A detailed look at the nonprofit network powered by conservative activist Leonard Leo with new reporting on money paid to his for-profit businesses

In 2017 the New York Times published a piece on Leonard Leo who had been executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society and had taken a leave to advise Donald Trump on Judicial nominees including Neil Gorsuch. They accurately noted at that time that most Americans had probably never heard of Leo.

Leonard Leo first appeared on my radar in 2017 because he was a director of Reclaim New York, with Rebekah Mercer and former director Steve Bannon – who I had been following because of Bannon and the Mercer family’s support of Trump and investment in Cambridge Analytica.

A 2019 Washington Post story described Leonard Leo’s behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts:

The story of Leo’s rise offers an inside look into the modern machinery of political persuasion. It shows how undisclosed interests outside of government are harnessing the nation’s nonprofit system to influence judicial appointments that will shape the nation for decades.

A Guardian story from 2020 described how Leo-aligned nonprofit the Judicial Education Project – also called the Honest Elections Project – was fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election. The Judicial Education Project (later renamed The 85 Fund) was run by Carrie Severino who ran the similarly named Judicial Crisis Network, also known as JCN and since renamed The Concord Fund. Severino was previously a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

Many of the nonprofits aligned with Leo have confusingly similar names, have often changed their names, and are led by an overlapping group of people who expand out to a wider network of organizations. One example is Neil Corkery who has been a director and/or treasurer for many Leo-aligned nonprofits and per Politico is also the CFO of Leo’s for-profit company CRC Advisors. I noted in this twitter/x thread that Neil Corkery was also an officer for Candace Owens Blexit Foundation.

Robert Maguire at CREW has investigated the dark money that has been funding Leo through various nonprofits including the Rule of Law Trust. In 2022 he reported on Leo’s mysterious $200 million dark money war chest ahead of the 2022 midterms, and how his network was active in “culture war battles over Critical Race Theory, trans rights and climate change mitigation” and the consequential efforts to change how elections are conducted.

For years Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has used hearings to educate the public about Leonard Leo and the dark money networks he influenced including the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network.

In 2020 Senators Debbie Stabenow, Chuck Schumer and Sheldon Whitehouse published a report on Captured Courts that featured a section entitled “Follow the Money: The Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, and How Special-Interest Money Dominates Our Courts.”

But with Trump dominating the news throughout his presidency, the coverage of Leo was sporadic and most of it was over-shadowed by Trump and better-known members of his inner circle. It wasn’t until 2023 that Leonard Leo started to garner more visibility and consistent media coverage.

Leonard Leo’s plans to crush liberal dominance

In February 2023 the Wall Street Journal reported on how Leonard Leo was leading a multimillion-dollar effort to push anti-ESG messaging and legislation. Leo’s nonprofit Marble Freedom Trust and his consulting firm CRC Advisors spent over $10 million on the push against ESG.

Their goal: Transform the acronym for environmental, social and corporate-governance investing into a rallying cry against “woke capitalism,” much the way critical race theory became shorthand for broader criticisms about how race is taught in schools. 

In March 2023 ProPublica reported on Leo’s new nonprofit Teneo Network and his plans to expand beyond the judiciary and to influence all aspects of American politics and culture.

Leo declared in a slick but private video to potential donors, he planned to “crush liberal dominance” across American life. The country was plagued by “woke-ism” in corporations and education, “one-sided journalism” and “entertainment that’s really corrupting our youth.”

Another piece from ProPublica and The Guardian described the state strategy implemented by Leo who has been called Donald Trump’s ‘Court Whisperer’ because of the key role he had masterminding judicial appointments during the Trump presidency.

In October ProPublica published a story called “We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority.” The piece provides perhaps the most extensive deep dive into how Leo has built a machine and implemented a strategy that has remade the American legal system, and reports on what Leo plans to do next. In the piece the executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association says:

Leonard Leo has done more to advance conservative causes than any single person in the history of the country.

Leo’s decades-long Supreme Court relationships

Leo has also been in the news recently because of his deep relationships with Justice Clarence Thomas, donor Harlan Crow as well as other justices and major GOP donors.

At the age of 25 Leonard Leo helped with Clarence Thomas’s nomination, and Thomas is a godfather to one of Leo’s daughters. For decades Leo has organized events and donor meetings with Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito and many others.

The Washington Post reported that in 2012 Leonard Leo instructed GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill the nonprofit Judicial Education Project and to use the money to pay Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas “another $25K” and that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid (Ginni) Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012.

Investigations by ProPublica revealed that Republican donor and real estate magnate Harlan Crow paid for lavish travel and gifts for Justice Thomas for decades and Thomas repeatedly failed to disclose these gifts.

In the July 2023 the Senate Judiciary Committee requested information from Leonard Leo, as well as billionaires Paul Singer and Robin Arkley, for a full accounting of gifts to Supreme Court justices.

Leo’s lawyer argued that the requests for Leo’s financial records violated his constitutional rights and Leo did not comply with the request. In early November the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo as part of the committee’s Supreme Court ethics probe.

Heidi Przybyla has done extensive reporting for Politico on Leonard Leo and how many of his nonprofits have made significant payments to his for-profit business.

A March 2023 story highlighted how Leonard Leo and his friends benefitted from his judicial activism and described tens of millions of dollars paid by Leo-aligned nonprofits to two for-profit businesses run by Leo, CRC Advisors and BH Group.

A network of political non-profits formed by judicial activist Leonard Leo moved at least $43 million to a new firm he is leading, raising questions about how his conservative legal movement is funded… A POLITICO investigation based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021 found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016, the year he was tapped as an unpaid adviser to incoming President Donald Trump on Supreme Court justices. It’s the same period during which he erected a for-profit ecosystem around his longtime nonprofit empire that is shielded from taxes.

In April 2023, the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the D.C. attorney general and the IRS to request a probe into what services were provided by Leo’s for-profit businesses and whether Leo violated laws against using charities for personal enrichment.

A few months after her initial story, Przybyla reported that Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb was investigating Leo and his network of nonprofit groups.

In October Leo’s lawyer said he would not cooperate with the DC probe because Schwalb has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures” because Leo’s aligned nonprofits were organized outside of D.C.

Campaign for Accountability Complaint

In April 2023 the Campaign for Accountability sent the IRS this Complaint Against Several Tax-Exempt Organizations Paying Excessive Compensation, Directly or Indirectly, to Leonard Leo.

New reporting shows Leo-affiliated nonprofits paid his for-profit business CRC Advisor significantly more than payments from other nonprofits

New information reported here for the first time reveals a list of over twenty nonprofits that are not known to be directly aligned with Leonard Leo that have paid his for-profit company CRC Advisors fees since 2020.

As the Campaign for Accountability complaint noted, there were questions about the contractor payments that benefitted Leonard Leo and “whether the payments made were substantially in excess of the fair market value of those services.”  

This new reporting shows that for the three years from 2020 to 2022 CRC Advisors was paid over $8.5 million by more than twenty nonprofits (see the first table below). During the three year period 37 payments were made, with an average payment of $230,000. The payments range from a low of $100,951 from First Liberty Institute in 2021 to a high of $885,841 from Patientrightsadvocate Org Inc. in 2022.

Based on public 990 filings that have been released to-date, only three nonprofits made annual payments above $500,000 to CRC – Patientrightsadvocate Org Inc paid $885,841 in 2022, Heritage Action for America paid $797,629 in 2021 and Consumer Research Inc paid $624,456 in 2021. None of the nonprofits that are not directly aligned with Leonard Leo has come close the multi-million dollar payments made by Leo-aligned nonprofits to CRC Advisors.

For the three year period from 2020 to 2022 Leo-aligned nonprofits The 85 Fund, The Concord Fund and the Federalist Society made 8 payments to CRC totaling $54,306,173 (see the second table below). These nonprofits paid an average of almost $6.8 million per payment, and payments ranged from a low of $1,565,911 from the Federalist Society in 2022 to $21,715,382 from The 85 Fund in 2021 (the 85 Fund has not yet reported their 2022 financials so that amount is not included yet).

To show how intertwined these organizations are, as Przybyla reported — in 2020 when the Federalist Society paid CRC Advisors over $1.6 million, they also received a grant of $5.6 million from The 85 Fund.

Overview of nonprofits run by or affiliated with Leonard Leo

The information that follows helps provide context for the vast network of nonprofits where Leo either directly runs the organization or serves as an officer or director.

The section below shows organizations where Leo is listed as a primary officer and director. These nonprofits range from the small Chicago Freedom Trust, which gave $20,000 in grants to a small number of organizations in 2022, to Marble Freedom Trust which received a $1.6 billion donation in 2021 from Barry Seid.

The section section shows other nonprofits where Leo is one of many officers or directors.

Information is based on the most recent IRS 990 filing for each nonprofit (2020-2022).