CNP's Secret 2014 Membership Directory Leaked - 413 Conservative Elite Exposed

The Southern Poverty Law Center obtained and released a leaked copy of the Council for National Policy’s 2014 Membership Directory, exposing 413 members of what it described as a “Who’s Who of the Right” - the first comprehensive membership list made public since 1998.

The 191-page directory revealed the depth of CNP’s coordination network, including members who had kept their affiliation secret for years. Among the notable members exposed were Steve Bannon (who would become Trump’s chief strategist) and Kellyanne Conway (who was on CNP’s executive committee in 2014 and would become Trump’s senior counselor).

SPLC’s analysis found the two most predominant issues among CNP members were “international/islamophobia” and “sexual morality/anti-LGBT,” revealing the ideological priorities driving the network’s coordination efforts.

The leaked directory was significant not only for exposing conservative activists and religious right leaders but for revealing “the many real extremists who are included.” The membership roster demonstrated how CNP functioned as a coordination hub connecting Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the Federalist Society, and other conservative institutions through a single secretive network.

The directory showed CNP members paid thousands of dollars for invitation-only membership in an organization whose existence they were instructed never to acknowledge publicly. This exposure provided rare documentation of the shadow network that coordinates conservative movement strategy across media, policy, legal, and political domains.

The leak represented a major breach in CNP’s decades-long operational security, offering the public its first detailed look at the membership roster of the organization Anne Nelson would later call “the secret hub of the radical right” in her book “Shadow Network.”