The Head of a New RFK-Backing Group Promoted 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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Before May, most people in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s so-called Make America Healthy Again movement likely weren’t familiar with Leland Lehrman, a self-styled media entrepreneur, anti-vaccine activist, and former teahouse owner who once unsuccessfully ran for the US Senate in New Mexico.

Last month, however, Lehrman was named executive director of the MAHA Institute, a new advocacy organization that aims to amplify “MAHA wins for President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, and the Cabinet,” advise elected officials on the movement’s agenda, and “find and attract” allies to work in government. The group shares key leaders with MAHA PAC, the new name of American Values 2024, a fundraising vehicle that raised $50 million in support of Kennedy’s presidential candidacy. While the MAHA Institute only launched in May, its ties to RFK Jr. are close enough that at its founding conference Lehrman was the first to reveal that the secretary would announce the government would stop recommending COVID vaccines for pregnant people and children. 

But even less well-known is Lehrman’s long history of promoting antisemitic and extreme conspiracy theories, as detailed in a new report from the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, an organization which studies extremism and the far right. The IREHR found that in the mid 2000s, Lehrman spread conspiracies about the September 11 attacks and extensively touted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an outrageous antisemitic forgery that purports to document a secret meeting where Jews plotted world domination and which has been debunked for over 100 years.

Lehrman wrote multiple articles outlining his belief in the Protocols on the website of Jeff Rense, a far-right radio host who’s often given airtime to Nazis, racists, and assorted antisemites. In 2005, Lehrman sat down for a long interview with Rense in which he described “high-level Jewish Illuminists, or Lucifer worshipers” who have “most certainly collaborated with the Lucifer worshipers in all the other sects like Nazism, like high-level Freemasonry. They have most certainly collaborated in the development of this New World Order plan.”

“The reason why the Protocols of Zion is important is because it is a terrifically well-elucidated encapsulation of all the methods and techniques that have been used to bring about the New World Order,” Lehrman added.

According to the IREHR’s report, Lehrman is the great-grandson of the founder of the Rite-Aid corporation. His father, the investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman, is from a Jewish family, although he publicly converted to Catholicism four decades ago. His mother is Episcopalian. In his first piece for Rense’s site in 2005, Lehrman described himself as “an American citizen of Jewish heritage concerned about the methods and doctrines that the criminal leadership of the Jewish and Zionist hierarchy have promoted worldwide.”

Lehrman acknowledged receiving a request for comment from Mother Jones, but he did not answer questions about his past writings and statements before publication. He did not say whether he still holds such views.

Mark Gorton (the millionaire creator of LimeWire) and Tony Lyons (the founder of Skyhorse Publishing, which releases conspiratorial and anti-vaccine books, including some written by Kennedy) are the cofounders of MAHA PAC, and are also the co-presidents of the MAHA Institute.

When asked about Lehrman’s past statements, Lyons replied with a brief statement. “We’re being asked to comment on an accusation of anti-semitism,” he wrote. “Five of the six most senior people at The MAHA Institute are Jewish, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a good hit piece.” Lyons did not respond to followup questions about whether he’d read Lehrman’s writings on the Protocols, or whether he was counting Lehrman among the institute’s senior Jewish staff.

HHS did not respond to requests for comment, but on his LinkedIn page, Lehrman details a series of roles that have drawn him nearer to Kennedy and his inner circle. He says he began volunteering for RFK’s presidential run in 2023, before being “hired to do research and provide ideas for Bobby and the campaign on policy issues, news briefs, and tweets.”

For the last eight months, according to his LinkedIn, he’s worked as a volunteer and then as a consultant for MAHA Action, a separate group led until recently by anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, the former communications director of RFK’s 2024 campaign. “I assisted Stefanie Spear, Chief of Staff to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I engaged with Bobby’s policy correspondence… I worked with the team to advance both MAHA policies and our candidates for government positions,” Lehrman wrote. The page also says he began a position in March as the executive director of the obscure Freedom for America Fund, whose website claims it will source “healthy, high-integrity Americans” to work in the Trump administration to “promote health and freedom.” The organization lists no contact information, and it is unclear if Lehrman still holds that position. 

In Lehrman’s first article on Rense’s site, he argued that the Protocols were legitimate—a notion debunked not long after they first appeared around 1903. In the article, Lehrman claimed he was not denigrating all Jews, explaining that “those ‘Jews’ who play the world domination game are in effect no longer Jewish by religion in that their strategy is in direct contradiction with the Ten Commandments, the real pillar of the Hebrew religion.”

Lehrman also promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories, writing that during Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 Democratic presidential campaign—which Lehrman said he “ran” in Santa Fe—he “met a former Captain in US Army Intelligence who was able to substantially add to my understanding of the 9/11 Inside Job. Very substantially.” He also baselessly tied the assault to Israel, writing in July 2005 for a defunct site called Progressive Convergence that Mossad, the country’s intelligence service, was “a leading candidate for architect of the 9/11 attacks.” 

During his unsuccessful attempt to become New Mexico Democrats’ 2008 Senate nominee, Lehrman made reopening a commission on September 11 a major priority, as he continued to promote conspiracy theories about the attacks, now claiming that then-vice president Dick Cheney was responsible.

“It’s only because Americans are so terrified and so easily propagandized that this unbelievably bad conspiracy theory that the government has put forward about 19 hijackers and the guy in a cave in Afghanistan even warrants mention,” he told the Santa Fe Reporter in December 2007. 

After leaving New Mexico, Lehrman settled with his family in upstate New York, where he participated in anti-vaccine activism before, with the emergence of Covid, becoming intensely suspicious of lockdown measures and vaccines that target the virus. In his Substack bio, Lehrman presents himself as having decided to stay out of politics and writing until, as he put it in a nod to Orwell, “the COVERT-1984 Plandemonium started,” and he “knew it was time to begin again in earnest.” 

As the IREHR report points out, Lehrman has praised extremist texts within the last several months. In April, he attended a conference hosted by the Brownstone Institute, which was founded to promote anti-Covid lockdown ideas. In an interview during the event, he hailed the 1955 book Pawns in the Game by Canadian antisemite and conspiracy theorist William Guy Carr as “a very, very controversial book, but it’s also an important one,” praising it for how it “uncovered the thread of Free Masonic activity.” According to extremist researcher Chip Berlet, Carr claimed “an age-old Jewish Illuminati banking conspiracy used radio-transmitted mind control on behalf of Lucifer to construct a one world government.”

So far, the MAHA Institute has done little public-facing work besides its May 15 launch event, which was meant to preview the MAHA Commission Report, a Trump administration document which turned out to cite nonexistent studies. The speakers that day included Calley Means, a special government employee and Kennedy advisor who previously worked on his presidential campaign, and Sara Brenner, an FDA official who recently served as the agency’s acting commissioner. Shortly after the event, the organization, which says it is collecting resumes for MAHA-friendly candidates to work in the Trump administration, posted to X about battling unnamed enemies within the government.

“Right now, tens of thousands of D.C. bureaucrats are working to subvert the MAHA Agenda,” a May 22 post declared. “That ends now.”

Lyons’ statement gave no indication that Lehrman’s writings and claims will affect his standing at the MAHA Institute, but antisemitism has not been a barrier to serving within the Trump administration itself. And while Kennedy’s HHS is part of a joint federal task force which claims to investigate antisemitism in universities, Kennedy himself once claimed that COVID was a bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, and multiple Trump cabinet members have ties to antisemitic and far-right extremists.

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