“He Wants Someone He Can Trust”

Leo, armed with an ever-growing network of dark-money groups, has for decades helped construct the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority and the rightward bend of the federal judiciary. Formerly President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo is the chair of the board of directors at the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative legal group.

“Leonard Leo has played a central role — in fact, the central role — in packing the US Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues who are advancing his agenda,” Graves said.

Leo has wielded power by amassing immense financial influence through a network of clandestine nonprofits that obscure where exactly his billions are going — an arrangement that is now under investigation by Washington, DC’s attorney general. Leo’s network bankrolled Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation campaign and arranged payments to Ginni Thomas, ClarenceThomas’s wife, while his legal groups had cases before the Supreme Court.

In 2022, the Lever exposed a historic $1.6 billion payment from a billionaire with a history of funding conservative causes to a Leo nonprofit called the Marble Freedom Trust. Since then, the dark-money group has dished out millions to antiabortion groups and enriched Leo’s for-profit consulting arm, CRC Advisors.

Leo assembled a small group of close allies to manage Marble Freedom Trust and its billion-dollar fortune, the nonprofit’s tax filings show. Aside from Leo himself, there are three names listed as officers at the nonprofit: the husband of one of Leo’s longtime employees; the president of CRC Advisors; and Green, the partner at Consovoy McCarthy.

Green is listed as an administrative trustee of the nonprofit, which generally refers to someone who manages day-to-day operations of a trust. He has served in the role since the trust’s founding in 2020 and according to tax filings is unpaid. As a trust, the Marble Freedom Trust does not have to disclose most details of its operation, but tax documents list its headquarters as a house owned by Green in North Salt Lake, Utah.

David Armiak, the research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, called Green’s role a “significant” one.

“[Leo] wants someone he can trust — it’s over a billion dollars,” he said.

They “Came in at the Last Minute”

Consovoy McCarthy has proved a growing force in recent years, scoring a number of major victories at the Supreme Court, including two June 2023 rulings that ended affirmative action in college admissions. Last month, the firm notched another win: the high court ruled in favor of their client in Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a case that may leave a huge swath of federal regulations vulnerable to attack.

The firm’s founder, William Consovoy, who died in 2020, defended Trump in his efforts to keep his tax returns out of the public eye and made his name in part by litigating a landmark election case, Shelby County v. Holder, that undid federal election protections implemented by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the decade after the Shelby ruling, states enacted dozens of new restrictions on voting.

All the while, Leo and his allies were also working to undermine election protections across the country. In 2004, Leo started a nonprofit called the Judicial Education Project, later renamed the 85 Fund, and also known by its legal alias, the Honest Elections Project. It funneled millions to voter suppression efforts and other conservative causes. In 2013, the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in support of Consovoy’s case in Shelby County v. Holder.

After Consovoy founded his own firm in 2014, it began working directly with the Judicial Education Project and its later iterations. Since 2016, the first year the nonprofit reported payments to the law firm, Consovoy McCarthy has received more than $4.5 million in legal fees from the 85 Fund, as it submitted amicus briefs for the nonprofit in election cases in front of the Supreme Court.

Voting rights advocates have taken note of the law firm’s interventions.

“The first time that I noticed Consovoy McCarthy coming into a case I was working on was in a voting rights case in 2019,” said Jeff Mandell, the cofounder of Law Forward, a Wisconsin-based voting rights organization. The firm, which was representing the Honest Elections Project, intervened in a case to support the attempted purge of a quarter-million voters from the state’s voter rolls.

“All of a sudden, Consovoy McCarthy came in at the last minute,” Mandell recalled.

While their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, the firm’s intervention — in which it raised new arguments in the case — was jarring, said Mandell, and representative of how in Wisconsin and elsewhere, dark-money organizations “don’t have any apparent connection [to the state], but suddenly are weighing in and trying to persuade courts to distort Wisconsin law to make it harder for people to vote.”

This year, Consovoy McCarthy also submitted a brief supporting an effort to maintain a ban on ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Thomas McCarthy, the cofounder of Consovoy McCarthy, has also been listed in the Republican National Committee’s motions to restrict voting in Minnesota, Mississippi, and Georgia. Consovoy McCarthy received $4.1 million from the committee this election cycle, according to Federal Elections Commission records.

“A small coterie of people, including apparently Mr Leo, are hiring the same lawyers over and over and over, and dispatching them around the country to weigh in on the laws in states to which those people don’t have any connection,” Mandell said.

Green, the trustee of Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, has been at the forefront of many of these cases, including the Corner Post case that was decided in July.

An “Unlimited Bank Account”

Lawyers with Consovoy McCarthy are representing Republican operatives in four ongoing election cases in battleground states — worrying voting rights advocates, who warn the cases could limit access to the polls in the states they are targeting.

The Arizona case stems from a 2022 state law that would have required Arizona voters to provide additional proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections — a law that was struck down by a judge in February after a flurry of legal challenges from voting rights groups in the state.

But earlier this month, the Republican National Committee, represented by Green and other Consovoy McCarthy attorneys, asked the Supreme Court to intervene and block voters from participating in the November election if they did not provide sufficient proof of citizenship. If the high court agrees, the decision would exclude tens of thousands of Arizona voters from participating in elections.

Green’s colleagues are also representing the Republican National Committee in its case in Nevada, which is asking a judge to force several counties in the state to purge voters from their rolls, arguing that the voter registration tallies are inaccurate. Consovoy McCarthy is also representing the committee in a similar case in Michigan.

In Georgia, Green and other Consovoy McCarthy attorneys are representing Republican officials in their defense of a law that voting rights advocates say makes it more difficult for people to vote, particularly black voters, by limiting early voting and ballot drop boxes.

The legal team in these cases has close ties to Thomas, who has been friends with Leo since before he became a Supreme Court justice.

Consovoy, after clerking for Thomas in 2008, called the justice his “hero,” and five years later the justice was among the 5-4 majority that ruled in favor of Consovoy and the Judicial Education Project’s efforts to strip election protections in Shelby County v. Holder. Three Consovoy McCarthy attorneys in the new election cases — Green, Gilbert Dickey, and Patrick Strawbridge — also clerked for Thomas.

Another attorney involved, Thomas McCarthy, has long been codirector of the Supreme Court Clinic at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where Thomas regularly teaches, thanks to funding from Leo’s network. A fifth lawyer involved in the cases, Conor Woodfin, received his law degree from the school.

“This dark-money network trickles down into all of these various lawsuits across the country that are trying to disenfranchise voters,” said Matt Cohen, a senior staff writer at Democracy Docket, which tracks voting rights litigation across the country.

Thanks to Leo, he said, right-wing organizations trying to limit voting in places like Arizona and Nevada have an “unlimited bank account.”

Whether that bank account will buy successes in these battleground cases still remains to be seen. Republicans asked the Supreme Court to hand down a ruling in the Arizona case by Thursday, but for now the case is still pending; so too are the three other cases brought by the law firm.

Still, Leo has a track record of being victorious. “When Leonard Leo has put his resources and his operatives to task, they’ve succeeded at what they’ve done,” said Armiak.