SKY YORK JOURNAL News – A controversial nominee for the Office of Special Counsel is facing scrutiny after a data leak revealed his responses to a questionnaire for Project 2025, an initiative by the Heritage Foundation aimed at staffing a potential new Republican administration.
In 2024, as Donald Trump’s reelection campaign gained steam, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was designed around crafting an agenda for an incoming Trump White House, and put out a call for aspiring administration officials. The application sought to place would-be Trump appointees on the political spectrum and assess their priorities. Among those who filled out the form was Paul Ingrassia, whose name has since become central to a debate over the impartiality of key government roles.
Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Office of Special Counsel.
Now, pending a Senate confirmation, Ingrassia is set to potentially lead the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an office responsible for protecting whistleblowers and ensuring the civil service remains free from partisan influence. Critics, however, argue that Ingrassia’s past statements and questionnaire responses suggest he is ill-suited for a role demanding impartiality.
Project 2025 Questionnaire and Concerns
The Project 2025 questionnaire answers, attributed to Ingrassia’s name, have raised concerns about his commitment to non-partisanship. The responses, as reviewed by the SKY YORK JOURNAL, included suggestions for drastically reducing the size and scope of federal agencies due to perceived “toxic ideologies,” halting immigration, and implementing a novel voting test. Notably, Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment, as confirmed by SKY YORK JOURNAL sources.
A leaked dataset of the Project 2025 application questionnaires was released in June by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets. An analysis of the leaked data showed that more than 13,000 people had filled out the applications.
The leaked data, originally obtained by The Intercept and reviewed by SKY YORK JOURNAL, contains contact information matching Paul Ingrassia’s details. Ingrassia’s Senate confirmation hearing, initially scheduled for July 24, was postponed, adding to the uncertainty surrounding his nomination.
Opposition from Good Governance Groups
Civil society groups have voiced strong opposition to Ingrassia’s appointment. The Project on Government Oversight, along with 23 other organizations, penned an open letter to Senators, arguing that Ingrassia lacks the necessary qualities to lead the OSC effectively. They emphasized the importance of a nonpartisan leader with a respect for federal workers, stating that Ingrassia falls short of these criteria.
Ingrassia’s social media activity, as previously highlighted by SKY YORK JOURNAL, reveals instances where he advocated for the arrest of political opponents, suggested Democrats pose a threat to democracy, and disparaged Republicans critical of him.
White House Response
In response to the allegations, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields, in a statement provided to the SKY YORK JOURNAL, defended Ingrassia, calling him a “respected attorney” who “has served President Trump exceptionally well.” Fields dismissed the concerns as an “eleventh-hour smear campaign” and affirmed the administration’s confidence in Ingrassia’s ability to advance the President’s agenda.
The Questionnaire
In the Project 2025 questionnaire filled out under the name Paul Ingrassia, the respondent agreed that “the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.”
A response to a prompt about which political issue he was most passionate about and why included a long list of pet projects.
“I’m passionate about restructuring the administrative state, condensing the size and scope of the various bureaucratic agencies, defunding many of them, given how destructive they and their toxic ideologies have been on the American way of life; reform and shut down many of the intelligence agencies; fully upend the justice department; reform the courts; redesign Washington, D.C., and build an even better city in its wake,” the Project 2025 applicant wrote.
The questionnaire also asked respondents to “name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.” The response — Trump and Pat Buchanan — lacked an explanation. When asked to “name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy,” the data under Paul Ingrassia’s name said “Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Donald Trump.”
The answer to the question about what issues the applicant was passionate about said:
I’m also very passionate about immigration — specifically, ending birthright citizenship, deporting all illegals and thinking about economic, other ways, to incentivize them to self-deport, building the wall and militarizing it with state of the art technology, personnel; instating a moratorium on all immigration, and revising the tests for citizenship, voting, other basic privileges of American life.
Trump Loyalist
Long before his stint in government, Ingrassia was a right-wing firebrand. A 30-year-old lawyer and right-wing commentator, he has referred to himself as “Trump’s favorite Substacker” and spent years writing articles praising Trump.
He has ties to far-right figures and those with fringe beliefs. Last summer, Ingrassia showed up at a rally organized by far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes, whom Ingrassia has advocated for in the past. He also has a relationship with Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a January 6 rioter who the Justice Department called a “Nazi sympathizer.”
Ingrassia’s social media has included 9/11 conspiracy theories and support for Alex Jones, who gained notoriety for denying children were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
He graduated from Cornell Law in 2022. In 2023, Ingrassia worked for McBride Law, a firm that represented far-right influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate when they were facing allegations of rape and human trafficking in Romania and the United Kingdom. The firm filed a defamation lawsuit against one of their accusers that summer. (The Tate brothers have consistently denied these allegations. Proceedings are ongoing in both countries.)
Ingrassia was not legally allowed to practice or market himself as a lawyer at the time; the firm referred to him as an Ivy League-educated associate attorney working on the case. He sat for the bar in July 2023 and was admitted to practice in New York on July 30, 2024.
After McBride, he worked as a communications director for the conservative nonprofit National Constitutional Law Union and occasionally wrote articles for the right-wing site Gateway Pundit. He left both positions after taking a job in January as a presidential liaison to the Department of Justice in January.
After a few months, however, he was reassigned from the Justice Department to another agency amid reports of administration infighting.
Reporting from ABC suggested his advocacy for the department to hire John Pierce, his old boss at the National Constitutional Law Union, played a role. Pierce represented many January 6 rioters. His work as a defense attorney faced criticism in the media.
Correction: July 24, 2025
This story has been corrected to remove an errant reference to the Office of Special Counsel being housed at the Justice Department. It has also been updated to include a statement from the White House received after publication and note the delay in Ingrassia’s hearing.
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