Leonard Leo: Man in the Middle, Part II
Leonard Leo: Man in the Middle, Part II
He's one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. And he owns the Supreme Court.
Read Part One.
Since Part One of this two-part dispatch dropped last Tuesday, Leonard Leo’s Supreme Court handed down a bevy of wretched decisions that are now the law of the land. These decisions have two things in common: All of them will cause more harm than good. And all of them are wins for Leonard Leo.
As many legal scholars have pointed out, the internal logic of the Leonard Leo Court is functionally nonexistent. Nothing holds. It’s like you’re halfway through Succession, one of the White Walkers from Game of Thrones shows up, and Kendall Roy starts shooting lasers from his eyes. There is no rhyme or reason to these decisions. The Leonard Leo judges will dredge up some anti-witchcraft statute from medieval England, while ignoring the last 50 years of settled law in the here and now; “Starry Decisis” may as well be Sam Alito’s drag name. Automatic weapons have more rights than women. Corporations have more rights than gays and Lesbians. And Leonard Leo and his moneyed chums have more rights than anyone.
Too, the hypocrisy of the Court is next level. Clarence Thomas struck down Affirmative Action—Clarence Thomas! Brett Kavanaugh ruled against debt forgiveness—Brett Kavanaugh! Amy Coney Barrett—a Gen X woman who has been pregnant no fewer than five times, and thus is presumably familiar with the many things that can go medically wrong—took away abortion rights. And John Roberts, that corrupt and sneaky fascist, gets all indignant whenever anyone points out that he’s a corrupt and sneaky fascist. Ethics, schmethics, as long as the checks clear.
There has been popular outrage this past week about these putrid decisions, and, perhaps, a more concerted attempt to shame these jerks into behaving better; lovely trees, but let’s not miss the forest here. The Court ruled as it did because that’s what Leonard Leo wanted. Leonard Leo is opposed to abortion, as an article of his faith; the Leonard Leo Court strikes down abortion rights. Leonard Leo is opposed to homosexuality, as an article of faith; the Leonard Leo Court concocts some fictitious legal dispute out of whole cloth, just so it can strip away the rights of the LGBTQ community. Leonard Leo knows he can’t get the America he wants if America continues to be a democracy; the Leonard Leo Court continues to chip away at voting rights, and, in Moore, ominously, sets itself up to be the ultimate arbiter of future presidential elections.1 Whatever Leonard Leo wants, Leonard Leo gets.
Leonard Leo presides spider-like over Washington, moving chess pieces across the great board, raising unfathomably vast sums of money, and cultivating his extensive network, which I have attempted to map out here.
Note: Leo has so many connections that it became unwieldy to confine them to a single dispatch. In Part One, I covered the judges, non-profiteers, lawyers, media members, and titled Europeans. Today’s installment will focus on the radical Catholics, the billionaire donors, and the politicians.
Radical Catholics
Leonard Leo is a man of faith. He attends Mass every day. He truly believes in his extreme strain of radical Catholicism. And he practices what he preaches. He is a modern-day St. Paul—another wildly successful, massively influential evangelist who hated women and gay people.
He is NOT—and this is important to understand—a mainstream Catholic. As I wrote in “Leo the Cancer:”
The strain of radical Catholicism practiced by Leo and his ilk bears little resemblance to the Catholic Church in my own New Jersey hometown, where I was confirmed, or the one I encountered among the joyful Jesuits at Georgetown University, where I went to school. . . . Leo’s is a dour, zero-sum faith—pure, inflexible, unswerving. Less inquisition, more Inquisition. And this is no act. He really believes this crap. When I asked if Leo’s faith was sincere, Tom Carter, who was communications director at USCIRF from 2009-2012, when Leo was the de facto chief, told me: “He believes he’s on a mission from God.” That mission is to mold the judicial branch to his liking, and in so doing, to do away with Roe and protections for the LGBTQ community.
Understand: there are plenty of American Catholics who are pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights. President Biden, to name one. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to name another. But Leo doesn’t just want any old Catholic on the high court. If so, he would have been jumping for joy about Sotomayor’s selection. . .What Leo wants are radical Catholics—the Church’s answer to Evangelical Christians, Chabad-Lubavitch Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims.
Because this strain of radical Catholicism lacks a proper name, it is harder for non-Catholics to make the distinction. This also makes it easy for its critics to be accused of being prejudiced against Catholics—just as critics of Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, a crook, are routinely denounced by his apologists as anti-Semites. William Donohue, longtime president of the Catholic League, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 2019 accusing Carl Hulse, that paper’s chief Washington correspondent, of “anti-Catholic bias” for daring to suggest, on a panel with another journalist, that there is a “real Catholic underground that is influencing [the court] in an outsized way”— as if Leonard Leo didn’t exist, as if the names of Donohue’s Board of Directors were not all in the guy’s Rolodex.
Let me reiterate: this is not mainstream Catholicism. The perverse strain of radical Catholicism Leo practices doesn’t have a convenient label. Leo is associated with Opus Dei, but I’m not certain that’s he’s formally a member of that prelature—or, for that matter, that all members of that prelature are in lockstep with his extreme views. There is significant overlap with members of the Catholic Information Center (CIC) in Washington, which is run by Opus Dei priests, and the Leonard Leo crew. So we begin there, with. . .
C. John McCloskey III (1953-2023)
Opus Dei priest
Once a “celebrity priest,” the former investment banker turned man of the cloth was the head of the Catholic Information Center in its heyday. Charles P. Pierce wrote a piece for the Boston Globe in 2003, about a group he termed “The Crusaders,” that focused on McCloskey:
There is a glow to the priest when he talks…He is talking about a futuristic essay he wrote that rosily describes the aftermath of a “relatively bloodless” civil war that resulted in a Catholic Church purified of all dissent and the religious dismemberment of the United States of America.
“There’s two questions there,” says the Rev. C. John McCloskey 3d, smiling…“One is, Do I think it would be better that way? No. Do I think it’s possible? Do I think it’s possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of family, over a period of time to choose to survive with people who think it’s OK to kill women and children or for—quote—homosexual couples to exist and be recognized?
“No, I don’t think that’s possible,” he says. “I don't know how it’s going to work itself out, but I know it’s not possible, and my hope and prayer is that it does not end in violence. But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way.
“If American Catholics feel that’s troubling, let them. I don’t feel it’s troubling at all.”
McCloskey recruited a number of prominent political types into the fold, including Newt Gingrich, author of the obstructionist tactic adopted by the Republican Party that has poisoned our democracy, and the columnist Robert Novak, best known for appearing on Crossfire and outing CIA agents. Reportedly, McCloskey’s circle also included the former FBI agent and KGB spy Robert Hanssen (who also died this year); Louis Freeh, the shady former FBI director; two-time Attorney General Bill Barr, cockblocker of the Mueller Report; the rightwing publisher Alfred Regnery; Antonin Scalia; rejected SCOTUS nominee Robert Bork; and Ginni and Clarence Thomas.
You’re not gonna believe this, but McCloskey fell into disrepute after a scandal involving sexual misconduct—not the first accusation of that kind against him—which wound up costing almost a million bucks in settlement money. Opus Dei removed him from his post, insisting that the former priestly powerbroker “suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s…[and] has not had any pastoral assignments for a number of years and is no longer able to celebrate Mass, even privately.”
That dude was their moral leader.
Msgr. Fernando Ocáriz (b. 1944)
Opus Dei prelate
The current head of Opus Dei, who recently had his wings clipped by Pope Francis. In a related story, Pope Francis seems not to be especially popular in Leonard Leo circles.
Catholic Information Center
Board of Directors
Fr. Charles Trullols is the priestly head of the CIC. On the current board with Leonard Leo, Greg Mueller, and Montse Alvarado are: Brian Svoboda (chairman), Alexandra Clement, Thomas White, Chris Anzidei, Edward Grubb, Gerard Mitchell, and Kate Todd.
Rightwing Plutocrats
Presumably, Leonard Leo, who as mentioned attends Mass every day, is familiar with the story of Jesus in the temple, which appears in all four Gospels. Christ is famously even-keeled. Even when the Roman soldiers are whipping Him, He does not betray His inner peace. The only time He gets pissed off is when He sees what the money changers are doing in the temple. Per Matthew 21:12-13: Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of thieves.”
Why does He get so mad? First, because the money changers have desecrated the holy space. And, second, because the money changers are greedy bastards who are actively screwing over poor people.
Leonard Leo takes a different approach to the modern-day equivalent of the money changers. Leonard Leo doesn’t want to upset their tables. He wants them to open their checkbooks. And he’s very, very good at getting them to do so. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, Leonard Leo might be the most effective fundraiser that ever drew breath.
J. Peter Grace (1913-1995)
Industrialist
Like Leonard Leo, the late CEO of W.M. Grace & Co. was a Knight of Malta. His grandfather was the first Catholic mayor of New York. It is Grace’s 8,000-square-foot, 11-bedroom mansion on Mount Desert Island that Leo purchased from the estate of the late industrialist and political operative. Word is, he got himself a nice deal on the purchase price.
Barre Seid (b. 1932)
Electronics magnate
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Seid amassed a vast fortune manufacturing and selling crappy surge protectors. Last year, the nonagenarian reactionary donated the bulk of said fortune, some $1.6 billion, to Leonard Leo. This is enough to underwrite whatever he chooses to do more or less indefinitely, as Nina Burleigh writes in the New Republic:
The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.
The gift from nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Seid (pronounced Barry Side) is effective altruism in reverse: a fire hose of cash aimed at destroying American liberal culture through lawsuits and support for politicians challenging gay rights, unions, environmental protection, voting rights, and public education. The money will last a good long while. Philanthropic recipients usually follow a 5 percent rule: They try not to spend more than 5 percent of the endowment per year. Seid’s pile is so large that it could return an average $136 million a year, or north of $230 million on a good year, to influence U.S. law and policy. Without ever having to touch the nut. For a sense of how enormous that is, consider this. The Heritage Foundation and its affiliates spent about $86 million in 2021. Heritage is a huge, and hugely influential, conservative think tank. Leo could create two Heritage Foundations and one more sizable organization on the side—all, again, without having to dip into the principal at all.
It is enough, perhaps, to fund the end of democracy in the United States.
Harlan Crow (b. 1949)
Real estate developer
His father, Trammell Crow, was once described as “the largest landlord in the United States.” Harlan inherited the company, boosted its value, invested in Nazi memorabilia, and gave away gobs of money to rightwing causes—if by “rightwing causes” we mean “Clarence Thomas.” Crow took the SCOTUS justice on his yacht, flew him around on his private jet, entertained him at his rustic Adirondack getaway. He bought him Frederick Douglass’s Bible, paid for his nephew to go to prep school, financed the remodeling of his mother’s kitchen, and God knows what else. And in the middle of all that wheeling and dealing was Leonard Leo, immortalized in an oil painting with Crow, Thomas, and two of his acolytes.
Paul Singer (b. 1944)
Founder, Elliott Management
Vulture capitalist known for buying up bad debt from sovereign nations and forcing them to make good. Anti-tax libertarian and GOP donor. Unlike almost everyone else on this list, is pro-LGBTQ rights. Donated to the campaign of Republican John Faso, in my district here in New York, to combat the popularity of his progressive opponent, Zephyr Teachout; she famously challenged Singer to a debate, saying they should skip the middle man. It was Singer’s private jet that transported Sam Alito to that lavish Alaskan fishing getaway, as reported by ProPublica; subsequently, Alito sided with Singer in a Supreme Court case involving the sovereign debt of Argentina. The guy who arranged Alito’s appearance on that trip? Leonard Leo. ProPublica reports:
Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.
Timothy Busch (b. 1963?)
Founder, Busch Firm
Busch made his fortune in estate planning for high-net-worth individuals—helping grotesquely rich people pay as little in taxes as possible, basically. He is the co-founder of the Napa Institute, an organization that “empowers Catholic leaders to renew the Church and transform the culture,” whatever that means. The National Catholic Reporter calls it “a conservative Catholic organization known for its annual high-end conference featuring wine tastings and cigars.” Leonard Leo is involved with this organization, which, a quick survey of its repugnant Twitter feed reveals, is just as homophobic and pro-forced birth as he is.
Rebekah Mercer (b. 1973)
Heiress
She is the daughter of Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who invested in Breitbart News, Cambridge Analytica, and, in Britain, the “Leave” campaign, and who once owed the United States government $7,000,000,000 in back taxes. Rebekah was a key funder and co-founder of the social media site Parler. Christopher Ruddy, who owns Newsmax, once called her “the First Lady of the Alt-Right.” She, Steve Bannon, and Leonard Leo teamed up on the board of Reclaim New York, a charity. As the Washington Post reports:
Mercer and Bannon would go on to play central roles in Trump’s insurgent campaign, Mercer as a leading financial backer and Bannon as campaign chief.
In the year Leo joined Mercer’s group, and in the two following years, the Mercer family became a leading benefactor of the Federalist Society, donating a total of nearly $6 million, tax filings show.
Charles Koch (b. 1935)
Billionaire businessman
Leo and Koch are like the Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro of conservative fundraising. They may not appear in the same scenes, but they definitely know each other.
Politicians & Beltway Insiders
Donald Trump (b. 1946)
Criminal ex-president
I can’t imagine that Leonard Leo—ardent Christian and enjoyer of fine wines—has much personal affection for FPOTUS, the serial adulterer and sexual assailant who has nothing in common with Jesus beyond a gift for getting people to listen when he talks. But Leo worked him. As Trump’s “judge whisperer,” he got all three of his picks on the Supreme Court; it helped that Don McGahn, another Leo associate, was White House counsel at the time.
Not only that, but in the last year especially of the Trump presidency, the only competent officials remaining in the West Wing had ties to Leonard Leo and the Catholic Information Center: penultimate Attorney General Bill Barr; adviser Kellyanne Conway; Antonin Scalia’s son Eugene, the Secretary of Labor; Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli; and Pat “Patsy Baloney” Cipollone, the White House Counsel who served on the board of the CIC and co-founded the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast with, among others, Leonard Leo.
Were these people serving in the administration of that horrible criminal because they believed in Trump’s mission of naked self-enrichment? Or were they taking Machiavellian advantage of Trump’s executive ineptitude to shape policy, as Leonard Leo had done with regard to the SCOTUS picks? Were they motivated by patriotism—or something darker?
Rick Santorum (b. 1958)
Former senator, former CNN talking head
The onetime presidential candidate known for sweater vests and dullness was the baptismal sponsor of Sam Brownback, the former governor of Kansas, who was baptized by Father McCloskey. With Leonard Leo, Pat Cipollone, and a few others, he founded the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. As senator, he was rabidly anti-abortion and a staunch opponent of gay marriage, civil unions, and gay sex of any kind. His comments comparing homosexuality to bestiality drew the ire of sex columnist Dan Savage, who popularized a new definition of “santorum.” Santorum’s “Google problem” is funny; his anti-LGBTQ bigotry is not, and yet he was retained at CNN for years.
Orrin Hatch (1934-2022)
Senator from Utah
Leonard Leo’s first Beltway gig, back in 1986, was as an intern in Hatch’s Senate office. The two remained connected. Hatch’s name frequently pops up in old newspaper articles about Leo-related initiatives. In 2019, Leo was the keynote speaker at “Protecting Our Religious Liberty,” a symposium hosted by the University of Utah’s Hatch Foundation.
Ron DeSantis (b. 1978)
Governor of Florida
DeSantis and Leo are connected via the Teneo Network, a shadowy conservative outfit that aims to check liberal dominance of the popular culture. The former is featured in the advertising and spoke at a recent event; the latter is on the board and helps raise funding. As ProPublica reports:
Soon after Leo took an interest in Teneo, the group’s finances soared. Annual revenue reached $2.3 million in 2020 and nearly $5 million in 2021, according to tax records. In 2021, the bulk of Teneo’s income — more than $3 million — came from one source: DonorsTrust, a clearinghouse for conservative, libertarian and other charitable gifts that masks the original source of the money. In 2020, the Leo-run group that received the Chicago business owner’s $1.6 billion donation gave $41 million to DonorsTrust, which had $1.5 billion in assets as of 2021.
Florida under DeSantis is a place that rails against “wokeness,” abortion, and LGBTQ rights, especially for trans people; the governor’s public battle with Disney represents his ideological battle against liberal culture. DeSantis removes journalists from his press conferences who ask him difficult questions, and works to suppress voting rights in the Sunshine State. He’s a conservative Catholic, a guy who wasn’t exactly kind to Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a crony of Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro, and an obvious fascist. In short, he is exactly the sort of politician Leonard Leo wants.
The co-founder of the Teneo Network is . . .
Josh Hawley (b. 1979)
Senator from Missouri
The senator who represents, but does not live in, Missouri is best known for fist-pumping, and then turning tail and fleeing from, the January 6 insurrectionists. An enemy of democracy, he was the first senator to publicly object to the certification of the 2020 election. He’s staunchly antichoice—in college, he reportedly had that “pro-life” poster hanging up in his dorm room—and has thought long and (ahem) hard about masculinity, so much so that he wrote a book about it.
Hawley and Leonard Leo have been associates for years. Hawley worked at the Becket Fund for Religious Freedom, a Leonard Leo joint, where he helped argue the Hobby Lobby case, which ultimately allowed corporations to deny insurance payments for contraceptives.
Oh, and Hawley’s wife, Erin Morrow Hawley, an attorney with the contemptible Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)—the two of them met while clerking for John Roberts—litigated the 303 Creative case before the Supreme Court. That’s the case where a homophobic bigot, Lorie Smith, won the right to deny services to gay people. But the dispute was pure bullshit. The man making the request for her services, “Stewart,” denies ever having done so. As the Associated Press reports:
Smith named Stewart — and included a website service request from him, listing his phone number and email address in 2017 court documents. But Stewart told The Associated Press he never submitted the request and didn’t know his name was invoked in the lawsuit until he was contacted this week by a reporter from The New Republic, which first reported his denial.
“I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I’ve been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years,” said Stewart, who declined to give his last name for fear of harassment and threats. His contact information, but not his last name, were listed in court documents.
He added that he was a designer and “could design my own website if I need to” — and was concerned no one had checked into the validity of the request cited by Smith until recently.
The lawsuit that stemmed from this fictitious dispute is now the law of the land.
This means that an attorney associated with Leonard Leo, who is married to a senator who worked for a Leonard Leo group, presented an argument near and dear to Leonard Leo’s heart—that is, that it’s very legal and very cool to discriminate against gay people—to a Supreme Court composed of Leonard Leo’s “godfather,” two justices Leonard Leo helped get nominated and confirmed, and three justices Leonard Leo selected for the job. On this case, the Leonard Leo Court ruled 6-3. All six Leonard Leo judges gave Leonard Leo the victory Leonard Leo wanted.
Expand the Court. Run on a promise to do so. Don’t let Leonard Leo and his motley assortment of hateful weirdos prevail.
NOTE: This corrects a previous version which erroneously stated how many times Amy Coney Barrett has been pregnant that we know of. She has seven children, two of them adopted.
For more on the Rehnquist Concurrence, read the first section of this December 2020 post by Moscow Never Sleeps, or watch the last segment of The Five 8.
Good morning-- Happy Independence Day!
And perfect timing a follow up.