Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society kingpin and deep-pocketed conservative power broker who engineered the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court, thereby reversing decades of liberal progress, nonetheless is convinced of something truly unbelievable: that the left is crushing the right in the war over the soul of America.
In a recent letter to unnamed beneficiaries of a dark-money fund that he evidently controls, Leo bemoaned “that conservative philanthropy is too heavily weighted in the direction of … education about conservative ideas and policies” and complained that “vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.” He implicitly threatened to withhold funding from grantees that don’t answer the call for weaponizing “the conservative vision.”
The letter, together with a rare interview he gave the Financial Times last week, is extremely revealing, though perhaps not in the ways that he seems to think. Self-dealing, the corruption of the political system, and paranoia—it’s all in there.
Leo’s letter is addressed to beneficiaries of the 85 Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization that distributed $134 million, largely to reactionary political causes, in 2022 (the most recent year for which tax forms are publicly available). Leo co-founded the organization with megadonor Neil Corkery in 2011, and he writes his letter as if he were fully in charge of the fund and its decision-making. Yet Leo is not listed as an officer, board member, or member of the staff of the 85 Fund. Why is he not in charge of the fund whose grants and direction he appears to control? It may have something to do with the fact that Leo’s own for-profit firm, Creative Response Concepts/CRC Advisors, receives huge payouts from the same fund. In fact, Leo and his sprawling network of organizations are under investigation by D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb for possibly violating laws that prohibit using charities for personal enrichment.
According to Lisa Graves, the managing director of Court Accountability, a legal advocacy group, “Since the beginning of 2020, Leo has led a for-profit P.R. group that has received more than $100 million from nonprofit groups he helps direct funds to or is tied to.” Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice, added that the 85 Fund has provided at least $55 million to CRC Advisors since 2020. Although the amount that Leo personally received (if any) is unknown, it is known that Leo has a rather lavish lifestyle. In 2018, he paid off the mortgage on his McLean, Virginia, house and purchased a $3.3 million Tudor-style mansion in Mount Desert, Maine; just three years later, he purchased yet another home, also in Mount Desert, for $1.65 million.
A second unintended revelation in Leo’s letter concerns the degree of corruption in the political finance system. On paper, the 85 Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means that it enjoys tax-exempt status and is consequently supposed to remain nonpartisan. But there is nothing nonpartisan about Leo or his fund. Recent beneficiaries include a number of organizations that collaborate on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–led blueprint for a potential second Trump administration. In other words, your tax dollars have in effect subsidized the creation of a detailed plan for the radical right wing to assume command of the federal government, fire any federal official who does not share their ideology, and impose their extreme vision for society against the will of the people.
The 85 Fund represents some of the darkest money on the American political scene. The donors behind it are committed to weaponizing the political process against democracy and seem equally committed to their right to remain anonymous. One way they achieve this goal is by shuffling money around a network of interlocking groups.
The biggest beneficiary of the 85 Fund by far ($92 million in 2022) is Donors Trust, the dark-money behemoth founded in 1999 with the goal of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative donors,” and which disburses over $2 billion a year. But precisely because the 85 Fund is such a big donor, Donors Trust is in some regards a pass-through for Project 2025. On account of Supreme Court rulings, of course, we don’t know exactly who is providing the money that flows from the 85 Fund through Donors Trust and into Project 2025. The court that Leo helped shape has made clear that money is speech, but somehow that speech is guaranteed perfect anonymity.
A third revelation in Leo’s letter is the extent of disordered thinking—or just plain paranoia—that afflicts the reactionary right. “We’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in areas of news and entertainment, where left-wing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the Financial Times. “Expect us to increase support for organizations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs.”
Like many on the New Right, Leo is convinced that “the Left” has a unified identity, and he believes it has captured all the key levers of power. As an example of this Left-borg in action, he cites the Voter Registration Project, a nonpartisan group whose self-declared mission is “to conduct non-partisan voter registration and mobilization to under-represented ethnic and socio-economic groups in the United States, including African-American, Latino, Native American and low-income voters.” Leo argues in his letter that this “secretive” group must be countered by the right because it registers “Democratic-leaning demographics.”
Leo also cites Students for Justice for Palestine as an example of “liberal dominance,” but the group is not remotely representative of the policies favored by Democratic officeholders or the liberal public in general; indeed, it is closer to the opposite. And he goes on to denounce the “radical transgender policies” of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which he accuses of strong-arming mainstream trade groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the British Medical Association. But here again, the views he identifies with “the Left” are hardly representative, since a majority of Americans, including most liberal-left Americans, support certain forms of sex-based rights, including single-sex sports teams.
The deepest, saddest revelation in Leo’s letter, of course, is not much of a revelation at all: that this conspiratorial mind sits atop one of the largest piles of corrupt money that the American political system has ever seen. The Marble Freedom Trust, which Leo controls, received a $1.6 billion contribution from a conservative Chicago billionaire, Barre Seid, in 2021. According to publicly available tax forms, the Marble Freedom Trust disbursed huge sums to two grantees with connections to Leo: $153,750,000 (yes, the number of zeros is correct) went to the Schwab Charitable Fund and $55,500,000 to the Concord Fund, which controls the Judicial Crisis Network, one of the many organizations in Leo’s orbit. The Schwab Charitable Fund’s form 990 for 2022 shows a transmission of $141,500,000 to the 85 Fund.
“Leo has built a cash machine to advance his extreme agenda and to reverse constitutional freedoms that generations of Americans sacrificed to secure,” said Graves. “The ads fueled by the fortunes he has deployed often invoke lofty phrases like the ‘rule of law,’ and in his speeches he asserts that he holds the moral high ground. But there is no doubt that he has enriched himself by essentially profiting at the cost of other people’s rights, as he has sought—without being elected to office or appointed to the Court—to rewrite the Constitution to suit his agenda.”
In short, Leo’s
letter to the 85 Fund is the epitome of irony. He asserts that the groups he
funds are spending too much money on ideas; now he just wants action. But it
seems clear that Leo and his cronies have never really cared about ideas,
because the one idea they keep repeating is that they care about America’s
constitutional government. And yet, they have put their weight and money behind
a man, Donald Trump, who attempted a coup, and they are filling our courts with
judges who seem keen to enable the MAGA project of destroying the Constitution.
