Yesterday, Rolling Stone exposed how conservative kingpin Leonard Leo has been working to expand, rebrand, and weaponize his corrupt dark money network to push an extreme agenda onto the American people.
Rolling Stone: GOP Puppetmaster Expands His Dark-Money Operation
Andrew Perez
2/20/24
Key sections:
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Conservative activist and judicial puppetmaster Leonard Leo is building out his dark money network.
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A counsel at one of Leo’s primary nonprofits recently registered two new dark money organizations with subsidiaries whose names just so happen to be very similar to groups through which Leo has run some of his most effective activism campaigns.
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Leo, who co-chairs the Federalist Society, the influential conservative lawyers network in Washington, is known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. Leo served as former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser — helping him select three justices while simultaneously directing the dark money campaigns to boost their confirmations.
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His network has spread money around to help bring cases before the Supreme Court, determine which cases the justices consider, and influence the court’s decisions.
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In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize a subpoena after Leo refused to provide lawmakers with a full accounting of all gifts and payments that he has directed to Supreme Court justices and their spouses.
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The vote followed reports that Leo steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, and arranged Justice Samuel Alito’s seat on a private jet — paid for by a billionaire hedge fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008.
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Leo has publicly refused to cooperate with the reported D.C. probe, with his lawyer arguing that the district’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures.” Leo has also refused to comply with the promised Senate subpoena, saying in a statement: “I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution.”
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In 2021, he was gifted an unprecedented $1.6 billion dark money fund, with the purpose of shifting American society further to the right.
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Leo’s Supreme Court advocacy campaigns, which date back to 2005, were long run through Judicial Crisis Network. Its sister charitable arm was known as the Judicial Education Project.
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In 2020, Leo and his allies rebranded those organizations as the Concord Fund and 85 Fund, respectively, and designed the groups to act as fiscal sponsors, or hubs for new advocacy and educational groups.
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The 85 Fund and the Concord Fund were both named in the watchdog complaint to the Washington, D.C., attorney general, Schwalb. Not long after the complaint, the 85 Fund moved its corporate registration to Texas, withdrew its charter from Virginia, and withdrew its D.C. registration, business filings show.
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More recently, Leo’s team created two new nonprofit hubs.
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O.H. Skinner, a counsel at the 85 Fund, formed the two new nonprofits in Virginia on Dec. 21, business records show. The groups are called the Publius Fund and the Lexington Fund.
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Skinner subsequently registered some familiar new trade names within those groups. The Judicial Education Project Fund is part of the Publius Fund, while the Judicial Crisis Network Fund is in the Lexington Fund.
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The new organizations also have trade names affiliated with the Honest Elections Project, a Leo network entity that’s worked to restrict voting access, as well as the Alliance for Consumers, the Leo group that Skinner leads.
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The trade names also include two variants of the name “American Parents Coalition” — suggesting Leo’s network may be expanding its efforts to push the education system to the right.
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