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When President Donald Trump threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion over its edit of his speech from 6 January 2021, when thousands of rioters descended on the US Capitol building, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage immediately took to his show on GB News to defend the President.
Describing the BBC’s edit of his speech as “totally outrageous” he told his viewers that “I spent a few minutes with him [the US President]… And his basic thought was, ‘Is this how you treat your best ally in the world?’ And I get it.”
Six months earlier, under chandeliers and American flags at a Florida Republican fundraiser, Farage grinned for the cameras as he shook the hand of a convicted 6 January rioter – a man once photographed stealing Nancy Pelosi’s lectern.
At the time, it was widely reported that Farage had missed PMQs to attend the event. Byline Times can reveal that the photo captured more than a moment. It marked the meeting point of two movements – Donald Trump’s Project 2025 machine in the United States and a rising populist right in the UK.
The same pro-Trump political operative who arranged Farage’s Florida appearance later brought his network to London, launching a new lobbying vehicle aimed at exporting Trump’s evangelical Project 2025 agenda across the Atlantic, and working secretly to support Farage.
It was in March 2025, at a glitzy fundraising event hosted by the Florida Republican Party in Tallahassee, that Farage posed for a photograph shaking hands with a convicted 6 January 2021 rioter. The event – a Florida Republican ‘Disruptors Dinner’ fundraiser whose VIP tables sold for $25,000 apiece – featured the Reform UK leader as the man who delivered Brexit.
Seven months later he belatedly registered receiving a fee for the “speaking engagement” from a company called Imperial Independent Media LLC (IIM), operating from Washington but registered in Alaska. His parliamentary register shows three installments totalling £25,972.
By failing to declare the payment at the time, Farage had breached parliamentary rules. He conceded that his Florida visit should have been declared earlier and apologised for the “error”.
By the time he disclosed the fees in October, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards had already opened a probe into the late registration.
The name of the paying company barely registered in Westminster. In Washington, however, it can be found in Justice Department files as the vehicle of a registered foreign agent – Zachary G. Freeman.
Byline Times can reveal that Farage’s benefactor is a pro-Trump political lobbyist embedded in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 ecosystem – the US conservative plan to dismantle climate policy, rights for women and ethnic minorities, and democratic safeguards. He also has ties to evangelical groups in the US with a history of anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion activism – and appears to be working actively with Farage to bring this Project 2025-style ideology to Britain.
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‘The Next Prime Minister of Great Britain’
In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, Zachary Freeman worked with the Heritage Foundation’s State Department planning team in Washington DC. The group’s work fed into Project 2025.
Project 2025 was a 900-page policy manual produced by the Heritage Foundation under its ‘Mandate for Leadership’ series. The document set out how the incoming second Trump administration should radically reshape the federal state, replacing almost all civil servants with pro-Trump political appointees, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate programmes, slashing renewable energy, abolishing the Department of Education, cracking down on women’s rights to abortion (even in relation to cases of rape or risk of death) and dismantling fundamental civil rights legislation protecting Black people and minorities from discrimination.
Zachary Freeman is also a long-time anti-abortion activist. As communications director for the evangelical Family Policy Institute of Washington, he campaigned against LGBTQ+ rights and made a name for himself over a lawsuit to leak abortion clinic employee names to the Center for Medical Progress – an anti-abortion group known for propagating heavily doctored videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood profiting off the sale of fetal tissue.
In 2017, Freeman’s consultancy Imperial Independent Media LLC – which paid Farage – lobbied on behalf of the Women’s Liberation Front, a US anti-trans group which received funding and legal support from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an American evangelical anti-abortion pressure group which helped overturn Roe v Wade – the landmark US Supreme Court decision ruling that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an abortion.
Previously, as the New York Times revealed, the ADF’s UK arm helped arrange Farage’s US congressional testimony, brokered a secret meeting with Trump officials in London and supplied the Trump administration with attack lines casting the British government as hostile to free speech.
More recently, Imperial has lobbied on behalf of a string of foreign political and institutional clients, including Iceland’s right wing Independence Party.
In January 2024, the filings reveal, IIM began lobbying on behalf of the Coalition for Global Prosperity (CGP), a London-based foreign policy advocacy group founded in 2018 by former Tory prime minister David Cameron.
Freeman has gone on to work closely with CGP since then, arranging delegations of British cross-party parliamentarians to meet mostly Republican Party politicians and Trump administration officials.
One filing from August 2024, proposed a delegation for “US/UK alliance building” in December for “a briefing at Heritage Foundation, and meetings with presidential transition team”.
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Riot Act
In January 2025, both Zachary Freeman and Nigel Farage attended a raucous inauguration party celebrating Trump’s return to the White House organised by the so-called ‘bad boys of Brexit’: Andy Wigmore, Arron Banks and Washington fixer Gerry Gunster. The party ended up proclaiming Farage as “the next prime minister of Great Britain”.
By March, Freeman would play a key role in facilitating Farage’s attendance at the Republican Party fundraising event in Tallahassee. Photographs obtained by Byline Times suggest that Farage travelled by private jet for the event, accompanied by Freeman and a former Florida state lobbyist, Adam B. Corey.