Bonus Sample: Swamp Creatures 6: Leonard Leo, Judicial Kingmaker
Control the Court. Overturn Roe. Funnel anonymous donations and shady gifts. Deregulate for Jesus. Roll back the cultural clock. Celebrate. Rinse and Repeat.
Leonard Leo’s libertarian Catholic agenda has made him a preeminent power-broker in right-wing American politics. He’s reshaping society while enjoying the pipeline of cash and influence that connects billionaire GOP mega-donors and the SCOTUS judges he helped install.
Julian tracks how Leo’s Federalist Society used Trump as part of a decades-long systematic takeover of the judicial system that culminated in the current ethics and corruption scandal in the SCOTUS.
Show Notes
ProPublica “Friends of the Court” investigative journalism series
The Guardian Club For Growth GOP Insurectionist Support
Open Secret 2022 Donor List
Dark Money Spending After Citizen’s United
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse “The Front Group Swarms”
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This story begins with a photorealistic painting and a handwritten list.
The painting is of a daytime outdoor scene.
The backdrop a meshwork of tall green forest trees.
Foreground, five men sit in very rustic looking Adirondack chairs.
Relaxed, but deep in discussion.
Behind and above them towers a statue of a Native American man, face lifted, well-muscled arms raised, palm up, as if in gratitude or reverence.
Two feathers in his hair, long braids draped over his bare chest.
The men are middle-aged and wear outdoorsy clothes.
Two in shorts, the others in Chino-style hiking pants.
Hiking shoes.
One even in those open-toed outdoor sandals.
Thick straps.
Good tread.
On a small end table between them, the paraphernalia of cigar smoking.
Lighter.
Cutter.
Cigars.
The lone black man appears to be the one talking.
He's slumped back in his chair, cigar held aloft, mouth open, eyes in the middle distance.
The others listen, three looking directly at his face, the fourth staring into space, cigar tucked between his fingers, hand dangling from a loose wrist draped over the arm of the chair.
The speaker is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The painting is at the center of ProPublica's reporting from April of last year, which ignited a media firestorm and a crisis of faith In the independence of our highest court.
That's because the man beside Thomas in hiking sandals and shorts, cigar in hand, is billionaire Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow.
The deck is located at a 105-acre private lakeside resort Camp Topridge in upstate New York.
And the painting commemorating this meeting now reportedly lives on one of its walls.
Crow owns the invitation-only resort.
Hi, Conspiracuality listeners.
Julian here with another installment in my Swamp Creatures series.
I should tell you that you can now find all of the previous episodes under the handy Collections menu item at the top of the page.
So far, we've gone deep into the muck on the origin stories, high crimes, and misdemeanors of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and Steve Bannon.
You may already think you know all about those guys, but listen, if you haven't yet, check out those episodes, your jaw may just hit the floor.
Far from draining the swamp, the Trump era has been characterized by giving the most corrupt, sociopathic mud-dwellers the keys to the kingdom, and then pardoning them when they get caught indulging their criminal appetites for power and wealth.
Some of these characters are back after redeeming their get-out-of-jail-free cards for more in 2024.
Meanwhile, Trump faces his own election year criminal comeuppance, having as best he could,
and in unprecedented fashion, stacked the court system in his favor all the way up to the top.
I said before that the most important man in the painting we started with
was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and that the reason it is emblematic of the crisis
of judicial ethics and the all-time low public confidence in our highest court
is embodied in the person sat beside him in shorts and open-toed hiking sandals, Harlan Crowe.
The other men are significant too, but none more so than the third I'll identify now.
His name is Leonard Leo.
He sits looking intently through his round spectacles at Thomas, hands held in that classic steepled fingers shape characteristic of confident focus.
Though he sits with a Supreme Court judge and the billionaire co-founder of Club for Growth, by some measures, Leonard Leo may be the most powerful person under those trees.
Which brings us to the list I mentioned.
This time, we picture just two men.
Donald Trump sits facing the TV camera, an American flag covering the entire wall behind him.
He's talking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, who we only see from behind.
And what we did, and I just have it, we just took a list of judges and I thought what I would do is put this forward and this would be the list that I would either choose from or pick people very close in terms of the spirit and the meaning So in that clip, Trump unfolds a piece of paper which he's reached off camera to grasp as a visual aid.
I don't actually know if it's handwritten.
That just sounded good.
It's probably printed from an email.
Hell, who knows?
Maybe it was just Trump's lunch order.
But the paper is intended to represent a list of potential Supreme Court nominees created for then-President Trump.
By Leonard Leo, who was then Vice President of the Federalist Society.
One of Trump's repeated promises during the 2016 campaign was that the three Supreme Court appointees that he might get to pick would essentially all be chosen by the Federalist Society.
It was an unprecedented guarantee.
Some political analysts say that this move did a lot to galvanize evangelical support for the otherwise unpalatable candidate and swayed powerful never-Trumpers who saw no trace of actual conservatism or presidentiality in him to fall in line behind the unscrupulous New York real
And I'm appointing you know you saw the 11 names I gave and we're gonna have great judges
conservative all picked by Federalist Society.
Gaining control of the court has been central to the conservative project of overturning the last 60 years of progress toward a more open and equal society, overturning legal abortion, maintaining gun rights, forcing gay and trans people back into a dark and unequal closet, Keeping corporations safe from business and environmental regulations and the wealthiest Americans free from paying their fair share of taxes.
Trump kept that promise.
As we've seen in the momentous decisions since the 6-3 supermajority was established on the court, this promise will likely reshape American society in the mold of an outdated religious conservatism favored by a minority of the population.
And represented by those five, paunchy, cigar-smoking power brokers in the painting.
