P2025 links: Senior Fellow at Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 advisory group. He worked closely with judicial activist like Leonard Leo on the SCOTUS Clarence Thomas nomination, and calls both men close friends; he is close to Ginny Thomas, who is also linked to Project 2025 advisory groups and law efforts.

Qualifications: A lawyer and partner at Shafer Jaffe LLP; Chief Counsel for Oversight and Investigations in Congress for a decade. He worked under Russell Vought at the OMB under Trump 1.0.

Views: Paoletta helped secure Justice Clarence Thomas’s nomination to Supreme Court, and wrote a book on Thomas. He is a fierce Christian activist. Lisa Graves of True North Research is among right wing influence watchdogs who tracked the dark money connections between Paoletta, Leo, Thomas, and other right-wing billionaires like Harlan Crow. Paoletta has been assigned by Trump to work closely with the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, run by Musk and Ramaswamy) to eliminate regulations and federal agency bloat. Paoletta is a fierce critic of the Justice department, which he views as weaponized against Trump.