It also prohibits religious tests. Weinstein called the Easter greeting posts a “poster-child example” of a religious test and said they violate “a vast ocean” of regulations.

The centuries-old Easter greeting is believed to have originated from similar phrases in the New Testament. Its meaning goes beyond mere well wishes like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter.”

Pres. Donald Trump campaigned against ecumenical seasonal messages, such as “Happy Holidays,” falsely implying that businesses were barred from naming specific holidays, like Christmas. He has falsely claimed his election led to people saying “Merry Christmas” again.

But the Easter greeting goes even further than “Merry Christmas.” While referring to specific Christian holidays can exclude non-Christians, the Easter greeting negates them. It’s an assertion that Christianity’s defining claims are factually correct.

The Christian Bible, in other words, is correct, according to the government. The implication is that other, conflicting religious beliefs are false.

Muslims and Jews, for instance, believe a messiah is yet to come. Some religions, not to mention secularists, don’t believe in messiahs at all.

But as of today, the State Department and its secretary have used their official platforms to declare that non-Christians have it wrong.

Accordingly, under Rubio, other religions don’t get the same treatment in their respective holiday wishes. For instance, the overlapping Passover holiday got no official statement that Judaism is correct.

Last week, on the first day of Passover, the State Department marked the holiday without parroting Jewish claims that Passover miracles were real. Instead, the agency said “We” share “their” — the Jewish people’s — hope for peace.

The “we” was apparently not Jewish people. The Passover post, unlike the Easter messages, was addressed “to all who celebrate.”

The Hebrew phrase “Chag Sameach” translates roughly as “Happy Holidays.”

And even some Christians are left out by today’s posts. Orthodox Christianity observes Easter this year on April 12, a week from today.

The longtime State Department employee told me, “I’m outraged at the blatant cooption of official USG [U.S. government] and especially Department of State channels to push a specific religious credo of belief.”

The employee described themselves as atheist, and said they were planning to enjoy a secular Easter brunch on Sunday. They said:

“It’s normal for State and diplomats to wish groups a happy religious or secular holiday from official accounts - that’s called being polite, respectful, and decent human beings. The difference here is that this isn’t offering a positive statement to believers of a certain group; it’s an explicit statement of faith, and that is grossly inappropriate for a federal employer to say officially, in official channels. Let alone for a federal agency to say that!”

Weinstein of the MRFF said:

“These violations clearly show a pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of wholly illicit, immoral and unethical Christian nationalist exceptionalism, domination, superiority and triumphalism in abject defiance of this foundational aspect of our country’s Constitution.”

Rubio has a history of using his official positions to push his personal religious beliefs. But a member of Congress, which Rubio was, is typically understood to be speaking for themselves.

As the secretary of State, Rubio is America’s top diplomat, representing the entire nation on the world stage and leading a diplomatic corps that consists of people of every religious stripe, dealing with national governments both secular and of diverse religions.

Sixty-five percent of Americans identify as Christian. One out of three does not.

The State Department’s own Office of International Religious Freedom says it encourages governments to “to respect their international obligations to safeguard freedom of religion or belief. This includes reforming laws, [and] ending abusive or discriminatory practices…”

Rubio has in the past been active with the Fellowship Foundation, a private, secretive group that seeks to inject right-wing Christianity into politics. Rubio helped The Fellowship, also known as The Family, destroy a UN anti-corruption task force before it could zero in on Guatemala’s allegedly corrupt evangelical president.

The State Department last year erased Uganda’s LGBTQ+ death penalty from its annual human-rights report. The Fellowship abetted the new legislation.

Last April, in response to a Trump executive order, Rubio, who is Catholic, ordered department employees to report “anti-Christian bias.” There was no evidence of significant, let alone systemic, anti-Christian bias at the State Department or anywhere else in government.

Rubio’s order also condemned bias against other religions as discriminatory and unconstitutional, but acknowledged that Trump’s order “focuses on anti-Christian bias.”

Trump’s examples of putative anti-Christian bias under Pres. Joe Biden included things like not funding non-profits that refuse to serve LGBTQ+ people. (Funding was denied to any charity that discriminated against LGBTQ+ people, regardless of religious justification.)

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I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.