By GARY FIELDS and ALI SWENSON
WASHINGTON (AP) — A conservative think tank that is planning for a complete overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win is suggesting that President Joe Biden might try to hold the White House “by force” if he loses the November election.
The Heritage Foundation’s warning — which goes against Biden’s own public statements — appeared in a report released Thursday that the group said resulted from a role-playing exercise gaming out potential scenarios before and after the 2024 election.
“The lawlessness of the Biden Administration — at the border, in staffing considerations, and in routine defiance of court rulings — makes clear that the current president and his administration not only possesses the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president,” the report reads.
The report, issued just ahead of the Republican National Convention and four months from the presidential election, shows how conservative groups supportive of former President Donald Trump are trying to turn the tables on the narrative of which candidate represents the greatest threat to the country’s democratic traditions. Biden has dedicated a handful of speeches to laying out the case against Trump, while Trump and his supporters have pointed to his four criminal cases to suggest that Democrats have weaponized the justice system against their chief political opponent.
The Heritage Foundation and other pro-Trump groups have continued to promote the same false claims of election fraud that fueled Trump’s attempts to stay in office despite his 2020 loss to Biden. Those efforts culminated in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when rioters sought to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
During a news conference to discuss the report, the authors warned about the upcoming election, employing a technique Trump has used throughout his political career to cast doubt on the validity of an election in case he loses.
“As things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America,” Mike Howell, executive director of the foundation’s Oversight Project, said.
The report alarmed experts who pointed out that there’s been no indication Biden intends to hold onto the presidency if he loses.
“This is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Biden has said he will accept the election results.
“Like President Biden has previously committed, he will accept the will of the American people,” his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters in May. “That is a commitment from the president.”
The Biden campaign on Thursday denounced the claim and noted that the group is the same one pushing Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint for dismantling many parts of the federal government and making far-reaching changes that include rolling back protections for the LGBTQ community and infusing Christianity more deeply into society. It said the group was “laying the groundwork to try and steal another election.”
“This document is nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6,” said James Singer, a spokesperson for the campaign.
Trump has stopped short of making a commitment to accept the results, saying in CNN’s recent presidential debate that he would do so “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.”
The Heritage Foundation report details the results of two role-playing exercises it says were conducted by a bipartisan group of participants who it declined to name, saying it kept them secret for safety reasons. It lists several key lessons and findings, largely centered around potential left-wing efforts to interfere with the election.
It instructs the public to “reflexively disbelieve and challenge the intelligence community’s allegations regarding Trump, foreign interference, and Republican efforts to legally win the White House.”
Hasen said those recommendations seem aimed at sowing doubt about institutions that “help protect election integrity and give voters truthful information they need to evaluate evidence before them.”
The report was created as part of a collaboration dubbed the “Transition Integrity Project,” which Heritage says formed in January in response to Biden’s “weaponization of government” and “record of violating norms and constitutional limitations on executive power.”
The authors took inspiration from a different group by the same name that ran an exercise in 2020 anticipating that Trump would likely contest that year’s election results. Howell said he felt that group’s efforts were ideologically biased while his own project was bipartisan.
Rosa Brooks, one of the organizers of the 2020 exercise, said of the new report that she would have “welcomed a good faith assessment of the vulnerabilities, but this isn’t it.” She said she has criticisms of Biden, but “I don’t have the slightest concern that he will refuse to accept the results of the election.”
The report’s release comes a week after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
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Swenson reported from New York.
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