Leonard Leo, the architect of the conservative Supreme Court and principal puppeteer of right-wing legal affairs, is currently about a month and a half into defying an April 11 Senate subpoena. The Senate Judiciary Committee seeks his testimony under oath about gifts, including luxury trips, he has helped to arrange for multiple Supreme Court justices and their families. But Leo’s flouting of the Senate subpoena, underscoring his decades of contempt for legal ethics and democratic oversight, reflects his determination to execute his corrupting agenda without accountability.
Leo is an astoundingly powerful political figure who controls billions of dollars and an array of political front groups. Most importantly, he is the co-chairman of the board of the Federalist Society, the highly influential right-wing legal network. In the Trump administration, Leo played a primary role in picking justices for the Supreme Court—Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett—as well as almost every other federal judge appointed to lower benches. As ProPublica reported, “Once Trump took office, he gave control over judicial picks to Leo, [White House legal counsel Donald] McGahn,” and their allies. It’s no mistake that of the Trump appointees to the circuit courts and the Supreme Court, “86 percent were former or current Federalist Society members.”
The Senate has subpoenaed Leo to learn the facts about the lavish travel, lodging, and transportation gifts he arranged for Supreme Court justices, most notably Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, and Samuel Alito. In 2008, for example, Leo organized a trip to Alaska that included a private jet flight for Alito, paid for by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire and Leo donor with interests before the court.
Leo’s brazen defense explaining why he is not complying with the subpoena is that it is “lawless.” In a bit of flagrant projection, he said the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of judicial corruption was nothing but “the left’s dark money effort to silence and cancel political opposition.”
A duly authorized Senate subpoena is not “lawless.” Nor is the Senate committee a “dark money effort.” On the contrary, it is Leo who operates a dark money empire whose influence-peddling with the highest court in the land the committee rightly wants to discover. It’s not the first time he’s projected so strongly: Ironically, Leo named one of his dark money groups for shielding the identities of wealthy donors who seek to undemocratically pack the courts and influence judges the Rule of Law Trust.
Leo fears congressional oversight because his methods of elite influence depend on secrecy and obfuscation that are antithetical to a functioning democracy. In particular, Leo seeks to obscure his gifts to Ginni Thomas, which raise crucial issues about the proper boundary between the judicial branch and partisan politics. Thomas’ activism exploits her personal ties to inject her extremist politics into the judiciary, and Leo has played an instrumental political and financial role in enabling her agenda. Thomas launched her lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, in 2010. Her firm’s website promoted her work by quoting a client affirming that she is able to “give access to any door in Washington”—which occurs in part thanks to the right-wing network including Leo and his money.
According to the Washington Post, in 2012, Leo instructed Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill $100,000 to the Judicial Education Project—a nonprofit group Leo advised, which was to become a landmark supplier of conservative amicus briefs to the Supreme Court—and then to funnel that exact money to Ginni Thomas. Leo told Conway that the paperwork should have “no mention of Ginni, of course.” Conway’s firm went on to pay Thomas’ firm $80,000 from 2011 to mid-2012 and another $20,000 by year’s end. The same year, despite an obvious conflict of interest, the nonprofit Judicial Education Project filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
In short, Leo’s defiance of the Senate Judiciary Committee enables him to escape providing information about these exact types of efforts to influence the court by enriching, with hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past 15 years, the wife of a Supreme Court justice through the political organizations with whom she allies, which has disquieting implications as to her husband.
At the same time that he works to hide the means of his influence, Leo’s success in subjugating democracy to right-wing special interests is all too apparent.
In 2022, the Guardian published a study of the 74 right-wing anti-abortion amicus briefs that pertained to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade. More than half of the briefs were filed by entities and individuals linked to Ginni Thomas. They include right-wing groups, religious interests, prominent conservative lawyers, and other political players.
By persisting in snubbing the subpoena Leo could be risking a lot. Consider what happened to other high-profile malefactors who have flouted compliance. Two former Trump administration aides, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, were referred to the Justice Department for criminal contempt, convicted, and sentenced to four months in prison for defying the Jan. 6 committee’s evidentiary demands. Navarro is currently in prison; Bannon is still out on appeal, but his conviction was recently affirmed. Leo is following their example. But where Bannon and Navarro could conjure up claims that executive privilege protected their refusal to cooperate, Leo can hardly seriously assert that, as a private citizen, lavishing gifts upon Supreme Court justices while operating a network of political action committees enjoys any legal privileges at all.
How does Leo presume he might get away with this? Consider that Leo has spent millions to promote a distorted use of history that conservatives invoke as “originalism.” Those he has selected for the Supreme Court have applied this dogma to justify their decisions overturning abortion rights, voting rights, and gun control. It would not be out of character for Leo to contend that the Constitution would have expressly named congressional subpoenas if he were meant to submit to them. But an argument like this shouldn’t hold water: The first subpoena was issued by the House in 1827. And Congress enacted a bill enforcing the attendance of witnesses “to discover Testimony” in 1857. Originalism can’t help Leo with the subpoena.
Leo may believe he can simply continue to defy compliance. So far, the Judiciary Committee has not referred him for contempt. Leo is banking on delay in the hope that the Republicans win the Senate in the 2024 election, and in the next session drop the subpoena against their generous benefactor. His refusal, however, is not just a political game. It is a cover-up of the corruption of the highest court in the land. Leo’s contempt exposes his cynicism about the rule of law, no matter the hypocritical name of his dark money group. Allowing Leo to defy the subpoena would only validate what he already believes to be true: that he, and his powerful friends, are above the law, untouchable, and unaccountable to anything but their own ideology.