All Episodes
June 22, 2024 - Conspirituality
45:39
Deep Cut: Leonard Leo, Judicial Kingmaker

A Deep Cut from January's Patreon. 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” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We've never had a more demonstrably corrupt Supreme Court.
Luxury vacations, backdoor donations and expensive gifts have for many years now flowed from billionaires with a vested interest in Supreme Court decisions to its supposedly neutral and impartial judges.
Justice Samuel Alito and even more so Justice Clarence Thomas have been central to an ongoing scandal in this regard with a lot of excellent investigative journalism coming out of ProPublica.
Those billionaire donors to the GOP also have ties to the Federalist Society, where for almost three decades, a man named Leonard Leo has been enacting an ultra-conservative religious takeover of America's legal system.
That project Which culminated in the overturning of Roe vs. Wade has involved funneling dark money through shell companies as part of the network of power, money, and influence that has led to Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas being in highly suspect relationships with billionaires Paul Singer and Harlan Crowe, respectively, amongst others.
In November of last year, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved subpoenas for Leonard Leo and Harlan Crowe.
In January of this year, I recorded a bonus episode as part of my Swamp Creatures series that tracks the unsavory cast of characters associated with Trump.
Their histories, their high crimes and misdemeanors, and more often than not, their presidential pardons.
So as you might guess, past alumni have included Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon.
They each get their own episode.
This one is called Leonard Leo, Judicial Kingmaker.
And with everything going on in the news around the Supreme Court, we've decided to release this episode to the public, free to anyone curious about what's really going on behind the scenes, where Leonard Leo has been moving the chess pieces for decades to bring us to this current crisis.
But that was January of 2024 and so much has happened in the months in between.
You may have heard about the pine tree flag.
It's a white flag with a green pine tree upon it that bears the words and appeal to heaven.
The flag dates back to before the American Revolution and, more recently, was flown outside of Samuel Alito's home last summer.
Another flag, an upside-down American flag, was also flown just 11 days after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
Because of these two flags, you may have heard that recently Samuel Alito has been called upon by many to recuse himself from two specific cases that are going to be before the Supreme Court.
One involves Trump's claims of immunity from prosecution on trying to overturn the 2020 election.
The other involves a Philadelphia man facing January 6th related charges.
I said that the Supreme Court has been in the news a lot lately.
You probably also heard about these controversial secret recordings, criticized by many, released by activist and journalist Lauren Windsor.
These feature Samuel Alito as well as Chief Justice Roberts at a gala event.
Windsor got Roberts to say that he agreed we need to return the country to a place of godliness and she elicited comments from Alito about there being certain differences with the left that the right just cannot compromise on.
But the conversation The one that really made news was with Martha Ann Alito, who's the one behind those two flags that we were just talking about.
She spewed vitriol about having to see a pride flag across the lagoon from their house all month.
She bemoaned not being able to fly a sacred heart of Jesus flag in response and fantasized
both about making a custom flag with the Italian word for shame, vergogna, in the center, as
well as the revenge that she vows to take against the media after her husband retires.
Okay, we've caught up on the religious and political conflicts of interest to some extent,
and we've gestured towards the corruption scandal that's rocking the court.
What I haven't said yet is that this is the most conservative court we've had in over 90 years, and all of their decisions, a significant majority of their decisions, I should say, are trending in a disastrous way for the American public, for ordinary people, as well as for the world.
So, without further ado, let's move on to understanding the role that Leonard Leo has
played in getting us to this crisis.
This story begins with a photorealistic painting and a handwritten list.
Bye.
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 Crowe.
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
started with was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and that the reason it is emblematic of the
Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and that the reason it is emblematic of the crisis of judicial
crisis of judicial ethics and the all-time low public confidence in our highest court
ethics and the all-time low public confidence in our said before that the most important man in the painting we
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 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 of what they represent.
I came up with a list.
The Federalist Society was very much involved.
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
estate wheeler dealer pussy grabbing formerly pro-choice brash and unqualified candidate.
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.
While the frozen-in-stone, powerless, indigenous icon of shirtless, masculine naturalism bestows his tokenized blessing.
Statisticians at the University of Michigan calculate the 2022 term of the Supreme Court as producing more conservative decisions than at any time since 1931.
Of course, Roe vs. Wade is the big one, and it has been the dreamed-of Super Bowl victory for religious conservatives, especially evangelicals, for decades.
But there's also the reversal on affirmative action, as well as rulings on gun control, climate crisis measures, issues concerning separation of church and state, and religion in public schools, and I don't have to tell you in each case which way those rulings have been trending.
For episode 187, we covered the Heritage Foundation's 900-plus page Project 2025 document.
That's their in-depth policy plan for the next conservative president, starting on day one.
It is chilling.
The slide toward authoritarianism indicated by their fetishizing of unitary executive theory Would give Trump, or someone perhaps more scary, complete free reign with no checks and balances.
But at the heart of this agenda is overturning New Deal era regulatory structures that serve to protect society and the environment from exploitation, pollution, and unethical marketing and products.
Or as Steve Bannon famously put it on the stage in 2017, we want the deconstruction of the administrative state.
According to NPR, experts on the court say cases challenging the authority of those regulatory agencies are in the pipeline.
They've also described this court as heedless, reactionary rather than conservative, and in a big hurry, even calling it the YOLO court.
You only live once.
Cases that affect gay and trans rights and voting rights protections, as well as one that could give state legislators the kinds of leeway Trump needed, but didn't have, for overturning the election he lost.
This stacking of the court also gives today's leading GOP candidate, who faces 91 indictments during this election year, a possible friends-in-high-places loophole, if needed, on some of these charges.
As you know, the stage is already set for the Supreme Court to decide if attempts to keep him
off the ballot in some states due to being involved in an insurrection are constitutionally valid.
In a moment we'll get to who exactly our swamp creature for today,
Leonard Leo, really is.
But first, here's why that moment of splendid repose in nature, captured in that photorealistic painting, matters.
I mean, look, judges are allowed to have friends, right?
Surely they're allowed to go hiking and sit on the deck unironically puffing on cigars under the statue of a vanquished but still noble and spiritually grateful Native American.
Obviously, a conservative Supreme Court justice is going to have conservative GOP-affiliated friends.
Maybe this is all just liberal pearl-clutching.
Like, what about George Soros?
Well, put a pin in that bogeyman.
We'll come back to him later.
One point I've made repeatedly in my coverage of the religious conservative big money donors behind right-wing media is that there's a style of conspiracy theory that projects occult backroom corruption and malign influence onto liberal universities or democrat elites or the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, the actual metaphysically inspired conspiracies of power, dark money laundering machinery, and blatant culture war, dishonest propaganda production from the right is the real Leviathan.
But back to the deck.
As has now been the subject of many a newscast, Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow actually have a relationship that spans decades, and is perhaps the biggest ethics scandal the court has faced.
ProPublica have done all of the groundbreaking reporting on this, dating back to April of 2023, so credit for most of the factual references I will make belongs entirely to them.
And I want to acknowledge the work, for ProPublica, of Joshua Kaplan, We don't have time to trace all of the fascinating threads here.
You can follow the link in the show notes to ProPublica's excellent Friends of the Court series, which gathers all of that reporting in one place.
But one loose end we can consider together is that in the year 2000, After having been at the job for nine years, Thomas was deep in debt and he flew back from a conservative conference alongside a conservative congressman.
Thomas reportedly complained about not making enough money and intimated that unless Congress gave judges a significant pay raise soon and repealed a law prohibiting payments for speaking engagements, he might have to quit the court.
Neither the salary increase nor the door opened to paid speaking events happened.
And though we can't draw a straight line of causality, in the years that followed, Clarence's fortunes changed.
What the reporting has uncovered is not only a significant upgrade to Thomas's vacation lifestyle and travel status, but also gifts and backdoor donations that raise serious questions about his judicial neutrality.
You've probably heard the series of revelations that have emerged.
Billionaire real estate magnate and GOP mega-donor Harlan Crowe paid the private school tuition for Thomas's nephew, who he'd been raising since he was six.
Then it came out in 2014 that Crowe had bought Clarence's mother's house, in which she still resides, as well as other surrounding properties from the Thomas family.
He also made a large donation to a tea party group founded by Thomas's wife Ginny, which more than covered a substantial salary she withdrew, but failed to report on her taxes, along with other payments from the libertarian conservative and climate denialist think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
We'll come to Leonard Leo soon, but real quick, he has also funneled large sums of money to Ginny Thomas in similar ways.
Crow also gave Clarence expensive gifts, including an antique Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and a bust of Abraham Lincoln.
Then there are the at least 38 luxury vacations to which the SCOTUS Associate Justice has availed himself over the last two decades.
Luxury resorts, super yacht voyages, private jet, and helicopter travel.
VIP, pro, and college sports box passes.
It's quite a lifestyle.
All laid on by wealthy benefactors with Crow at the top of that list.
The vast majority of it undisclosed.
Judicial ethics experts call all of this an unprecedented violation of norms for the court.
Now, I didn't want to barrage you with all the dollar amounts in this quick rundown, and you can find it elsewhere, but let's just say for now that the combined dollar value of this is easily in the millions.
So, of course, the question is, what's the quid pro quo?
Well, Crow and the other benefactors have denied ever talking to Thomas about specific cases before the court.
But here's the thing.
Harlan Crowe donates heavily to conservative organizations and candidates.
He's also served on the board of trustees for libertarian conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, which have filed amicus briefs before the Supreme Court.
So another quick aside, amicus briefs are essentially arguments in cases presented by parties not directly involved.
It's a supposed impartial opinion.
It comes from the Latin for friend, or more fully, and ironically, friend of the court.
As I mentioned, Crow is on the founding committee of the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that lobbies for tax cuts and deregulation, opposes climate measures, and has a super PAC that in 2004 donated more to candidates than any other group outside of the GOP itself.
They also have been described by The Guardian as one of the biggest financial backers of Republicans seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
Now on the subject of taxes, Crowe appears to have used Thomas's yacht and private jet travel
as a huge tax write-off for himself.
Okay, back to the deck.
Camp Topridge in upstate New York.
Sitting with Clarence Thomas, Harlan Crow, and Leonard Leo are two conservative lawyers and political operatives, Mark Paoletta and Peter Rutledge.
Now, Paoletta, as it turns out, represented Ginny Thomas when she was called before the January 6th Committee due to her efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
And especially because of a series of texts and emails, some referencing QAnon-affiliated ideas between her, Mark Meadows, and John Eastman.
Paoletta has also written several pieces for The Federalist, not connected to the Federalist Society.
It's a billionaire-funded right-wing website often fact-checked as making false claims, and he's written those pieces defending Clarence Thomas over the years.
Our real estate magnate Harlan Crow, whose father was described by Forbes as the largest landlord in the United States, owns the Camp Topridge Resort.
But the other man in that 2018 painting, the one holding steepled fingers who I identified as the most powerful, is Leonard Leo.
And here's something emblematic of that power.
ProPublica also reports that on June 23, 2022, Leo hosted a lavish dinner party at his mansion on the coast of Maine.
The roughly 70 guests included around two dozen federal and state judges.
The event required heightened security, as evidenced by ear-pieced U.S.
Marshals watching over the proceedings and a Coast Guard boat on standby.
T'was the night before the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe vs. Wade, was announced, and the guests were in high spirits after a SCOTUS term which had already delivered multiple big conservative victories.
It turns out that those judges were in town for a conference at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, which grooms young lawyers to advance conservative, big-business-friendly policies and rulings.
The heads of the school We're there too.
Because, you see, a huge part of what Leo does is form relationships with big money donors and then plug them into the machine that he's been building to take over not only the Supreme Court, but key aspects of our entire judicial system.
In this case, Leo helped facilitate the name change of that law school in honor of Scalia via 30 million he secured in donations.
The school is a major pool for the pipeline that snakes its way through clerkships, solicitor general positions, circuit court, and state supreme court appointments.
That water in that pool, also filled with Federalist Society members at other schools, eventually boils down to the ink on the type of SCOTUS candidate list held in Donald Trump's hand.
Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are all professors at that law school, and the Mercatus Center, an attached libertarian think tank, is heavily funded by one of Leonard Leo's dark money hubs called the 85 Project.
The guests at the dinner were served cuisine and libations fit for a king, or I should say, for a king maker, which is what the man is.
Longtime Federalist Society Vice President, now Chairman of the Board, and National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Board Member, Leonard Leo, has established a highly effective network of judicial contacts, wealthy donors, and dark money groups to become a kind of judicial kingmaker.
To wit, Leo has been directly involved in the appointments of six of the current nine Supreme Court Justices, and it's not hard to guess which ones.
Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett.
They all are current or former members of the Federalist Society, as was the now-deceased Antonin Scalia.
Only Chief Justice Roberts denies Federalist Society affiliation, but he was listed on their DC Steering Committee in the late 90s.
Here's the 101 on the Federalist Society.
It was founded in 1982 by law students committed to the then newly emergent idea of originalism, championed by law professors Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork.
It's a kind of fundamentalist reaction against the Warren Court civil rights era trend of interpreting the Constitution as a living document that could evolve with the times.
Leo founded his own chapter of the fledgling group while at Cornell in 1986.
It was Robert Bork's failed nomination to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan that convinced the young Leo that conservatives needed to be better equipped to push back against the liberal tide.
Having befriended Clarence Thomas during a clerkship, the 25-year-old worked for him during his embattled but successful confirmation process, providing research that supported his case.
Then, he devoted himself to further growing the Federalist Society.
A decision only galvanized by the Supreme Court 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which upheld the constitutional right to an abortion.
ProPublica journalists Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein, and Ilya Maritz say it was the Casey decision which set Leo on his current path because, and this is crucial, the Casey decision was rendered by an already conservative court.
Which meant that, when it came to interpreting the Constitution and making impartial rulings as they are supposed to do, Even Republican appointees couldn't be counted on to stay ideologically loyal.
His developing strategy for gaining greater control included finding young lawyers-to-be and shepherding them through their education and early careers, easing the way for them into positions of power and preserving ideological purity at every stage of the process.
Donors who prize this kind of influence over the legal system flocked to the Federalist Society, whose budget quadrupled during the 90s.
During the second Bush administration, Leo kept increasing his influence over the appointment of judges at every level, drawing on his lists of candidates groomed on originalist doctrine.
Beyond seeking to gain a conservative religious lock on the highest court, installing judges in the lower courts and solicitor general positions has another strategic purpose.
It can serve to make sure the right cases make it up to be seen by the Supreme Court.
You know what I got in?
We had over a hundred federal judges that weren't appointed.
I don't know why Obama left that.
It was like a big beautiful present to all of us.
Why the hell did he leave that?
In 2005, Leo was behind the scenes of the founding of a non-profit called the Judicial Confirmation Network.
Later renamed Judicial Crisis Network, which, for the first time, approached confirmation hearings like political campaigns, they spent huge amounts of anonymous donor money on advertising to sway public opinion.
They have spent millions on each of the five current Federalist Society-backed Supreme Court justices appointed since 2005.
Leo is friends with these judges, too.
He's described now-deceased Arch-Conservative Justice Scalia as being like an uncle to him.
He displays a photo of himself with Mr. and Mrs. Alito in front of the Palace of Versailles.
And Clarence Thomas is godfather to one of Leonard Leo's daughters.
And again, you may hear all of this as just the understandable efforts of someone trying to impose their strong convictions in a legal and political career.
It's a free country.
Surely people on both sides do this, right?
Sure.
But here's what makes Leo unique.
and potentially criminal.
We've already discussed how Leonard Leo uses the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis
Network to put himself at the nexus of big money donors, young lawyers, and judges-in-waiting,
as well as ideologically loyal Supreme Court picks who need that extra political campaign
style funding, and attack ads to push them over the line.
Over time, he also started hosting unofficial private dinners at upscale restaurants during Federalist Society conferences.
Here, donors with especially deep pockets could meet in person and form relationships with high-powered judges.
You know, the types of relationships that lead to Thomas and Crow sharing cigars with Leo on that deck at a private resort in the Adirondacks.
Or that lead to Samuel Alito being pictured with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer on an Alaskan fishing trip.
Or that saw Scalia and Thomas enjoying Koch brother donor retreats.
That's just a glimpse.
You can find out more if you're curious via the links I've already mentioned in the show notes.
But here's where things get really shady.
Reporting from the Washington Post tracks the dark money network Leo has set up to turbocharge his mission.
They actually got him to sit down and respond to their questions.
Listen.
The Washington Post and other entities are more than welcome to write stories about money
in politics.
But I don't engage in that conversation because one, I'm not particularly knowledge about
a lot of it.
But secondly, because it's just not what I do.
His responses to these kinds of questions usually take one of two routes.
He either does this whole, I'm man involved in the battle of ideas and I don't know anything
about money in politics angle.
By the way, did you notice the telltale gulp he made in the middle of that?
One, I'm not particularly knowledge about a lot of it.
Or he says things like, it's about time conservatives caught up with the outsized political donations from people like, wait for it, George Soros.
I said we'd come back to George Soros, but first, here's Washington Post reporter Sean Boberg with more.
In 2016, Leo starts three new nonprofits.
Freedom and Opportunity Fund, America Engaged, and BH Fund.
They're all created by the same law firm in Warrington, Virginia.
They also have no employees.
They have no office space, no website, and virtually no public profile.
The Washington Post asked Leo about one of the groups.
Could you describe just what the purpose of the BH Fund is?
Um... BH Fund is a charitable organization.
You can look it up, but I'm sure its statement of purpose is listed.
We did.
Its tax document says its mission is to promote the rule of law and limited constitutional government.
And it received $24 million from an anonymous donor in 2017.
I have a very simple rule, which is I'm engaged in the battle of ideas.
And I care very deeply about our Constitution and the role of courts in our society.
And I don't waste my time on stories that involve money and politics, because what I care about is ideas.
There's a reason why the Founding Fathers wrote the Federalist Papers anonymously.
And it's because the power of ideas is what matters in our country.
Leo and his allies promote those ideas through their obscure, very well-funded network of nonprofits.
And this is one way they do it.
BH Fund gives millions of dollars to both Freedom and Opportunity and America Engaged.
America Engaged gives a million dollars to the lobbying arm of the NRA, The NRA then announces a million-dollar ad campaign targeting senators who supported gun control and pressuring them to vote for Neil Gorsuch.
So, I looked up some numbers.
George Soros has actually been increasingly donating to progressive causes in the US.
He donates to causes like criminal justice reform, racial justice, and civic engagement.
Oh, and education.
His Open Societies Foundations have tried to foster and preserve democratic government in post-Soviet states in Europe and have funded education there to help prevent a mass exodus of the intelligentsia to greener pastures.
His efforts also helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, which in a bygone era would have made him a hero to Republicans, but he's not.
Case in point for why, here in the US, he was the single biggest donor overall during the failed Red Wave 2022 midterms.
2022 midterms he pumped 128 million into those elections and a total of 176 million into liberal groups
over the 2021 to 2022 cycle according to Open secret comm
That's a lot of money.
But if we look at that list some more, we see a combined $255 million from the donors in positions 2 through 5, all of that donated to conservative groups.
In fact, 17 of the top 25 donations are to conservative groups, for roughly $534 million altogether.
Left leaning groups brought in $340 million or so by comparison from their 8 donors in that top 25.
Now that's just the money we can track.
Then there's the new phenomenon of dark money.
The Republican-backed Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010 reversed a century-old law that limited corporate and outside group spending on elections.
The case was won, as you probably know, by arguing that corporations are people and that money is free speech.
In addition to making unlimited donations possible, this paved the way for wealthy corporate interests to maintain anonymity by funding outside groups that serve only as shell companies to disperse huge donations to campaigns and political activist groups.
This creates a situation in which voters are kept in the dark while candidates still know to whom the IOUs belong.
And those IOUs keep getting bigger.
Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has campaigned to overturn Citizens United and get dark money out of politics.
He points out that while Democrats have to play the same game to be competitive, his Disclose Act couldn't get a single Republican vote in the Senate.
But all of the Democrats voted for it.
But back to the deck.
We've already heard about how Leonard Leo's shell groups, Freedom and Opportunity Fund, America Engaged and BH Fund, which overlaps with 85 Fund, essentially circulate dark money to then funnel toward his causes.
But that's nothing compared to what happened in 2020.
That year, he founded Marble Freedom Trust, a political advocacy group officially designated as a 501c4 social welfare organization.
A year later, they received the largest ever anonymous political donation in the form of corporate stock worth 1.65 billion with a B dollars.
ProPublica and the New York Times discovered the donation was made by Barry Seid and represented the entire cash value of his company called Triplight.
Which Marble Freedom Trust was then able to pocket after they sold the stock themselves.
This avoided $400 million in taxes for Barry's side.
He refers to his political donation strategy as attack philanthropy.
He's funded climate denialism as well as initiatives opposing business regulation and Medicaid expansion.
Nice guy.
Organizations funded by Leonard Leo and other dark money administrators oppose progressive legislation on climate, gun safety, reproductive freedoms, LGBTQ rights, and of course campaign finance reform.
But not only that, they're involved in so-called election integrity campaigns that are really associated with the Stop the Steal movement.
They also pay for political ads and anonymously fund candidates in ways that don't show up on that open secret donor list I referenced earlier.
Leonard Leo is taking advantage of the possibilities opened up by Citizens United in the same way that Koch Foundation and the Wilkes Brothers have done as well, but with an even more disciplined and organized agenda.
According to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Leo is at the center of a scheme that channels anonymous money and influence into deregulating business and climate, advancing conservative cultural and religious agendas, protecting the interests of the NRA, and stacking the Supreme Court in a way that undermines democracy and the state-church divide.
White House alleges that Koch, Seid, and Leo have also turned what has, since 2015 with the sizable donation, been called the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University into an academy that not only trains, but strategically places conservative justices.
When this network recognized the opportunities to appoint judges through the Trump presidency, who created the list of conservative candidates that Trump referenced in speeches and held up during that interview on television?
Leonard Leo.
In fact, one of the key reasons Trump won that election may have been that true conservative never-Trumpers and evangelicals turned off by the candidate's morals lined up behind him once they saw they were actually voting to realign the Supreme Court along conservative religious lines.
All six of the current supermajority are not only associated with the Federalist Society, they're also all Catholics.
And wouldn't you know it?
Leonard Leo reportedly attends Catholic Mass every day.
He may really need it.
You probably noticed a little bit ago me foreshadowing potential criminality.
It turns out that as of September 2023, Leo is under investigation by the DC Attorney General.
This involves some 73 million dollars he may have funneled through his non-profits as payment to himself.
Over a period of six years.
In October, Leo said he would not cooperate with the investigation.
In November, the Senate Judicial Committee approved subpoenas for both Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow as part of the probe into ethics violations on the court.
But the fate of those subpoenas may rest on a needed 60-vote majority if Crow and Leo defy the information requests on gifts and donations that have been levied.
Of course, Republicans oppose the subpoenas.
Like so many highly consequential cliffhangers, We're looking at right now.
We'll have to wait and see how 2024 unfolds.
We'll no doubt be subjected to a barrage of campaign stump nonsense from Trump, echoed faithfully by his allies about corruption in DC, the justice system, and the media, and how only they can drain the swamp.
Meanwhile, the alliance between theocratic power brokers, far-right anti-democratic politicians, activist judges wrapped in the Constitution they're actually unraveling, and culture war new media pundits will continue to flood the zone.
We can't let all of that muck obscure how they are edging us closer and closer to actual authoritarianism.
I have an ominous hunch that so many of them will be fighting extra hard and extra dirty this year
because the personal stakes are also exceptionally high given the criminal consequences of the
multi-layered conspiracies they're involved in that await them if they fail.
Thank you for listening and for your support and appreciation of the Swamp Creatures series.
It means a lot.
Export Selection