Mayorkas Impeachment Staff Have Theocratic Ties
The top two staffers on the committee that led the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have ties to multiple theocratic organizations, including one that teaches Hill staffers to inject Biblical views into their work, disclosure filings show.
Some of the organizations have histories of amplifying falsehoods to combat their political enemies.
The Homeland Security Committee chair, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), oversaw last month’s impeachment and is one of the impeachment managers appointed by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to prosecute Mayorkas in the Senate. Senate Republicans are pushing Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to allow a trial, but it’s not clear that he will.
Although Green has not made public which of his staffers will assist the House impeachment managers, it’s expected that the team will draw from his committee’s impeachment veterans.
And staffers on the team that impeached Mayorkas in the House have multiple ties to far-right, theocratic organizations. That includes the staff director and his deputy.
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Their affiliations include organizations that have used lies to counter or even remove political enemies, as even some Republicans have suggested Green’s committee is doing to Mayorkas by characterizing policy differences as prosecutable offenses.
Green’s committee staff director is longtime aide Stephen Siao. The deputy staff director is Eric Heighberger.
The groups to which they’re tied include the Council for National Policy (CNP), the Faith and Law Project, and even the Guatemalan affiliate of the secretive Christian group behind the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, according to records I reviewed.
When Green went to Congress in January 2019, he tapped Siao, his friend and campaign manager, as his chief of staff.
Between March and July of that year, Siao became a member of the CNP, according to membership rolls obtained by Documented.
The Council for National Policy
The far-right, theocratic leanings of CNP leaders and members have been well established. The group has explicitly identified its goals as including national “policy and leadership that restores … Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.”
CNP’s executive director today, and when Siao joined, is former lobbyist and Rep. Bob McEwen (R-TN), a longtime insider at and emissary for the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family, the group behind the National Prayer Breakfast. Another Family insider, Pres. Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese, has been a CNP fellow.
CNP’s 2019 Board of Directors included Ginni Thomas — who sought to help Trump steal the election — and Ken Blackwell, now a senior fellow at the Family Research Council. The CNP Board of Governors included Ralph Reed, Jay Sekulow, Leonard Leo, and Foster Friess.
CNP has embraced former Pres. Donald Trump, including after his attempt to steal the presidency. But even before Trump, some of CNP’s Christian right leaders had a history of challenging democratic results they didn’t like — even if it meant lying.
When Côte d'Ivoire’s then-President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after losing a 2010 election that international observers deemed fair, McEwen was one of the Christian right stalwarts who rode to his rescue.
Gbagbo, an evangelical Christian, paid McEwen, then a lobbyist, $25,000 a month to help him retain power. McEwen falsely called the assumption of the presidency by Gbagbo’s Muslim opponent “a coup.”
(Another Family insider, then-Sen. James Inhofe, also backed Gbagbo. Inhofe claimed he had “evidence of massive voter fraud” in Côte d'Ivoire, almost a decade before Trump did it here.)
Siao’s Christian-right affiliations aren’t limited to the CNP. In 2022, he won a ten-month fellowship focusing on “American political theory“ from Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian school where the board of trustees is chaired by right-wing game-show host Pat Sajak.
Reportedly, Siao “started his career” with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has fought as high as the Supreme Court for religion-based exemptions to anti-discrimination law.
His background also includes communications and grassroots work for Heritage Action for America. A spinoff of the Heritage Foundation, the group acts as its political arm, advocating for legislation. A number of the Mayorkas impeachment staffers, including top investigator Sang Yi, have connections to Heritage, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, a detailed plan to fill the federal government with loyalists of Donald Trump if he wins in November.
Siao’s deputy, Heighberger, is a longtime congressional staffer. Heighberger’s been tied even more closely to a right-wing Christian group that mustered lies in the pursuit of power. (Neither Siao nor Heighberger nor Green’s committee responded to emailed questions and a request for comment.)
Guatemala Prospera
Back in 2007, Heighberger was a bit player in a relatively trivial, albeit troubling, instance of government deception. FEMA held a fake news conference, and Heighberger was a participant. It’s not clear whether Heighberger understood the nature of the fake event, but he’s also been associated with a group involved in a much more grave use of deception against political opponents.
Last year, Heighberger traveled to Guatemala on the dime of a group called Guatemala Prospera.
Guatemala Prospera is one of The Family’s many international spinoffs. Its own version of the National Prayer Breakfast served as a nexus for corrupt businesses and individuals who helped elect right-wing evangelical President Jimmy Morales.
Morales allegedly won office thanks in part to illegal infusions of cash from Guatemala’s elite, some of whom were drawn to the Guatemalan breakfast by the chance to hobnob with American members of Congress — flown there by The Family.
When a UN anti-corruption task force trained its sights on those potential campaign-finance violations, the founder of Guatemala Prospera and his American allies in The Family succeeded in killing the task force.
The task force had enjoyed strong bipartisan support in the U.S. at the time. But then Family insiders, most notably Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), embraced and elevated claims that the task force was compromised by the Russians. The tale was so far-fetched even the State Department of then-Secretary Mike Pompeo rejected it.
It didn’t matter. Rubio and others used the Helsinki Commission to push the story. Right-wing media picked it up and the consensus supporting the task force broke. Without that U.S. shield, Morales had a green light to run the task force out of the country.
The nation’s top prosecutor fled, becoming a refugee living in a Washington, DC, studio apartment with help from expatriate donors. Morales escaped prosecution, and was succeeded by another religious right-winger.
Last year, the political allies of allegedly corrupt companies behind all of these efforts came extremely close to subverting first the election of a progressive president and then his assumption of the office in January.
During that time, Heighberger’s trip, sponsored by Guatemala Prospera, included meetings with some of those companies, according to the itinerary he filed with his congressional disclosure form.
There’s no indication Heighberger played any role in Guatemala’s domestic politics; the trip was about boosting U.S. investment that would benefit those companies. One of the trip’s goals, according to Heighberger’s filing, was to “look at issues such as illegal migration.” One driver of such migration, of course, is corruption, which the UN task force is no longer there to combat.
Politically advantageous lies aren’t the only Christian-right tool to be found looking at the past associations of Mayorkas’s prosecutors.
There’s also the conviction that one’s individual religious beliefs should influence how you carry out your official duties, even to the point of superseding traditional democratic norms. That creed, the supremacy of one’s personal faith over the obligations of government service, is made explicit by a right-wing Christian group that Siao and Heighberger have in common.
It’s called the Faith and Law Project, and its history suggests that faith comes first not just in the title, but on the job. The disclosure filings by Siao and Heighberger downplay the organization’s evangelical Christian nature, but it’s clear in other documents.
Faith or Law
In Siao’s filing to attend Faith and Law’s October 2022 conference, he wrote that the event consisted of “sessions on characteristics that are essential to public service, and how they should be applied in our roles on Capitol Hill.” He said, “The sessions included those on truth, justice, peace, and love.”
Faith and Law’s filings for both Siao’s and Heighberger’s trips were similarly anodyne. The retreat’s purpose, the group said in each filing, was “to equip Hill staff and other attendees on how to critically think about, apply, and discuss faithfulness and good character in public service.”
If those descriptions sound laudable, or even benign, it’s because they both omit what Faith and Law clearly says elsewhere about its work. It’s not just generic “faithfulness” that Faith and Law has in mind. It’s Christian faithfulness. And Christian faith.
The conference’s agenda, for instance, is straight-forward. The actual name is “Christian Faithfulness in Public Service: Essential Characteristics of a Christ-follower on Capitol Hill.”
Lessons about essential characteristics for Capitol Hill Christ-followers came from event speakers including Paul McNulty, a co-founder of Faith and Law and president of the Christian, conservative Grove City College, which has a history of being ranked among the schools most hostile to LGBTQ+ people.
McNulty is probably most famous, however, for his role in the Bush administration’s attempt to use false claims of voter fraud to justify official voter suppression. After the Bush White House pushed out federal prosecutors who refused to go along with lies of rampant voter fraud, McNulty, then a Justice Department official, said in congressional testimony that most of the departed prosecutors left for “performance-related” issues and that the White House wasn’t involved.
When DOJ documents emerged refuting McNulty’s testimony, he blamed other DOJ officials for not briefing him fully.
McNulty’s topics at the 2022 Faith and Law conference included truth and justice. To his credit, the agenda flags an important epistemological tool, being “watchful for politically beneficial assumptions.”
Other references are more ambiguous. “Does truth even matter in political debates?” one bullet point asks, presumably rhetorically. Another suggests that justice is “[M]ore about wisdom than knowledge,” and follows that up with the question, “To what extent does your general view on the virtues of government align with God's purposes as revealed in the Scriptures?”
Also speaking was Mark Rodgers. Head of the Clapham Group, a political consultancy group that seeks to shape the culture, Rodgers is former chief of staff for then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA). While Rodgers holds typical evangelical views such as opposing reproductive rights, they’re somewhat tempered by more progressive positions, such as advocating for paid parental leave and tax credits for low-income parents.
But the broader theme of the conference assumed the injection of personal religious belief into one’s government work. The expectation, the agenda says, is that attendees will learn lessons that might “impact how you interact with public policy — the laws you draft and the laws you seek to stop…”
Another filing for the same event, submitted months later by a Democratic staffer, gives much more explicit detail about the sectarian and even theocratic themes. It says the conference “explores how a Christian worldview impacts public policy and a vocation in the public square.”
The reason Faith and Law gives in this filing for holding the retreat is that it’s “for attendees to learn how to apply a Biblical framework to their work.”
One exercise asked participants to consider whether Christians should be “more winsome” or, like right-wing pundit Eric Metaxas, a former National Prayer Breakfast speaker, “more bold in our confrontation with the culture as it becomes more hostile to traditional Christian values,” asking, “Is it possible to do both?”
The group alludes to its evangelical beliefs in one dinner-table exercise for participants. The suggested discussion-starter asks participants to think down the road about the direction of the culture, “other than Jesus's second coming.”
Participants are asked to consider several questions that presume the intertwining of their personal faith with the public office they hold, or even to use that office to proselytize:
“What has helped you in the context of your work to pursue faithfully your calling to be a partaker of the divine nature?”
“In what ways does your job's interaction with people allow you to bear witness to the Gospel?”
“From your vocational platform, what are ways that you can work to advance the Kingdom of God beyond doing your job with excellence?”
The agenda also takes as a given that Hill participants will work to advance the gospel. One dinner discussion topic: “To what extent is the current divisiveness in public life compromising the advancement of the gospel? What can we do to remedy this problem?”
Siao’s filing didn’t include this version of the agenda.
In it, only one Christian dictate is questioned specifically. The question arises in another suggested discussion topic: “How does Jesus's command to love one another get misused in policymaking?” the agenda asks. “Is there a proper place for its consideration, and if so, where?” No examples were offered of love’s misuse in policymaking.
Another Homeland Security Committee staffer, attending the 2023 Faith and Law conference, was straightforward about incorporating her religious beliefs in her work. “As a Research Assistant on the Committee on Homeland Security, I frequently ask myself how my personal faith should influence my approach to national security and emergency management,” she wrote. “This retreat will help me answer that question…”
That filing was signed by Green on Sept. 28, 2023, during the committee’s Mayorkas investigation.
Somewhat paradoxically, the staffer both anticipates learning how her personal beliefs should influence her government service and laments a lack of humility on Capitol Hill.
That same 2023 conference included a session moderated by Ammon Simon, a Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer. Simon’s LinkedIn page shows he graduated from Wheaton, home to The Family’s archives, and worked for Family insiders including then-Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL), who’s now on the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation board.
Simon was also senior counsel at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Secretary Ben Carson, whose political career was launched at the National Prayer Breakfast.
Simon’s LinkedIn page doesn’t include his prior work for the right-wing Judicial Crisis Network. He’s also listed as an author at The Daily Caller.
In his 2023 Faith and Law presentation, Simon offered “a brief framework on how Christians could and should engage with the distinctive tensions within vocations in law, policy, and associated disciplines.”
Simon also moderated a panel at the 2023 conference, in which Siao was a panelist, alongside Ann Thomas Johnston (a former lobbyist, Hill staffer, and Trump Defense Department official) and former GOP Hill staffer Katherine Haley.
Another session used a papal encyclical to “highlight the tension and possibility inherent in Christians in political vocations.”
The president of Westmont College was also there. Westmont is a Christian university with decades-old ties to The Family, allegedly “a feeder school.” Its motto is “Holding Christ Preeminent.”
One session led by Westmont President Dr. Gayle Beebe focused on leadership. For that exercise, on “Ethics and Morality in Public Square,” Beebe shared observations about world leaders “shaped by their religious upbringing.” Examples included Henry Kissinger.
Beebe and former Rep. Dan Coats (R-IN), another longtime Family insider, led a discussion on “frames that Christian Hill staffers can use to understand their vocational roles…” Panelists included officials from Navigators, Ministry to State, and Christian Embassy, organizations with varying degrees of theocratic histories.
Faith and Law’s advisory board includes McNulty, House Speaker Johnson, and several Family insiders: Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), and former Reps. Joe Pitts (R-PA), Zach Wamp (R-TN), and Frank Wolf (R-VA).
Faith and Law Executive Director Susan Gates, according to the group’s bio for her, “has a passion for the intersection of Christian faith and public policy.”
In an email included with one Democratic staffer’s travel disclosure filing, a Faith and Law official who previously worked for both Heritage and Rep. Pitts acknowledges the group’s partisan nature. “I’m really trying to make this more bi-partisan and would love more ideas of Christian democrats to invite,” then-Executive Director Lauren Noyes wrote in 2022 to the Democratic staffer. “We’d love to have you!”
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran reporter and TV news producer, having worked at MSNBC, CNN, and TYT. You can support his independent reporting by becoming a subscriber.