MUSIC -Sophie Baum

Kai Wright: Hey everybody, it's Kai. This week we're sharing the third and final part of We Don't Talk About Leonard. If you've been following our feed, you know all about it. It's a three-part series from our friends at On The Media, who teamed up with ProPublica to investigate the rise of a man named Leonard Leo, who played an outsized role in the conservative takeover of America's courts. This week, the reporting team drills into the fight to gain influence over state courts and reveal what Leo and his allies are planning for the future. Leo, he is finally confronted face-to-face in his own neighborhood. Here's On The Media host Brooke Gladstone.

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Brooke Gladstone: Millions of dark money dollars are pouring into judicial races across the country, changing the way judges are elected, and how they preside.

Speaker 3: Suddenly, there were millions of dollars being put in.

Speaker 4: They add to the system. They add to democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, what conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo is doing with one of the largest political donations in American history.

Speaker 5: After one lunch, you can put different kinds of capital together to go out into the world and basically wreck shop.

Brooke Gladstone: Leo's vision for American society collides with American society.

Speaker 6: There is Leonard Leo himself with a security guard standing there chalking my name.

Brooke Gladstone: He was reading your name on the sidewalk as you were jogging by.

Speaker 6: Yes. How completely surreal is that?

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. The first week in October, the liberal majority on Wisconsin State Supreme Court agreed to hear a case about the state's legislative districts drawn up by Republican lawmakers back in 2011. In agreeing to hear one of the most disputed gerrymandering cases in the country, they also reignited a simmering threat.

Speaker 7: Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz remains under the threat of impeachment by legislative Republicans and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who has now created a secret panel of former Supreme Court justices to study the legal issues surrounding the process of impeachment.

Brooke Gladstone: Justice Protasiewicz was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court last April and started her term in August. Before she was elected, she'd made some public comments suggesting that the current electoral maps were rigged.

Justice Protasiewicz: Absolutely positively rigged. They do not reflect the people in the state.

Brooke Gladstone: And now.

Speaker 7: Republicans are saying if she agrees to hear a redistricting case, but does not recuse herself that that would constitute corrupt conduct in office.

Brooke Gladstone: This week, two former Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were asked to weigh in on the legality of the impeachment plan, their opinion, Protasiewicz had not committed a crime or corrupt conduct that would warrant such an extreme measure. State Republicans were thwarted, for now, in their efforts to unseat the justice, but the threat of impeachment has loomed ever since her short tenure began. What's happening in Wisconsin is an especially stark example of how state courts are becoming increasingly theatres of political war, but in Wisconsin, the judiciary has long been a partisan battlefield.

In this, the third and final installment of We Don't Talk About Leonard, our series made in collaboration with ProPublica, we examine the corrosive influence of money on judicial races and ponder, what's Leo planning for the future? Reporters Andrea Bernstein and Andy Kroll are our guides for this episode. Andrea is up first with more on the Wisconsin situation.

Andrea Bernstein: Wisconsin was one of the first states Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society got involved with in around 2007. That was the same time they were unsuccessfully trying to upend Missouri's nonpartisan judicial selection plan. It was designed to take politics out of judicial selection. The plan pushed the court to the center, something Leo opposed. Leo lost in Missouri, but he did not give up on state courts, they were too tempting to target. In contrast to the power they wield, for example, ruling nonvoting districts on gubernatorial edicts and abortion bans, they're pretty low profile. A little can go a long way when you want to change the composition of the courts.

Take Florida, where Leo did figure out how to influence state judicial selections. As soon as he was elected in 2018, governor Ron DeSantis, the Federalist Society member since law school, brought in Leo to lead a secret panel that reviewed recommendations by the state's public judicial commission. The Florida Supreme Court now has a six-to-one conservative majority.

Speaker 8: That's judicial selections. In this episode, we're looking at judicial elections. These are what Pomona College professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky, author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, describes as low-information elections.

Speaker 9: These are ripe for influence from outside parties who would like to see certain decisions go certain ways, and can use these judicial elections to populate the state with judges who are going to rule the way they want them to rule.

Andrea Bernstein: Judicial elections have led to results that have helped erode democracy in some states already, according to a University of Washington study that ranks the health of democracies and individual states. In the last two decades, North Carolina and Wisconsin have plummeted from two of the highest-scoring states to scraping the bottom. Leonard Leo played his part in making that happen.

Speaker 9: When you have a policy agenda and a policy platform that is not appealing to the majority of Americans, then the courts become a very attractive venue for carrying out your policy agenda.

Andrea Bernstein: Like an abortion.

Speaker 9: It's not just policymaking through the courts. It's policymaking through the courts, that then feeds back into the machinery of democracy in ways that favor Republican electoral outcomes.

Andrea Bernstein: I'm going to describe a recent event, one that looked like a defeat for Leo and it was, but it was also a victory. Stay with me, you'll see why.

[applause]

The most expensive State Supreme Court race in US history ended the night of April 4th, 2023, at least $51 million were spent including millions from groups associated with Leo, because of IRS rules, we won't know how much for years. We may not ever know exactly who gave all that money. We do know that Leonard Leo personally donated $20,000, the maximum allowable to the campaign of the Conservative candidate Dan Kelly. Kelly had served once before as a justice and his opinions fit the profile of the kind of candidate Leo supports against abortion and same-sex marriage, against restrictions on businesses and gun ownership.

Kelly had also aligned himself with those rejecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Dan Kelly: I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent-

Andrea Bernstein: That early night in April, the night of the election in Wisconsin, Kelly takes the podium with a tight smile that looks like a frown.

Dan Kelly: -but I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.

Andrea Bernstein: Kelly gives an unusual concession speech, one that accuses his opponent of doing what critics said he had done, threatening the nature of the judiciary and democracy itself.

Dan Kelly: My opponent is a serial liar. She's disregarded judicial ethics. She's demeaned the judiciary with her behavior. This is the future that we have to look forward to in Wisconsin.

Andrea Bernstein: No partisan labels were attached to the candidates, but both the Republican and Democratic parties made clear who they were supporting. It was understood that if Kelly won, he would likely join opinions outlawing abortion, uphold political maps that favored Republicans, and possibly rule for the GOP in a case determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. That if his opponent, Janet Protasiewicz was one, she would likely do the opposite. Kelly wraps up his speech, sighing in person his lips.

Dan Kelly: I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it's going to need it.

[applause]

Andrea Bernstein: For years, Leo had made a project of Wisconsin in general, and Dan Kelly in particular. It started when Leo and the Federalist Society launched the state courts project and metaphorically put a red circle around the state of Wisconsin. The Federalist Society said in its 2007 annual report that Wisconsin faced an election of some consequence. In early 2008, a Wisconsin conservative named Michael Gableman been challenged to sitting Justice, Louis Butler. Butler had voted on a lead paint liability case that outraged a big Wisconsin business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

Justice Janine Geske: I just thought it was an awful race. It was so different than what we had seen.

Andrea Bernstein: This is Justice Janine Geske. Now she's a professor at Marquette University Law School, but back in the '90s, she served as a Wisconsin State Supreme Court Justice.

Justice Janine Geske: I am conservative in the sense that I don't think we should be uprooting laws and changing precedent, unless there's a huge reason to do it, and we should do it carefully and slowly.

Andrea Bernstein: Like many Wisconsin justices, Geske was named to fill a vacancy in her case by a Republican governor. She says the Gableman/Butler race was a real turning point for Wisconsin.

Justice Janine Geske: Suddenly, there were millions of dollars being put in. That was new.

Andrea Bernstein: The race was fraught, racially charged. Gableman's supporters targeted Butler who is Black with a barrage of ads suggesting he was soft on crimes.

Reporter: Louis Butler worked with criminals on the street.

Andrea Bernstein: One commercial run by Gableman's own campaign showed the mugshot of a convicted rapist next to a picture of Justice Butler.

Reporter: Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler on the Supreme Court?

Justice Janine Geske: To have those two pictures of Black men right next to each other one sex offender, one a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court took our breath away most of us looking at that thinking, "What have we descended to?"

Andrea Bernstein: Among Gableman's backers, Leonard Leo. These were early days for Leo. He was just building his network. It was years before Citizens United unleashed rivers of money into campaigns. According to a person close to Gableman's campaign, Leo had a big influence. This person told me Leo had a list of wealthy donors passed along to the campaign. The list came with instructions to call the donors and "tell them Leonard told you to call." Each donor on the list, this person said, gave them maximum. When we asked him about this, Leo declined to comment. Gableman won. This was the first time a state Supreme Court challenger had unseated an incumbent in Wisconsin in 40 years.

Reporter: Louis Butler blames his loss in part on the negative attack ads from third-party groups.

Louis Butler: It's my hope and my prayer that Wisconsin never has to see a race like we just went through.

Andrea Bernstein: In 2010, Republicans turned to Leo again according to emails. This time it was to help elected justice who could back Governor Scott Walker. Here's an ad from that race for judge. The Conservative judge won. Walker stayed in power. Leo declined to comment on his involvement in this race. By this time, Democrats are responding unkind, running their own attack ads. The year after that race, records show money from Leo-related groups finds its way to Wisconsin.

The Judicial Crisis Network, JCN, the dark money group that's been so closely tied to Leo's ambitions gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to Conservative and business groups that spent heavily on Wisconsin court fights. Leo says he doesn't remember this happening. Around this time is when Dan Kelly enters the scene. A graduate of the devoutly Christian Regent University Law School and an attorney for an anti-abortion group and the Republican Party. Kelly becomes president of the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. He travels to Washington for Federalist Society conferences. He becomes close to Leo and his team.

When we asked Leo about this, he said, "I have known Dan Kelly for a number of years."

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In 2016, there's a vacancy on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and Republican Governor Scott Walker gets to choose who fills out the term. There are three finalists, two Court of Appeals judges, and Kelly, who at the time had never been a judge. Then Leo stepped in and said, "It's going to be Dan Kelly." A person familiar with the selection process told me adding, "There is zero question in my mind. The Federalist Society put the hammer down."

Two other Wisconsin Republicans who learned of the intervention at the time confirm this account to me. Walker told me in a voicemail message that he never discussed judicial appointments with Leonard Leo while he was governor. Leo says he doesn't remember if he urged Walker to appoint Kelly. Kelly did not respond to requests for comment. Dan Kelly gets the job.

Justice Dan Kelly: Thank you, Governor Walker, specifically for the point. This is an exceptional honor.

Andrea Bernstein: In 2017, 2018, 2019, really big money from Leo's Judicial Crisis Network starts to flow into multiple Wisconsin Supreme Court races. Millions of dollars. Some of it ends up in TV ads aimed at swaying Wisconsin voters. JCN did not respond to our questions.

Donald Trump: Go vote for Justice Daniel Kelly, to defend the rule of law in Wisconsin. Daniel Kelly.

Andrea Bernstein: In April of 2020, it's time for Kelly to run for election for the seat he was given by appointment. It's a complicated political year. Kelly loses. Then he goes to work for the state Republican Party as their attorney. When Trump loses his second run for the presidency, Kelly gets involved in Trump's efforts to overturn the election.

Reporter: Wisconsin's 10 Republican electors secretly met at the Capitol in December 2020 trying to submit false paperwork claiming Donald Trump won Wisconsin instead of Joe Biden.

Andrea Bernstein: Then Kelly starts running for Supreme Court Justice again, he boasts openly about being the Conservative candidate who can pull in tens of millions of dollars in money from outside the state, money that translates to ads. Kelly does pull in the money, including from Leonard Leo, but the candidate backed by the Democrats also raises big bucks.

Reporter: The airwaves are flooded with ads from liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz who's outspending conservative candidate Daniel Kelly,

Andrea Bernstein: After the Supreme Court Dobbs decision sent abortion rights to the states, there was a 19th-century law banning abortion that could go into effect in Wisconsin. Abortion rights groups and voters rise up. Judge Janet, as she's called wins handily. Leo's candidate lost twice. The idea that Leo had all those years ago, that idea is winning, that judges could be a prize for a political party rather than an independent branch of government. Former Justice Janine Geske says it's like the candidates were running to be "super legislators" rather than independent arbiters of the facts, and the law.

Justice Janine Geske: Third branch was losing its judicial hat and putting on a legislative hat. They were making legislative decisions. That's not what they do, and I know that's not what they do. I think that's what many voters think.

Andrea Bernstein: Current and former state supreme court justices that I spoke with from all around the country are deeply disturbed with the overt partisanship and boatloads of money that were spent in Wisconsin.

Justice Bob Orr: That's bad for the system, it's ad for democracy. It's a very dangerous path to tread down.

Andrea Bernstein: This is one of those judges.

Justice Bob Orr: My name is Bob Orr and I was the justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Andrea Bernstein: When he was elected, Orr was the first Republican to serve on the bench in North Carolina for almost a century. He joined the Federalist Society for support.

Justice Bob Orr: It was a sense of if you're the underdog, it's us against them.

Andrea Bernstein: Justice Orr left the North Carolina High Court before Leonard Leo got to work on State Supreme Courts. You can trace Leo's interest in North Carolina through the money that starts coming in around 2012. The Judicial Crisis Network was using the same playbook they were using in Wisconsin. Just like in Wisconsin, JCN was part of a first wave of big outside money and negative ads coming into the state.

Justice Bob Orr: All of a sudden, we started seeing these, what I would consider misleading and distorted traditional political ads we all knew in politics, but we'd never seen those and judicial races.

Andrea Bernstein: Over the next decade, JCN, a group that Leo launched and raised money for, kept sending money to another organization, the Republican State Leadership Committee, or RSLC. Some years, Leo's JCN was RSLC's biggest donor, and that group spent more and more money on state judicial races. Staggering amounts according to the legal institute, the Brennan Center for Justice. Bob Orr says all of this money coming in has had a clear impact.

Justice Bob Orr: If I don't rule a certain way in certain cases, this is going to come back to really hurt my career.

Andrea Bernstein: Like Justice Janine Geske in Wisconsin, Justice Orr told me that the rank politics in court races confuses the public about the role of the justice system and civic lies, about what judges are supposed to do.

Justice Bob Orr: The whole confidence in the judiciary is critical in the sense of that's supposed to be the umpire, but if you have no confidence in the courts, then you undermine the whole process.

Andrea Bernstein: He says, "That's what the ads are doing."

Justice Bob Orr: The ads are going to be judged so-and-so voted to release a child molester who did this or that.

Andrea Bernstein: There was actually an ad about child molesting?

Justice Bob Orr: I'm trying to remember. After a while, you want to put them out of your mind.

Andrea Bernstein: Negative ads have long focused on democratic judges being soft on crime. In 2020, Chief Justice Cheri Beasley was running to retain her seat.

Chief Justice Cheri Beasley: I felt powerless to fix the trajectory of my race. I could do the very best I was going to do, but I also understood that the impact of outside money in my race was going to be determinative in so many ways.

Andrea Bernstein: Unlike in Wisconsin, judges run on party lines in North Carolina. Beasley ran as a Democrat and for a long time, her party controlled the majority in North Carolina Supreme Court. Beasley says even though she raised a lot of money, and even though Democrats are now spending in judicial races, conservatives have had a huge head start.

Chief Justice Cheri Beasley: Democrats and moderate-leaning groups long delayed being informed around the importance of judicial elections and why it was important to make sure that the electorate is informed about these races.

Andrea Bernstein: In 2020, Chief Justice Beasley lost her race to Republican Justice Paul Newby by 401 votes. Then more money comes in from Leo's groups. In 2021 according to tax returns, nearly all of JCN's funding came directly from a group Leo controls. JCN donates millions to RSLC. RSLC spends record-breaking amounts on state court races. In November of 2022, a year that was generally unfavorable to Republicans, RSLC and JCN and Leo win big. The North Carolina court is flipped from four to three Democrat to five to two Republican.

Speaker 10: All rise, Honorable Chief Justice--

Andrea Bernstein: In early February of 2023, the newly Republican-controlled court did something extraordinary. It said it would rehear two voting rights cases that the court had decided just two months earlier when it was controlled by Democrats. Same court, same facts, same law, different partisan makeup. This is the logical outcome of the court system Leonard Leo helped create. After the first hearing in a wind-swept plaza between the court and the Capitol, voting rights advocates looked grim staring at the ground.

Sam Hirsch: Good afternoon. My name is Sam Hirsch, H-I-R-S-C-H.

Andrea Bernstein: I traveled to Raleigh to watch the hearings in the two cases which were held on two unusually cold mid-March days. The first to be heard was Harper v. Hall, which just a few months earlier had green-lit electoral maps that more closely reflected the state's roughly even partisan division. The lawyer for the plaintiffs, in that case, didn't even pretend things had gone well.

Sam Hirsch: In the state of North Carolina and in the United States of America, collections are supposed to matter. They're the way that we translate the popular will, the sovereignty of the people into government power. If the Supreme Court of North Carolina overrules the Harper decisions from last year, it'll be saying to the people of North Carolina that only one election matters and that's the election for the seven members of that court. That's not our democratic system.

Andrea Bernstein: Can you tell us how it felt to be in the court today?

Sam: Hirsch: Quick. [laughter] Some of the justices did not seem to want to spend time hearing about the key issues, including--

Andrea Bernstein: The next day wasn't any better for the plaintiffs. This case was over whether voter ID laws discriminated against Black voters. Plaintiff lawyer Paul Brockman cited case law showing that to prove voter ID laws discriminate, you don't need to have someone explicitly saying they're meant to discriminate.

Paul Brockman: We are fortunately well past the time where we expect to find blatant statements of racially discriminatory motive in the legislative record. I hope [crosstalk]

Justice Phil Berger Jr.: I'm sorry, counsel. If I understand you are indicating that there is no direct evidence of racial animus in Senate Bill or the Legislative Bill 824.

Andrea Bernstein: This is Justice Phil Berger Jr., a Republican. He disregards what Brockman says. He wants the direct evidence. Brockman tries again.

Paul Brockman: We hope in 2023 that we are well past the point where legislators are going to stand up on the floor of the General Assembly and proclaim an intent to disenfranchise African-American voters.

Justice Phil Berger Jr.: You agree that the legislation on its face is--

Andrea Bernstein: In April, Berger Jr. wrote the five to two decision overturning a precedent that had stood for just five months. He wrote, "Plaintiffs here have failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that SB 824 was enacted with discriminatory intent or that the law actually produces a meaningful disparate impact along racial lines." The prior opinion is withdrawn.

Reporter: Major victories for the state Republicans today.

Reporter: The State Supreme Court issuing big rulings with major implications on how North Carolina votes.

Reporter: The North Carolina Supreme Court has reinstated the voter ID law.

Reporter: This five-to-two decision likely means that a photo ID mandate will be enforced in the 2024 election.

Andrea Bernstein: Neither the Judicial Crisis Network nor the Republican State Leadership Committee nor Justice Phil Berger Jr. had any comment. Leonard Leo wrote an answer to our questions, "I think the state Supreme Courts are more independent and impartial today than they were when trial lawyers and unions dominated state judicial races without any counter. If the name Phil Berger Jr. is ringing a bell, here's why. He was among the justices who attended the big party in Leonard Leo's mansion in June of 2022.

The one by the cove protected by US Marshals and the Coast Guard, the one where the mood was jubilant, where guests drank champagne and whiskey and consumed a three-course meal. The party that came at the end of a US Supreme Court term where conservatives made gains on gun rights, on religious rights, and the day after the party, abortion. Now, there was something else to celebrate, decisions that could protect Republican majorities in the North Carolina state legislature for years to come.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Leo is hard at work building the "Federalist Society for Everything." This is On the Media.

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This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. You are listening to our investigative collaboration with ProPublica, We Don't Talk About Leonard. In early 2020, the news website, Axios, reported a story with the headline, Leonard Leo to Shape New Conservative Network. Leonard had plans. He told Axios he was leaving his day job as the Federalist Society's executive VP to set up a group called CRC Advisors, a group inspired, Leo said, by an outfit called Arabella Advisors, described by Axios as a "little-known yet powerful consulting firm that advises liberal donors and nonprofits about where to spend their money."

Leo said that he planned to work with two existing groups that we've talked so much about in this series, the Judicial Crisis Network and the Judicial Education Project. Only they were getting new names, the Concord Fund and the 85 Fund. One of Leo's first projects, a $10 million campaign focusing on judges. Soon, he would quietly set in motion a plan to transfer a $1.6 billion donation from an obscure electronics manufacturer to a political nonprofit that Leo alone controlled.

Another thing Leo kept mum about was that he'd soon be taking over the Teneo Network, a private national networking group. ProPublica and the investigative journalism project documented, obtained hours of internal videos and hundreds of pages of documents from Teneo, which taken together provide a roadmap of exactly what Leo wants to do, which simply put is to create a federalist society for everything. Here's Andy.

Andy Kroll: When we started reporting this series, there were some big driving questions. What does Leonard Leo do with $1.6 billion? People who work with Leo, like Federalist Society co-founder, David McIntosh, said that Leo had a choice. Take the berry side money to the Federalist Society or create his own new thing. He decided new thing.

David McIntosh: He in his own thinking of, should he stay at the Federalist Society or should he give up that position and move to heading up the network.

Andy Kroll: The network, among Leo Associates we spoke with, that term refers to the broader network, but also a specific one, the Teneo Network, one former leader of that group, told me that it was "high on his priority list." Leo not only funded it, he took it over.

Leonard Leo: Teneo shapes the broader culture by building networks of conservatives that can roll back or crush liberal dominance in the areas of American life.

Andy Kroll: This is Leo in a promotional video from not too long ago. He's sitting on a couch, wearing a charcoal gray jacket, no tie.

Leonard Leo: I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. At some point or another, I just said to myself, "If this can work for law, why can't it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?"

Andy Kroll: Leo ticks off a few of those areas, what he calls wokeism in the corporate environment, one-sided journalism, entertainment that's, "corrupting our youth". He lays out the philosophy that's driven his work for the past three decades.

Leonard Leo: At the end of the day, the movements that have been most successful in human history have been the ones where relationships were built, where bonds were built, where friendships were made, where people had people's backs. If you can build talent pipelines of people who believe in the ideals around which our country were founded, and you can unite those people in common purpose,--

Andy Kroll: We've seen Leo do this, hosting parties, bringing people together, building networks, spotting talent, and making calls on their behalf to high government officials.

Andrea Bernstein: One person who worked closely with Leo told me, "It's not like normal Washington networking, where you get a business card, and then add the person to your contacts list." This person who Leo scouted in law school told me, "He'd always make time. He'd see what an event, come over and say hi. You always knew he was in your corner." Leo, this person said, has a "generational timeframe." Those judges he's recommended, "He had known some of them for life."

Teneo would've been around for about a decade before Leo took it over. Its co-founder was a conservative entrepreneur named Evan Baehr. There's this one video made late in the Trump administration, where Baehr explains why he formed the group. He said, "Leonard Leo was an inspiration."

Evan Baehr: The secret sauce behind Leo's work is the following. There's about 75,000, members of the Federalist Society.

Andrea Bernstein: Baehr says there are about 3,000 people that are in Leo's inner core.

Evan Baehr: With those people, he is mostly identifying them and recruiting them for either specific roles to serve as judges or to spin up and launch critical projects often, which you would have no idea about.

Andrea Bernstein: Baehr is telling us exactly how it works, recruit and mentor conservatives and get them in top jobs where they can really have an influence.

Evan Baehr: Leo in the White House, White House Counsel's Office, State Department, AG, Pentagon, DOD. They're everywhere, and that's really cool.

Andy Kroll: In 2021, Leo takes over as chair of the board of the Teneo Network. Soon new members join, federal judges and attorney general, a Solicitor General, deputy solicitors general. Also, people who work for Leo's business, CRC Advisors.

Andrea Bernstein: The leaders of the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Republican state leadership committee, top staffers for Republican governors and senators, and a lot of conservative media figures, athletes, academics, venture capitalists, and bankers.

Andy Kroll: All these new members are a diagram of the people that are important to Leo. The leaders he wants to connect with one another to bring about a new era of social change. In one video, Evan Baehr explicitly lays out how they want to do this.

Evan Baehr: We think the left gets us right all the time, and we're learning from them.

Andrea Bernstein: In the video, Baehr is wearing a navy polo shirt standing at a clear plastic podium in front of a couple of potted plants. He wears a watch on each wrist and just gesticulates a lot.

Evan Baehr: Consider this case study. Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in Midtown, Manhattan, and you have a billionaire hedge funder, you have a film producer, you have a Harvard professor, and a New York Times writer.

Andrea Bernstein: It's a conspiratorial view of the left. It's Teneo's model,

Evan Baehr: The billionaire says, "Wouldn't it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex change therapy paid for by the federal government?" The filmmaker says, "I'd love to do a documentary on that. That'll be a major motion film." The Harvard professor says, "We can do studies on that that say that's absolutely biologically sound and safe." The New York Times person says, "I'll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender." After one lunch, you can put different kinds of capital together to go out into the world, and what, basically wreck shop.

Andrea Bernstein: Wreck shop, go to town.

Evan Baehr: That is our approach for how we're trying to advance our ideas.

Andrea Bernstein: In a statement, Leo told us Teneo it was a network of some of the most intelligent, strategic, and driven people I've ever met or known, spanning across many major professional sectors in American life. Leo added he's excited to, "level the playing field in this country for a fair fight over the direction of public policy, media, and other areas."

Andy Kroll: When the Federalist Society started in the 1980s, it wasn't obvious how powerful it would become. Leo was identifying and promoting talent and making connections for decades before some of his efforts came to fruition. Leaders on the left told me, "Shame on us. We should have been working on this too."

Andrea Bernstein: Leo has only been in charge of Teneo for a couple of years. It's hard to see exactly what the group has accomplished. What we can say, Leo's getting ready to make a move should the pieces fall into place.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Leo has moved his family to a coastal mansion in Maine, but it has not been smooth sailing. This is On The Media.

Music - Liky Parker

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. You're listening to our investigative collaboration with ProPublica, We Don't Talk About Leonard. As the title of this series points to up until a few years ago, few people really knew about Leonard Leo, and that was by design, Pomona College, Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky.

Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky: If you can operate below the radar in ways that aren't apparent to the average citizen, and sort of achieve your goals in a way that doesn't invite backlash and scrutiny, then that's the most desirable way to go about doing politics.

Brooke Gladstone: Things began to change with the whole list situation and Donald Trump. In order to keep his supreme court project going, Leo has to send a big signal to Conservatives that he, Leonard Leo, is advising Trump.

Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky: I think he makes the calculation to come out from the shadows and put himself front and center because he knows that that will give Republican voters confidence to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, but that's an Icarus moment too, where they're getting really close to the sun now.

Brooke Gladstone: Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein pick up the story.

Andy Kroll: Leo's coming out more publicly in other ways, too. We can see from tax records that in 2021, the Judicial Crisis Network, which is now called the Concord Fund, is getting basically its entire budget for the $1.6 billion fund Leo controls.

Andrea Bernstein: Leo seems to be thriving, the Concord Fund, formerly JCN, and The 85 Fund, formerly the Judicial Education Project or JEP, are hiring Leo's business, CRC Advisors. So are groups that those groups fund, like the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Andy Kroll: Leo has gone from being a leader of a nonprofit with a modest home in McLean, Virginia, to living in a mansion in northeast Harbor, Maine.

Andrea Bernstein: Leo started coming a couple of decades ago as a visitor, eventually he bought a home.

Andy Kroll: How does somebody who is so stridently conservative, a very religious Catholic, how do you find yourself in Maine in Bar Harbor of all places?

Leonard Leo: We have a long history here.

Andy Kroll: Here's Leo in an interview he did in the summer of 2023. It's with The Main Wire, a Conservative media outlet.

Leonard Leo: As long as some people do, but we started coming here 20 years ago. We had a dear family friend and a house here on Mount Desert Island. She invited us to use her home when she wasn't there, and we started coming for vacations. Of course, we were first attracted by the beauty.

Andy Kroll: At one point, Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas come up to visit, but it didn't get much attention.

Andrea Bernstein: That changes when Leo holds a fundraiser for Maine US Senator Susan Collins in 2019 That was after she gave a deciding yes vote for US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There's a protest outside his house. The local press starts paying attention to Leonard Leo. Three years later, when the Dobbs abortion decision leaks, the demonstrations get more intense.

Demonstrators: Pro-life, that's a lie. You don't care if people die. Pro-life, that's a lie. You don't care if people die.

Andrea Bernstein: At the end of July of 2022, five weeks after Roe v. Wade is overturned, Leo calls the police. He'd been walking to the town's business district with his wife and daughter. The following audio was from a police body cam recording. It's pretty hard to hear.

Leonard Leo: A gentleman pulled up who I'm very familiar with because he's been harassing us for weeks

Andrea Bernstein: He says, "A gentleman pulled up who I'm very familiar with because he's been harassing me for weeks. His name, I think, is Eli Durant."

Leonard Leo: He's in the passenger seat. He yells out--

Andrea Bernstein: "He's in the passenger seat. He yells out, pardon my language, 'You're [censored] and you're going to hell.'" The backstory is that for weeks, protesters have gathered outside Leo's mansion on weekends. Leo has a video, he shows the cops. They watch it together.

Protestor: Leonard Leo is confronting women.

Leonard Leo: They had [censored] Leo signs and stuff like that. That's not political protesting.

Andrea Bernstein: Leo says this isn't a political protest. Instead, he says it's harassment. The protesters are saying, "You don't belong here."

Leonard Leo: You don't belong in this neighborhood.

Andrea Bernstein: Leo says, "With Eli Durant-McDonnell. He's reached his limit."

Leonard Leo: I feel as though it's time to take some action personally.

Andrea Bernstein: After the cops finished taking Leo's statement, he walks out to the front of Leo's house.

Cop Kevin: Eli, you got an ID on you real quick?

Eli Durant-McDonald: I don't actually.

Cop Kevin: All right. You're coming with me.

Eli Durant-McDonald: Why's that?

Cop Kevin: Disorderly conduct

Andrea Bernstein: The demonstrators start to yell.

Cop Kevin: Disorderly conduct on Main Street today, not here. Don't get in the way. Don't get in the way.

[background conversation]

Bow Green: Kevin, this is not cool. You know it's not cool.

Andrea Bernstein: The woman speaking, Bow Green taught calculus at the high school the cop's kids went to. That's how small this town is.

Bow Green: This guy is ruining your country that you say that you stand up for and you're talking about this young man. Come on, Kevin.

Protestor: Are you kidding me?

Bow Green: Kevin, what are you doing?

Andrea Bernstein: Almost a year after the arrest, the case against Eli Durant-McDonnell a recent Oberlin grad who works for a nonprofit and runs a landscaping business was dropped. He was banned from protesting Leo in town while his case was pending but now he's back. In June, he dressed up as Justice Samuel Alito carrying a giant salmon. It's based on a picture first published in ProPublica of Alito and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.

This protest is on the first anniversary of the DOM's decision. It draws a pretty big crowd despite an unpleasant rain. One of the other protesters here is named Bettina Richards. She's wearing bright pink cargo pants and carrying a sign that says, "You claim it's not about control but you're banning birth control. It was always about control."

Bettina Richards: I have definitely talked to him a couple of times when he was walking his dog by my front yard, which is really surreal.

Andrea Bernstein: Richards runs a record company in Chicago and lives on the island for the summers. Just down the road from Leo, where she has a sign that says, "Google Leonard Leo."

Bettina Richards: His neighbor across the street allowed us to hang a pink fist flag across from his house.

Andrea Bernstein: The flag was on private property but one day Richards gets a call that Leo's security guard is in the process of tearing it down.

Bettina Richards: I hopped on my bike and went down there, called the guy, and said what are you doing?

Andrea Bernstein: She gets to work rehanging the flag.

Bettina Richards: I was on a ladder repairing the flag because he'd broken the grommets and the security guard comes back out with Leonard Leo.

Andrea Bernstein: Leo tells her the flag is offensive.

Bettina Richards: I said, "You have a flag hanging out in front of your house."

Andrea Bernstein: Leo rotates flags with Catholic iconography. Richards says "Don't touch my flag."

Bettina Richards: I'm going to know if you've touched it. I have evidence that you've touched it. Then he said to me, "I will allow it."

Andrea Bernstein: Leo told us "The owner of that property came to us some weeks later stating that whoever put the flag up did not have permission and that the property owner would be taking it down." Richards said another household member had okayed the pink fist flag. It was taken down. That was encountered number one. Encounter number two involves some chalk drawings which protesters have taken to writing on the street outside Leo's home like, "Dirty money lives here." Because she lives so close, Richards sees Leo often. He now walks with a security guard and is often accompanied by a priest with a cassock and a collar.

Bettina Richards: I go running often in the morning and I was running about 8:00 AM. [chuckles] I was running down the street and there, bent over halfway, is Leonard Leo himself with a security guard standing there chalking my name.

Andrea Bernstein: He was writing your name on the sidewalk as you were jogging by?

Bettina Richards: Yes. Again, how completely surreal is that? The fact that someone that you would assume if you have a billion dollars that you don't have time to go out and chalk people's names?

Andrea Bernstein: He was writing your name over and over?

Bettina Richards: Yes. Each chalk drawing, he had written our names so he had written it at least four or five times by the time I got there. I think he continued on till he had attributed each chalk drawing to us.

Andrea Bernstein: Leo's spokesperson told us Leo was responding to messages, including one that said, "You should not be enjoying your life here while you destroy other's lives. Get out." Another message is probably best not repeated on the radio. Leo added, "I chalked the names of protesters next to the hateful, vulgar, and offensive statements they had chalked right in front of my family's house, but I washed their names off virtually immediately because I regretted that my behavior was churlish and undignified."

Andy Kroll: When Andrea and I visited Bar Harbor in June of 2023, we encountered something we really haven't found in our reporting, regular people who know who Leonard Leo is. It was like going through the looking glass. The town knows him. His name is familiar. Some of those people like him. Many don't, and some of those people are pushing back. To them, Leo is the face of the conservative takeover of the courts. He's become a rallying cry, a uniting force that's bringing his opponents together.

Andrea Bernstein: When he's spoken about his place in American society, Leo has consistently sounded one note since he was in college and maybe even in high school that he's losing and needs to catch up. In his response to us, he's still saying the same thing.

MUSIC - Sophie Baum

Brooke Gladstone: Here we are. As we've heard throughout the series, courts in America are becoming politicized. One person or seven or nine can overturn the will of the majority. If you're in the political minority, but you can control the courts, well, then you can control democracy through an ultra-minoritarian institution. ProPublica's reporting on undisclosed lavish trips and gifts bestowed on Supreme Court justices has provoked a sharp response. Justice Samuel Alito took to the Wall Street Journal editorial page to charge ProPublica with misleading readers even before the story about him had been published. He didn't dispute any of the facts in his op-ed, nor has he since.

Leo says that the exposes were merely, "bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage the Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber-stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences." Meanwhile, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee has begun investigating ethical lapses on the high court requesting information from Leo, Paul Singer, and Robin Arkley. So far, it seems the senators aren't getting through. In August, Politico reported that the District of Columbia's Attorney General was investigating Leo for possibly enriching himself through his network of tax-exempt nonprofit groups.

Leo's counsel says Leo has done nothing wrong and will not cooperate with the probe. Leonard Leo hasn't achieved total victory, but he's made huge strides, and all the while, almost no one was watching.

MUSIC - Sophie Baum

This series is reported by Andrea Bernstein, Andy Kroll, and Ilya Marritz, and edited by OTM executive producer Katya Rogers, and ProPublica's Jesse Eisenberg. Molly Rosen is the lead producer with help from Shaan Merchant. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Jared Paul wrote and recorded all the original music, which included Lily Parker on viola and Sophie Baum on violin.

Our fact-checkers are Andrea Marks and Hannah Murphy Winter. Our legal team is Ivan Zimmerman, Lauren Cooperman, Jeremy Kutner, and Sarah Matthews. If you missed parts one and two of We Don't Talk About Leonard, you'll find them On The Media feed wherever you get your podcasts. You could read much more at our partner site, propublica.org.

Andrea Bernstein: We'd like to say some thank yous to people who helped us report the story but whose names you won't hear in the show. ProPublica's Eric Umansky, Megan O'Matz, Lindenbaum, Doris Burke, Alex Mierjeski, Ken Twinkie, Ruth Talbot, Nick Weenies, Justin Elliott, Josh Kaplan, and Brett Murphy.

Also for our visual production, Nick Schweitzer, Lisa Larson-Walker, Anna Donlan, Alex Bandoni, and Zisiga Mukulu. Ed Pilkington, David Daley, Lisa Graves, and Evan Vorpahl of True North Research. Sailor Jones of North Carolina Common Cause, Nick Sergei and the team it documented, and Becky Harper. The many, many current and former justices, judges, elected officials, Trump administration appointees, and others who spoke to us confidentially for fear of the consequences to their careers or livelihoods if we use their names in We Don't Talk About Leonard. Tracy Weber is the managing editor and Steve Engelberg is the editor-in-chief of ProPublica. Thanks for listening. I'm Andrea Bernstein

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[music]

 

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