Tim Chapman, the president of former Vice President Mike Pence’s think tank, said on Monday that he expects his Advancing American Freedom organization to poach more staffers from the Heritage Foundation after announcing the hiring of 15 individuals from the embattled conservative organization.

Advancing American Freedom, founded by Pence in 2021 to advocate for classical conservative principles as President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement cemented its hold on parts of the Republican Party, announced on Monday that 15 Heritage staffers, including three senior officials from the think tank’s legal, economic and data teams, would be moving to AAF at the start of the new year. Chapman, who has been leading the recruitment effort, predicted more Heritage staffers would resign amid continuing frustration over Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ refusal to disavow Tucker Carlson for his platforming of neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes.

“Why I’m so excited about this big move today is because it really supercharges our efforts to be able to be a policy leader on the Capitol Hill and helps us create an institution that will be valuable to policy entrepreneurs,” Chapman told Jewish Insider in an interview on Monday. “These 15 hires that came today will not be the last 15. We expect to see other people leave Heritage and go to AAF and other places as well. We are happy to welcome them.”

Richard Stern, who led Heritage’s economic policy group, and Kevin Dayaratna, who served as Heritage’s chief statistician, were two of the senior officials from the embattled think tank joining AAF along with some members of their team. They are being joined by John Malcolm, Heritage’s vice president of its Institute for Constitutional Government and director of the organization’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, who will relocate the center, named for former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, to AAF. 

Chapman helped launch and lead Heritage Action, the think tank’s grassroots advocacy arm, and served as chief of staff to the late Heritage cofounder Edwin J. Feulner during part of his 36-year tenure as the organization’s president. He told JI that AAF began a $15 million fundraising campaign last month to cover the expenses of hiring the outgoing Heritage staffers and raised $13 million within two weeks. 

“We viewed this as a big opportunity to accelerate our growth plans, to become that institution that we’re building. It all happened very fast,” Chapman said.

Chapman said AAF’s quick success with fundraising suggested to him that “there is a market out there amongst conservative philanthropists for reorganization on the right. There were a lot of new donors who came in because they saw the value in the project and the importance of having an institution like the one I’m describing, and a lot of our current donors who stepped up and gave more.”

“It also says to me that there is a very heightened awareness of the downfall of institutions like Heritage, who have shifted their focus,” he explained.

“I look at it as the conservative movement reorganizing itself. The Heritage team that we are bringing over today, these are principled conservatives more in the traditional conservative camp. They wouldn’t think of themselves as nationalist conservatives, or not even necessarily MAGA conservatives,” Chapman said of the Heritage recruits. “There are a lot of things that MAGA fights for that we might be aligned on, but they would view themselves that way [from a more traditional standpoint], and they very much had been feeling stifled over the last two years at the Heritage Foundation.”

“Heritage had been creating an environment internally where the organization’s role as a traditional think tank that stood outside of the Republican Party was not the business plan for the future of the Heritage Foundation,” he added. “They started to think of themselves more as an outside enforcer for the MAGA nationalist perspective, and really began to orient themselves around personalities, whether it’s President Trump or [Vice President] JD Vance or other personalities that hold significant cachet on the right.”

Pence accused the Heritage Foundation of “abandoning its principles” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on AAF’s recruitment effort. “Why these people are coming our way is that Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism,” Pence told the outlet. 

A Heritage spokesperson did not respond to JI’s request for comment on Chapman’s comments or on AAF recruiting more than a dozen of their staffers, though Andy Olivastro, Heritage’s chief advancement officer, was critical of the former employees in a statement to the Journal. 

“Our mission is unchanged, and our leadership is strong and decisive,” Olivastro said. “Heritage has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable. A handful of staff chose a different path — some through disruption, others through disloyalty.”

Walk into any think tank in Washington and you’re likely to bump into more than a few so-called “Iran watchers”: researchers whose job is to try to interpret the actions of the often-opaque Iranian regime and help policymakers figure out how to approach the Islamic Republic. 

Given the adversarial relationship between Washington and Tehran, making sense of the two nations’ policy choices toward each other is big business. But according to some Iranians, something is missing. 

“Most of the people who are working on Iran, they have never been to Iran. Americans, I mean. That brings with itself certain limitations,” said Mehdi Parpanchi, who was born in Iran but now lives in Washington. The U.S. does not have a diplomatic presence in Iran, and vice versa. “In my opinion, the image of Iran is not being seen properly from outside the country.” 

Parpanchi is the director of U.S. news at Iran International, one of the biggest independent Persian-language news outlets in the world. Based in London, Iran International broadcasts inside of Iran via satellite — much to the chagrin of Iranian officials, who have called the network a terrorist organization. It also reaches Iranians expats and dissidents around the world. While the network mainly operates with the goal of offering independent news from an anti-regime perspective to the global Iranian diaspora, Iran International also serves as a crucial source to Iran watchers of all stripes, including those who have never set foot in the country. 

“There is always a decade of delay between the reality inside Iran and how it is being seen from the West, especially from the U.S.,” Parpanchi, who moved to Washington in 2020 to launch a U.S. headquarters for Iran International, told Jewish Insider last month. 

A new show from Iran International, filmed in Washington and broadcast around the world, aims to at least partly remedy that problem. “Iran International Insight,” which launched in June, pledges to put Iran International viewers who live in Iran in conversation with the political figures and diplomats across the world whose policy choices will affect their lives. 

“The concept was that there’s a tremendous opportunity for policymakers and experts in D.C., but especially policymakers, to be engaging with and taking questions from the Iranian people directly,” said Aaron Lobel, a co-producer of the new show and the founder and president of America Abroad Media, an international media organization.

The growth of Iran International’s programming in Washington comes after the Trump administration slashed funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which supports independent outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFERL) and Middle East Broadcasting Networks that air pro-democracy content around the world. Parpanchi previously spent two years at RFERL, which has a Persian-language branch. 

Iran International is not expressly trying to fill that niche, and the new program was in the works starting in 2024, before Trump even came to office. Regardless, the new program arrives at a time that America has pulled back from cultural diplomacy. 

“This is in the best traditions of the United States. It advances American values and it advances American interests,” said Lobel. “The more credible media organizations outside Iran that are trying to reach the Iranian people with information and to give them some sense of hope as well — the more the better.” 

So far, three interviews — hourlong conversations between one or two guests and an Iran International anchor — have been filmed, all in front of a live audience, including many Iranians who live and work in Washington. Iran International’s producers and journalists solicit questions from the network’s viewers in Iran. The interviews take place in English, but they are dubbed in Persian before being aired.

“I’ve met with groups of Iranian diaspora, who have family in Iran and who are activists with them. But I don’t think I received online questions like that,” Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, who was the first guest, told JI. “That was the primary agenda, to speak to the people.” 

Leiter’s interview with Iran International was a journalistic gold mine for the network: scheduled in advance, it happened to come at a particularly timely moment, hours after President Donald Trump announced a cease-fire between Israel and Iran at the end of the countries’ 12-day war in June. Leiter touted Israel’s military victories in its campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Yet many Iranians wondered why Israel would attack Iran, but ultimately not seek to remove the ayatollah from power. (Hundreds of questions were submitted.)

“One of the themes that came out that was so striking was, of course, many Iranians wanted Israel to continue the campaign, and they were, I think it’s fair to say, you could hear in that show, disappointed that Israel stopped the war. Or to put it differently, they were upset that the Israeli government had, in their view, raised their expectations of ‘regime change’ and then failed to deliver,” said Lobel. 

Leiter offered unusually candid responses to those questions, going beyond the diplomatic language that would’ve gotten the job done even if leaving viewers unsatisfied. 

“I appreciated the opportunity to explain why we weren’t going to go further and actually topple the regime by force,” Leiter explained. “I understand them. Remember when the chancellor of Germany said that Israel is doing the ‘dirty work’ for the world? I guess that the people wanted us to do the work completely for the world. But we can’t do that. And it was important for me to be able to explain that.”

Two other programs were recorded this fall. One featured Elliott Abrams, who served as Iran envoy in Trump’s first term, and Dennis Ross, a fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy who previously held several high-level jobs at the State Department in Democratic and Republican administrations. Another featured former CIA official Norman Roule and Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Iran International’s main Instagram account has 16 million followers, and video clips from the Roule-Dubowitz event got about 1 million views each.

Those four experts have different ideological backgrounds, but each falls closer to the hawkish end of the spectrum on Iran. So does Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who was scheduled to appear in an interview in September before the congressional schedule led Cotton to cancel. (Parpanchi said they hope to reschedule.) 

Parpanchi said Iran International aims to include a broad range of perspectives from Washington, noting that the program is only just beginning. 

“It’s not only hawkish. There are other people who have different views about Iran, and we will reflect them all,” Parpanchi said. Iran International plans to ramp up to a more regular filming schedule in 2026.