He found a Project 2025 duffel bag. Then police showed up at his house.
Journalist and author Malcolm Harris says he found the bag left on a ledge in Capitol Hill. It turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.


This Project 2025 duffel bag, photographed Aug. 15, was found by author and journalist Malcolm Harris on Aug. 9. Harris says it was left on a ledge. (Will Sommer for The Washington Post)

By Will Sommer
August 16, 2024 at 2:10 p.m. EDT

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.


The Heritage Foundation's building on Massachusetts Avenue NE in Washington. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

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.

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By Will Sommer
Will Sommer is a media reporter for the Style section. He's the author of "Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America," a book covering the QAnon movement. Twitter