Two of the House of Representatives’ most powerful committee chairs, Republicans Jim Comer and Jim Jordan, are targeting the District of Columbia’s Attorney General’s reported investigation into Leonard Leo, a right-wing judicial activist who heads a myriad of dark money groups and has worked to help pick or confirm every Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice who currently sits on the nation’s highest court.
Leonard Leo has strong ties to the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, which then-President Donald Trump used as a recommendation engine for his Supreme Court nominees. Leo served in different roles at the Federalist Society for more than a quarter century.
Calling him a “conservative activist,” The Washington Post in 2019 reported, “Leonard Leo helped conservative nonprofits raise $250 million from mostly undisclosed donors in recent years to promote conservative judges and causes.”
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That was before a single donor handed Leonard Leo $1.6 billion to remake the federal judiciary.
“In the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, industrialist Barre Seid funded a new group run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks and helped end federal abortion rights,” ProPublica reported last year. The investigative nonprofit called Leo “one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court.”
In August, Politico reported that “Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is investigating judicial activist Leonard Leo and his network of nonprofit groups, according to a person with direct knowledge of the probe.” Schwalb’s office has not confirmed the existence of the investigation.
“The scope of the investigation is unclear. But it comes after POLITICO reported in March that one of Leo’s nonprofits — registered as a charity — paid his for-profit company tens of millions of dollars in the two years since he joined the company. A few weeks later, a progressive watchdog group filed a complaint with the D.C. attorney general and the IRS requesting a probe into what services were provided and whether Leo was in violation of laws against using charities for personal enrichment.”
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Now, as The Messenger first reported Monday, House Oversight Committee Chair Jim Comer and Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan “are probing the D.C. attorney general’s investigation of the conservative legal mastermind behind the Supreme Court’s hard right turn.”
The two chairs in a Monday press release call the investigation into Leonard Leo “politically motivated.”
In their letter the pair of Republicans claim they are “concerned about potential infringement on free association and donor privacy.”
They allege Attorney General Schwalb does not have jurisdiction to investigate “because Mr. Leo and the organizations with which he is affiliated are, according to publicly available information, based outside of Washington, D.C.”
Last year, The New York Times reported the “network of increasingly influential conservative groups that Leonard A. Leo has helped to create and shape is not easily defined or quantified.”
“It is funded mostly by so-called dark money that is difficult to trace. The roster of nonprofit groups has evolved, with some ceasing operations and others being added. Mr. Leo has formal leadership roles in some groups, while he is an informal adviser to others. Most of the nonprofit groups have paid him or his for-profit firms, CRC Advisors and BH Group.”
Earlier this month ProPublica reported Leo “drew up the lists of potential justices that Donald Trump released during the 2016 campaign. He advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he’d helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.”
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