Nigel Farage’s ‘Project 2029’: The Pro-Trump Lobbyist Pushing His Agenda Into the UK

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 – whose clients include foreign political parties, a pro-Putin Balkan government, and a London policy organisation led by a former Conservative Cabinet minister. 

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.

Farage has not registered any interests in his travel for this event, claiming that he paid for the travel himself.

Alongside an all-star cast of Florida Republican stalwarts who took the stage of the fundraiser as Farage’s co-speakers was Adam Christian Johnson, also known as the ‘lectern guy’.

Johnson received a criminal conviction for his participation in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol Building in Washington DC, during which he was photographed stealing the lectern of Speaker of the House Nanci Pelosi. Up to 2,500 people had entered the Capitol Building during the attack, and 174 police officers were injured – and at least three died as a result.

A bipartisan Congressional select committee investigation concluded the following year that Trump had planned the 6 January attack as part of a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election results.

Upon taking office, Trump would pardon about 1,200 people convicted over the attack and dismissed charges against roughly 300 others – including members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Johnson was among those pardoned by Trump. Since the pardon, he has gone on to become a minor MAGA celebrity, appearing on podcasts to promote baseless conspiracy theories about the riots and US elections. Farage has previously downplayed far-right violence in Britain, describing anti-migrant riots in August 2024 – which involved racist targeting of ethnic minority British citizens – as the “inevitable consequence” of government failure and warning that “the public is reaching breaking point.”

At the Florida event, Nigel Farage posed for a photo shaking hands with the man who had vandalised Pelosi’s lectern on 6 January 2021. The two men are grinning at the camera.

The British Push

By April, Freeman’s IIM was hosting a parliamentary CGP delegation to Washington led by former Conservative Cabinet minister Dane Penny Mordaunt, including Labour MPs Fred Thomas and Rosena Allin-Khan, alongside Tory MPs Matt Vickers, Saqib Bhatti, and Bradley Thomas.

The related IIM filing reveals the extent of Freeman’s high-level access to the Trump administration, confirming plans for “a tour of the White House, US Capitol, and Pentagon.”

“The Coalition for Global Prosperity has worked with Mr Freeman solely to support our long-standing, cross-party MP learning delegations to the United States”, a CGP spokesperson told Byline Times. “Their purpose is to enable UK parliamentarians to meet US counterparts, government officials, and non-profit organisations to learn about global policy issues.”

Three months later, IIM was on the other side of the Atlantic for a whirlwind week of meetings in London and Belfast, this time to launch a new lobbying outfit on behalf of another Trump-aligned institution, Liberty University – which sat on the advisory board of Project 2025. 

One of those meetings was hosted by Nigel Farage at his Reform UK office in London.

According to Freeman’s social media posts, the trip was organised with “Liberty University UK” and launched a new organisation called the Institute for American-British Relations (IABR), intended to “preserve the values and institutions underpinning the Special Relationship.” 

Freeman’s delegation included former Republican congressman Dr Dave Brat, Senior Vice President of Business Relations at Liberty University, and Ian Paisley Jr, a former MP for the Democrat Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland.

Paisley’s former party, the DUP, is ideologically aligned with Project 2025 and the US evangelical right. It has long opposed abortion rights, same-sex marriage and binding climate change targets. Similarly, Liberty University is one of the largest evangelical universities in the United States and a central institution within the American Christian right.

Since then, Farage has continued to work closely with Freeman, who helped to secure American delegates for an invite-only dinner meeting in London with the Reform UK leader in September. One delegate secured by Freeman for the dinner, for instance, was a Trump-supporting American marketing strategist with links to senior Trump Cabinet officials Kristi Noem and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson (who recently sparked controversy for platforming neo-Nazi antisemite Nick Fuentes of the far-right ‘groypers’ movement).

Reform UK has now publicly aligned itself with Project 2025. No less than a month after Farage’s summer meeting with Zachary Freeman and Dave Brat of Liberty University, the Cambridge theologian James Orr – who heads up the Reform think-tank Centre for a Better Britain (CBB) – openly expressed his admiration for Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Amol Raja.

Aspiring to scrap Net Zero, rollback the Equality Act, and centralise executive power, much of CBB’s language mirrors Project 2025. By late October, its chair James Orr was appointed as senior advisor to Nigel Farage. 

The trail from Florida to Westminster exposes more than a shared ideology – it reveals a trans-Atlantic lobbying operation connecting Project 2025 to senior figures on Britain’s populist right. 

Neither Reform UK nor Imperial Independent Media responded to multiple requests for comment.

Former veteran Republican political campaign strategist Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told Byline Times: “One would hope other nations would see the damage MAGA has done to the United States on every axis and build up a resilient set of antibodies to its spread globally; the United Kingdom is obviously a ripe target, and with the technology, financial support, and the political will to spread far-right populism, they’re in the crosshairs of people like Freeman.”

This article was amended on 27 November 2025 to delete an error incorrectly claiming that Imperial Independent Media LLC had worked with the Representative Office of Republika Srpska in Austria.