By Will Sommer
(c) 2024 , The Washington Post
Author Malcolm Harris opened the door of his Capitol Hill home on Tuesday morning to find a D.C. police officer on his stoop.
The officer had come to find out what Harris knew about a missing “Project 2025” duffel bag from the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank – and the documents that had been inside. But Harris wasn’t interested in chatting.
“I don’t talk to the police, so we didn’t have a very long conversation,” Harris told The Washington Post.
For the Heritage Foundation, it’s hard to imagine a worse person to come across a bag full of their internal files than Harris. A Marxist journalist with a sense of humor and three books critiquing capitalism to his name, including the 2023 national bestseller “Palo Alto,” Harris has dedicated his life to the opposite of Heritage’s conservative politics.
In a city built on politics, Washingtonians of wildly different political persuasions typically manage to work, live and forget their duffel bags around one another without the situation escalating to a police investigation. Then again …
In Harris’s telling, he came into possession of the duffel bag on the evening of Aug. 9, as he walked to pick up a cheesecake. At the corner of Sixth and E Streets NE, Harris passed a low-set ledge where he says people often leave free, unwanted items. (As Harris reenacted his discovery of the bag at the corner a week later, someone was giving away a succulent.)
“People in Capitol Hill just leave a bunch of really nice stuff out all the time,” said Harris, who once picked up a coffee machine on the same block. “This is, in fact, not the nicest duffel bag I have found outside for free on Capitol Hill.”
As he walked up to the bag, Harris recalled later, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The blue-and-white, preppy-style banker bag carried branding for Project 2025, the sprawling Heritage project that has become a political third-rail for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Project 2025, a wide-ranging blueprint for a second Trump presidency created by many people with close ties to the ex-president, has become a weight around Republicans’ necks and a sort of byword for Democrats’ concerns about an extremist future in a second Trump administration. Amid a barrage of criticism of its goals – which include the elimination of the Department of Education, mass deportations and new restrictions on abortion – Trump distanced himself from the program in July. That same month, Project 2025’s leader left Heritage, and the group ceased new policy work.
For liberals of an ironic bent, the duffel bag could make the ultimate trophy. On Monday, Harris posted a picture of the bag on X, saying he might give the documents inside to a journalist.
The files and other items inside weren’t hugely revelatory. The bag and most of its contents appeared to be part of a Heritage internship program, including a document with pictures and lengthy biographies of its interns. Still, the fact that Harris discovered the documents on the streets of Washington could be a minor embarrassment for the think tank, at a time when both Heritage and Project 2025 are under intense scrutiny.
“It’s not like I found secret internal documents about Project 2025,” Harris said. “It’s not that crazy; it’s like, ‘Whoops, they left this out.’”
Judging from the reactions Harris received on X, though, the real prize appeared to be the bag itself. Harris said he soon received more than a dozen direct messages from interested buyers offering hundreds of dollars for the bag – “I need that bag! Let me buy that bag!” Harris initially considered auctioning off the bag, without its contents, to raise money for charity.
He figured the bag could make for a wry conversation piece.
“Just showing people when they come by your crib, like, ‘Look what I got,’” Harris said.
But Harris’s plans for the bag would soon run into D.C. police. After seeing Harris’s tweets, a woman who describes herself on LinkedIn as a Project 2025 staffer called the police and filed a complaint for theft, according to a police report obtained by The Post.
In the account she gave to police, the bag disappeared in the late afternoon of Friday, Aug. 9, when she and another Heritage staffer “left a bag in a parking space while getting into their car,” in a public area a block from Heritage’s headquarters on the 200 block of Massachusetts Avenue NE. When they returned to get it 30 minutes later, the bag was gone.
Harris and the Heritage staffer who complained to police differ on when the bag was taken. In the police report, the Heritage staffer claims the bag was taken from the parking spot a little more than an hour earlier, between 5 and 5:30 p.m. Harris provided The Post with map app data that demonstrates he was at the corner several blocks away where he claimed to have found it around 6:45 p.m. that day.
One or both of their accounts may be wrong, but the time difference also raises the possibility that an unknown third party took the bag from the parking space, carried it a few blocks, was perhaps unimpressed with the book about Israel and the Altoids tin inside, and dropped it on the corner, where Harris later found it.
The police report makes no mention of surveillance videos or witnesses who saw Harris take the bag from the parking spot.
The officer who went to Harris’s house claims in the police report that the author “spontaneously admitted that he was in possession of the bag and that he would not return it.” Harris insists he didn’t tell the officer he had the bag, saying only that he refused to give the officer his identification. Harris said he would never speak to the police without a lawyer, since both his wife and sister are criminal defense attorneys.
“If I talk to the police without a lawyer, I’m in way more trouble with my family,” Harris said.
On Thursday morning, after learning more about the ongoing police investigation, Harris decided to end the dispute himself. With his wife and 7-month-old baby (who was dressed in a police-abolition onesie), Harris walked to Heritage’s office to return the bag.
At no point in the process, Harris said, had anyone from Heritage just emailed him to ask for the bag back, but he was eager to be rid of it.
As Harris waited in the lobby, Project 2025 was dealing with still another embarrassment, this time potentially far more serious. Earlier that morning, a British journalism nonprofit released footage of Project 2025 author Russell Vought boasting about the program’s Trump ties. The journalists gained access to Vought by duping him with several false identities and websites.
Inside Heritage’s lobby, Harris and a man who identified himself as Heritage’s head of security sorted through the items in the bag, so the man could give Harris an itemized receipt that he hoped would put the police case to rest. The security chief said he didn’t need to verify the bag’s contents, given that the internship documents inside were not exactly “the keys to the kingdom.”
In a statement to The Post, a Heritage spokesperson said they were glad the bag had been turned over.
“We are pleased that our intern’s property was returned and hope that in the future our neighbors will exercise basic decency so that the police need not be involved,” the statement said.
After once more demanding an apology from Heritage for sending “an armed officer to my home,” Harris headed for the door, then posed for a final selfie in front of Heritage’s headquarters. The troublesome bag was gone.
“It’s not a bad bag,” Harris said. “But I guess it’s historically interesting.”