The largely unknown man behind the U.S. judiciary’s shift to the right

One of the most powerful conservatives in America is the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. He may be best known for providing former President Trump with a list of potential judges.

Leo also helped create the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority that overturned Roe v. Wade. He's described as a puppet master who hand-picks ultra conservative judges and connects them with the rich and powerful.

Today, On Point: Who is Leonard Leo and how does he do it?

Andrea Bernstein, Peabody award-winning journalist. Reported the three-part podcast We Don’t Talk About Leonard along with Andy Kroll and Ilya Marritz. We Don’t Talk About Leonard is a co-production of WNYC’s On The Media and ProPublica.

Part I

DEBORAH BECKER: Leonard Leo just may be the most important political operative that most people have never heard of. But conservative activists know him well and they count on his help in building a conservative legal movement to further their political goals.

Last May, Leonard Leo was commencement speaker at Benedictine College, a small Catholic college in Kansas. And when the college's president, Stephen Minnis, introduced him, he praised Leo's behind the scenes role in shepherding conservative justices onto the U.S. Supreme Court.

STEPHEN MINNIS [Tape]: It is those justices — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett — who he helped to get into place that were able last year to accomplish what the pro-life movement had been working and praying for nearly 50 years: to finally, unequivocally overturn Roe v. Wade. (APPLAUSE)

BECKER: Flying under the radar for years, and working with the Federalist Society, Leo became a prolific fundraiser, attaining a formidable record of filling state and federal courts with conservative judges. When GOP political operative Steve Schmidt first met Leo, he thought he was just a member of the group of stakeholders helping the Bush administration confirm Justices Alito and Roberts. But pretty soon, Schmidt figured out, "Leo is the guy." The person who makes things happen.

STEVE SCHMIDT [Tape]: If you take it down to like a school committee, like the PTA committee, who's going to be the chairperson of the committee? It's going to be the person who cares the most and shows up to all the meetings. So this is what Leonard Leo did.  You're making TV ads. You are trying to communicate, trying to make sure that no one is getting wobbly on you, right? But I can't explain to you why this stuff works -- but it does.

BECKER: Leo's armed with what's believed to be the largest political donation in U.S. history, $1.6 billion, for his work. And he says he wants to take on the broader U.S. culture, the parts of American life that he says are "really messed up right now."

I'm Deborah Becker, in for Meghna Chakrabarti, and this is On Point. This hour, we look at Leonard Leo, his methods and his impact on American life.

Joining me from New York is Andrea Bernstein. She's a Peabody award-winning journalist and co-reporter on a new three-part podcast called We Don't Talk About Leonard. Andrea Bernstein, welcome to On Point.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: It's so great to be back.

BECKER: First, Andrea, I wonder, tell me: Why is the story of Leonard Leo an important one that needs to be told?

BERNSTEIN: So Leonard Leo, as you mentioned in your intro, is just one of the most powerful people in this country that most people have never heard of. And after we at ProPublica reported that he'd received this really unprecedented $1.6 billion dark money donation that he could spend, have spent on basically anything he wanted having to do with politics in the U. S., we began to ask ourselves, who is he? And how did he get to this point? And what does he want to do now?

And the more that we dug in, the more that we realized that Leonard Leo's not just been influential on the U.S. Supreme Court level — and when I say "just," I'm really putting that in air quotes because obviously that is enormous influence — but has also had impact on state supreme courts, on state attorney general's offices and really on the modern interpretation of the Constitution. He has really set up a machine over the past three decades that has fed cases to the U.S. Supreme Court to produce outcomes that he and his allies approve of and then make sure that those decisions stand.

BECKER: So let's talk about some of those cases. First off, let's start with some big ones on the U.S. Supreme Court. And then tell us about some of the more notable state court rulings where you think that there are examples of Leo's influence on the judiciary that's resulted in some big changes.

BERNSTEIN: So I mean, our podcast starts out with a description of a party that Leonard Leo threw in his home in Northeast Harbor, Maine in June of 2022, the night before the Dobbs decision.

Now, we have no indication that they knew exactly what was going to happen the next morning. But here was this lavish party, champagne was served, there was a tasting of rare American whiskeys. And the guests at this party were some two dozen state and federal judges and justices, many of them owing their careers to Leonard Leo or who could owe their careers to Leonard Leo. Having this party, they were up in Maine as part of a seminar thrown by George Mason University, which is essentially a training institute for conservative justices.

And this to us was a real indication of Leonard Leo's power. Here he was with judges, including three of them at the circuit court level, so that's just one level below the U.S. Supreme Court. And there were these incredibly important people in the tent that night in Maine. But as it was described to us, Leonard Leo was the person that everybody wanted to talk to.

And the Dobbs decision, the decision to overturn abortion, was one of the very big decisions that Leo had worked on, according to our reporting, for — well, you could almost say since he was in high school. We spoke to a high school friend of his who said that Leonard Leo was opposed to abortion even in high school and that it sort of caused a stir because he would get into these passionate arguments with his classmates. And that continued through college, through high school, post high school, and in the days after Roe obviously was initially upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — most famously in the decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And many people thought it was a matter of settled law. But Leo really believed the decision could be overturned and worked assiduously to get specific justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby achieving this outcome that he'd worked for for 30, 40 years.

BECKER: But it's also down to the state court level, and especially state supreme courts and state attorneys general offices, as you mentioned. So I wonder, explain this thinking about creating that pipeline.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Well, this is something that was really, really fascinating to us.

So just to backtrack a little bit, Leonard Leo had created this fundraising network called, initially it was called the Judicial Confirmation Network under the Bush years, when Leo and the group began doing something that was pretty unusual at the time, which was treating a U.S. Supreme Court nomination like a confirmation battle. So this group was set up to fundraise for that.

And what we noticed in our reporting was that this group — the Judicial Confirmation Network, later called the Judicial Crisis Network — was not only spending money on these political campaigns aimed at shoring up U.S. senator support for their nominees for the U. S. Supreme court, but also sending money in some cases directly to the state, sending money in other cases to organizations who were supporting judicial races in the states.

And we focused in on a few states where there are judicial elections, particularly Wisconsin and North Carolina. And what we found was that Leo was sending money, often really unbeknownst to the people working in campaigns in the states. And not only sort of sending money, which I think is a kind of a traditional understanding in the United States about how people of both parties get their way, but getting personally involved.

So for example, there was a state supreme court race in Wisconsin in 2008, I believe, where a sitting justice named Louis Butler had angered that state's business community by ruling in favor of the plaintiff in a lead paint case. The business community rose up against him, but what we learned in the course of our reporting was that Leonard Leo personally raised money for Justice Butler's challenge. The ads were extremely negative. They were described to us, and we saw some of them, as sort of Willie Horton-type ads. And Justice Butler lost by a hair. And sort of changed the direction or helped change the direction of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for quite a while.

So sort of the nature of our findings was that not only was Leo spending money on this big level, but spending money on the state level. And then the state courts would send very important cases up to the U.S. Supreme Court for them to decide. And they did that in Wisconsin. And we also looked at that in North Carolina.

BECKER: You know, we actually have a piece of tape here from Bob Orr, who was a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court and the first Republican to serve on that state's bench. He was also a member of the Federalist Society, of which Leonard Leo was a prominent member. And he said when he saw Leo at work in his state starting in about 2012, it was really a surprising thing for him to see how this influence was playing out in judicial elections. Let's listen.

BOB ORR [Tape]: All of a sudden we started seeing these, you know, really what I would consider misleading and distortive, sort of traditional political ads we all know in politics. But we've never seen those in judicial races. That's bad for the system. It's bad for democracy. It's bad for the people who are caught up in the election process.

It's a very dangerous path to tread down. 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.

BECKER: And Andrea Bernstein, I'm wondering, was that sort of a common sentiment that you heard in other states as well, as this was what was going on?

BERNSTEIN: Oh, yes! This was something that was so interesting to me. When I began this reporting project, I had no idea if current and former state judges and justices would speak to me. Because, you know, judges are sort of, I mean, I had always seen them as kind of aloof, not really part of the fray, not really willing to speak other than from the bench. And I spoke to maybe dozens of current and former state judges and justices. And there was this real dismay, particularly among people who'd been in the system before dark money about the effects of dark money. And how much it has corroded the judicial system from really, when the money started coming in, when Leo and his allies started putting it in, until the present.

Part II

BECKER: Andrea, let's talk a little bit about how Leonard Leo got to power. It actually started decades ago with the Federalist Society, as you report in your podcast.

He came into the public eye briefly when he helped former President Trump devise a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. And in your podcast, you speak with Pomona College Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky. And she is author of the book Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counter Revolution. And she says that Leo understood early on that he had to go beyond just advocating for a cause. Let's listen.

AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY [Tape]: Policy is people. You have to connect those ideas to the right people who have access to the levers of power to make it happen. And so Leonard Leo is the policy is people guy. When Leonard Leo comes in, it becomes less about creating a sort of pipeline and a counter elite with their own ideas and shared vision of the Constitution. It becomes about plugging that in very consciously to power.

BECKER: Andrea Bernstein, I'm wondering: Can you explain that a little bit more? How exactly does Leonard Leo do that, plug people consciously to power?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, this was something that was a revelation to us. And we also spoke to some of Leo's — he doesn't really have any counterparts but people sort of working on the other side, on the left, who said they were surprised by this, too. That what Leo really understood from the very beginning of the Federalist Society — and just to sort of quickly summarize, I mean, the Federalist Society was a conservative legal group that was founded in the 1980s to gather together for warmth and support in what they saw was a real left-leaning legal environment. And they felt that the judiciary and the legal system was not really — conservatives couldn't really find a home in it. So they started this organization, the Federalist Society, which is basically a sort of law school group for a while.

But when Leonard Leo came on, he started this professional division in which he would connect with lawyers and judges around the country. And what he started doing was — and people who are members of the Federalist Society have risen to prominent positions with Leonard Leo's help, as well as others told us that what would happen is he would go to these meetings at college campuses, or he would meet people at the Federalist Society conference, and really latch on to them. Really help specific people and then make calls for them, help them in their careers. Some of them ended up with jobs in the federal government. Some of them ended up with Supreme Court clerkships. Some of them ended up in state attorney general's offices. And that even when they would stumble, he would help them find other jobs.

I mean, we talk a lot in our podcast episode two about one such individual, Lawrence VanDyke, who is now a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. Somebody said Leo helped at every step of his career. By the time Leonard Leo does what he did for Donald Trump when he was president, putting together a list of justices, potential justices, he has known many of these people since law school. He has nurtured them. He has helped instill in them these hard right conservative positions. So that when they get on the court, which happens when there are justices who he's recommended — or when they argue before the court, in the case of solicitors general who he has recommended — he's creating a system to fully carry out his conservative values.

BECKER: And he's really a patron, if you will, to many of these folks. Sort of shepherding them through --

BERNSTEIN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, many of them are so grateful to him because he has helped them get jobs and helped them along in their career. Some of the most powerful people in the country are people that Leonard Leo has really helped accelerate. I mean, one example: When Trump was president, Leonard Leo worked very closely with the White House Counsel's Office to push forward names of nominees, not just for the U.S. Supreme Court, but for all judges on the federal bench.

And one young judge that he helped move along was Judge Aileen Cannon, who is hearing the Mar-a-Lago documents case in Florida right now. Somebody that was sort of very young, some said quite inexperienced. But this was someone that Leonard Leo had watched out for and when there was a position that he thought that he could get her appointed to, stepped in and helped out, as we understand it from our reporting.

BECKER: And of course, we need to bring up yesterday's state Supreme Court ruling in Colorado, right? Which will go before the U.S. Supreme Court. And that ruling says that former President Trump's disqualified from holding office again because he engaged in an insurrection in violation of the 14th Amendment. So do you think because of cases like this almost, that it's not only forwarding an agenda, but it's protecting people as well? Do you think that's part of the play here?

BERNSTEIN: Well, I think that — I mean, from our reporting, certainly that is how former President Trump saw it. And indeed, after the 2020 election, our understanding is that the former president was unhappy with Leonard Leo because he thought he, Trump, had done so much work to appoint the justices and judges they recommended, and he expected them to automatically rule in his favor. And that didn't happen.

Now that said, one of the things our reporting shows is that the outcome of this real yearslong effort is the situation we have now where confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court is extremely low. And the issue that we were talking about before the break. Because so much money is going into state judicial races, what is happening is that people are viewing state judicial races like judges are super-legislators. And they're electing them to carry out a certain set of positions.

And that leads us directly to the situation where we are now, where the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to decide most likely not only the Colorado case about whether Trump is qualified to be on the ballot in Colorado because of what the court there described as his acts promoting an insurrection, but also the question of presidential immunity in the Jack Smith January 6 case, the one that's moving forward in Washington. And also another set of questions that relates to that Jack Smith case about whether the charge of obstructing an official proceeding is an appropriate charge for the January 6 riot. So all of these questions are being decided by a Supreme Court that has been pushed in a highly political direction, and that is a tricky situation not only for the court, but for the future of democracy.

BECKER: Right, right. Well, let's just talk about the money for a minute, because obviously this is key. We mentioned the $1.6 billion donation. Can you explain where this came from and where Leonard Leo is getting his money to help do this work?

BERNSTEIN: Yes, so that particular donation was from a sort of obscure electronics executive named Barry Seid. A very, very conservative individual who Leo had met and worked with some years ago, helped to broker a contribution to George Mason University's Scalia Law School, which is kind of a training ground for conservative lawyers or is thought of by some as that, and kept cultivating this individual. And the outcome was the creation of this entity called the Marble Freedom Trust, which is a dark money group that Leo entirely controls that can give money to political campaigns.

But the Marble Freedom Trust is just one such group that Leo is involved with. And one of the things that is really was a key insight of Leonard Leo's early on was that it wasn't just about, you know, he's sometimes described as a conservative activist and that is true, but I think that underestimates the insight that he had in the early 2000s. So this was before Citizens United, before dark money really began to take over elections. I'm referring to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that said corporations could effectively give unlimited amounts to political campaigns.

Before all of that, Leonard Leo was creating these groups where the contributions were very, very hard to trace. He is involved in, or has been involved in, maybe a dozen or so of these groups. Many of the groups give money to each other, or they give money to other groups. They have names like the Judicial Confirmation Network, the Judicial Education Project. Groups that are — as you can see, it takes a long time to explain this.

BECKER: Right.

BERNSTEIN: And it is very, very, very hard to trace the financial flows from one group to another. And that is one of the secrets of its success is that people are involved, you know, when I was reporting in North Carolina and I asked them about contributions, they were like, "We're involved in these intense elections. We don't have time to track this down because it's incredibly complicated."

So he's raising money for these groups. They're hard to trace. And they're giving money to state races and other causes, other conservative causes, at key moments that affect the outcome. And one of the things that was really an insight of our ProPublica colleagues who've been writing these series of stories that I'm sure many of your listeners have heard about trips that Supreme Court justices have taken. And what they have uncovered is that Leonard Leo has connected these very conservative, wealthy individuals to Supreme Court justices, and then they give money to his causes.

And because he worked on the confirmations of justices from Clarence Thomas to Amy Coney Barrett, Leo is seen as someone and is someone with access to the U.S. Supreme Court. And these donors get to meet the justices, which makes them very happy and then they give to Leo's causes. And it's a way that he keeps his entire mechanism and machine moving forward.

BECKER: Yeah. Actually your podcast includes a comment from Rev. Rob Schenck, who's an evangelical minister, a longtime anti-abortion activist. And he also socialized with members of the U.S. Supreme Court. He didn't work directly with Leonard Leo, we should say. But you know, he said he later came to regret some of his tactics. But he sort of described a little bit of this. So I'd like to listen to a piece of tape from Rev. Rob Schenck.

REV. ROB SCHENCK: It didn't take long for me to see their feet of clay. Every human is fragile. Every human is corruptible. Just because someone dons a robe, just because they sit so far removed from average people does not make them superhuman. How many people do you know who have taken a justice on a vacation trip and talked into the late night hours over a drink or traded stories? I'm going to guess none.

BECKER: So Andrea Bernstein, was this what we're talking about here, "We're using our influence with justices and our relationships with justices really to raise money?"

BERNSTEIN: I mean, the Reverend Schenck was such an interesting person for us to speak with. He had worked largely in the evangelical community, sort of in parallel with Leonard Leo. And worked for many many years as an anti-abortion activist and then started an organization who — really, the purpose of this organization was to stiffen the spines of U.S. Supreme Court justices. To make sure that they delivered not only the decisions that they wanted, but the way they wanted them.

And then Reverend Schenck came to sort of regret what he had done. He felt that as an evangelical minister, he understood how to manipulate people and that he had done that. And as a result, he spoke out to us and gave us an extensive interview in which he really described the process of viewing U.S. Supreme Court justices, not as these monarchical kind of figures who are just sort of human brains delivering decisions, but people who sort of exist in the world and can be influenced just as politicians can be influenced. And as we all understand, is part of the American political system.

BECKER: How did folks respond to your reporting, Leonard Leo, specifically? I guess you did not interview him, but he did respond to emailed questions, right?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, so Leonard Leo, we had been speaking to him for months trying to set up an interview. And one of the reasons that we called our podcast and our accompanying article We Don't Talk About Leonard was that for many months, people would not speak to us. They would not answer our calls. We did what any investigative reporter does. You call people who think highly of the subject of your story because you want to understand what are the things that motivate that person.

And some people did speak to us, but many, many people did not speak to us. Sometimes we would send out emails requesting interviews, and we would hear back from Leonard Leo's PR person. Some of the major groups that we wrote about the Federalist Society where Leo, by the way, has left the Federalist Society as a staff member. He has his own business now, but he's still chair of the board. But the Federalist Society, the Judicial Confirmation Network that I've been talking so much about are represented by the PR company that Leo owns right now. So he really has a tight, tight control over the public presence of these groups that we were writing about and that he's been involved in.

And at the end of the day, after months of talk, we sort of were coming down to our deadline and he said, "Well, good news," or his PR person said, "Good news, we can grant you an interview, but we are not going to talk about his relationship with U.S. Supreme Court justices or his finances."

BECKER: Wow. (LAUGHS)

BERNSTEIN: So we declined to interview him under those conditions.

BECKER: Right.

BERNSTEIN: But we did send him a very long list of both factual questions and reporting questions. And he reckoned with those questions. He answered those questions. And many of them are in the podcast or are in the story, the accompanying article. And in fact, the podcast was a three part series that rolled out on the WNYC Studios show On the Media.

And after the second episode, we had a promo clip looking forward to what was going to be in the third episode, which involved an instance of Leo writing in chalk the names of people on the sidewalk. And he heard it and called us up and said, "We'd like to respond to that before you run the episode." So that's how closely they were listening.

BECKER: Wow. So they're paying attention.

Part III

BECKER: Andrea Bernstein, before the break, we were talking about Leonard Leo's response to your reporting and to your podcast. I'd like to know: How would you summarize what he says about his activities in creating this conservative legal movement? Are they justified to him and how so?

BERNSTEIN: So one of the things that is so interesting about Leonard Leo is that we were speaking earlier about the formation of the Federalist Society and how it was borne of the sense that conservative lawyers were being iced out of the legal community. And that theme has traveled with Leonard Leo even as he has gained greater and greater success. So Leo, throughout his career, has basically said some version of, "We are being outspent. We conservatives are being outspent. We conservatives are being outflanked. So we're just trying to catch up."

And one of the things that was extraordinary to us was that, in the course of our reporting, so about last October, October of 2022, Leonard Leo gave a speech where he won an award from a group in Washington, the Catholic Information Center, which is a sort of tabernacle and center of Catholic power in Washington, D.C. And he gave this speech where he was — even though he had just won the Dobbs decision, he had succeeded in getting a 6-3 supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and it had been publicly reported that he had $1.6 billion dollars — he sounded like somebody that was besieged. And his speech was very much of the tenor, "They are coming after us. We have to gird ourselves against them." So that is something that has been a constant. We saw it in his response to us, that he is just trying to catch up with the left.

BECKER: Okay. Well, first, I want to play a little bit of tape so folks can hear Leonard Leo talking. And this is from a promotional ad for the Teneo Network, where Leonard Leo is now working for, even though he is still doing some work for the Federalist Society, as you mentioned. But let's play this. Here's Leo in this promotional ad saying he wants to look at other aspects of American culture aside from the judiciary. Here he is.

LEONARD LEO [Tape]: I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. And at some point or another, you know, I just said to myself, "Well, 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?"

BECKER: Andrea Bernstein, what are some of those other areas, do you think, in terms of where Leonard Leo is focusing his attention?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, so this is a promotional video for a group called the Teneo Network, which has been around for a while. It's sort of a conservative networking group. But Leo became chair of the board in 2021 and has really taken over the organization.

And the issues that they talk about — they talk about one-sided journalism. They talk about wokeness. They talk about campaigns against diversity, equity, and inclusion, corporate campaigns. That is, their view is corporations should not be pressured to be more diverse, more inclusive, or in fact, to work on issues like climate change. And as well as seeing sort of Hollywood and movie making as, too left, liberal and wanting to influence those communities in a more conservative direction.

One of the things that was so interesting to us about our reporting into this group is that there's a moment at which the then-executive director of the group gives a talk and he talks about how they see the left as working. And they say, you know, "You have a movie director and a Harvard professor and a New York Times reporter all sit down at the Harvard club and they all agree that they're going to take steps to make gender transition surgery more acceptable for teenagers." And they see their view as providing a counter to that — that they're going to have a group that is going to decide together to move all in the same direction.

So those are the issues that he's looking at now. And one of the things that's interesting is since we put out our podcast, two attorneys that are quite close to the Federalist Society and close to Leo have begun working on former President Trump's appeal in the January 6 litigation in Washington, D.C. So he's very much also keeping his connection to what is happening in the presidential race for 2024.

BECKER: Is there an organization on the left that's doing similar work? And when we're talking about conservatives feeling outspent or outflanked, and so that's why they're doing this work, I mean, who's doing that on the left do you think that might be somewhat comparable?

BERNSTEIN: So Leonard Leo points to a group called Arabella Advisors, which is a group that is supported by a wealthy, more left-leaning individual. And I think that what is quite interesting to me is that when you interview people on the left, they're like, "We are not coordinated in the way that Leonard Leo is or in the way that he thinks we are."

Now, to be sure, if you take just one example, which is a recent judicial race in Wisconsin. This was last spring and there was $50 million spent on that race, both by the left and by conservatives. And one of the sort of very situations that Leonard Leo has created is where there's this arms race. So now the left is beginning to wake up and beginning to respond in kind. But what you see is a situation that nobody thinks is really good, where you have sort of people arguing about the future of the republic through a single judicial race in Wisconsin, for example.

BECKER: Right. And we shouldn't really advocate for, you know, uh, the wealthy to be influencing these races at all, right? I mean, it's a problem regardless of what side you're on.

BERNSTEIN: Well, well, exactly. And I mean, that's the transition that so many current and former judges spoke to me about, which was that courts have become part of the political system. And in so doing, confidence in the judiciary is eroded and eroded. And now we have a situation where courts are going to be deciding literally the future of the country where people do not have faith in the courts. And part of it is because all of this money and the sense that the courts are partisan actors rather than a third independent branch of government, a neutral arbiter.

BECKER: So what can be done? Anything? To sort of change the path that this is on, to limit this kind of influence in the judiciary and try to ensure impartiality? What can be done there?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I mean, it's a really, really thorny question. And I've spoken to — I mean, nobody thinks that there is sort of an easy way to back out of this because you have both parties armed to the teeth. On the other hand, there are situations where you have brinksmanship, as we had in the Cold War, where people walk it back. And I think that that is the sort of thing that is discussed with me most often.

And there are other models of selecting judges. Some states have independent panels choosing judges and justices. But it's sort of going hand in glove with what is happening with the rest of the political system, where institutions that people thought of as neutral, places where people could come together and agree on outcomes are being attacked and undermined. And, unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

BECKER: Right. Because even if you change the way that judges are selected, I mean, if you do have this pipeline of folks in state AG's offices and other places, I just don't understand if there is a way to address that at all.

BERNSTEIN: It is — this is one of the things that we asked is what can be done. And no one had any great answers. But one of the things that felt to us as a really important part of our obligation here is to bring this to light because this does touch everyone in the country in some way — the courts, the decisions of the courts.

And it's not just, you know, we've spoken about the Dobbs decision, but obviously there was the affirmative action decision. There are a whole bunch of economic decisions on the agenda in this term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The wealth tax is an example. Arguments in that were just recently heard this month. The future of whether you can create a wealth tax. The issue of whether you can have federal government regulation, the functioning of groups like the Securities and Exchange Commission, all of these big economic decisions are now coming up for review by the U.S. Supreme Court in this incredibly polarized atmosphere. And that is the situation that is certainly where we are.

And I just wanted to say one other thing about that. Because many of the donors that have supported Leonard Leo and his causes are — some of them are Catholics, conservatives like Robin Arkley, who is a conservative Catholic mortgage magnate from California. But many of them are just wealthy conservatives who are much more concerned with these economic cases that are coming before the court than they are necessarily with the sort of moral decisions, like the moral conservatives, like the abortion decision. And one of the things that Leo has done is marry these two veins and use the wealth and connections of the economic conservatives to fuel his moral conservative agenda.

BECKER: Hmm. And we should say the Senate Judiciary Committee has been investigating so-called ethical lapses on the High Court, has requested information from Leo, from some of the wealthy donors. And the District of Columbia's AG is investigating Leo for possibly enriching himself through his network of tax exempt groups, right? I mean, could those things suggest that there might be other ways to make sure that things are done differently?

BERNSTEIN: Well, TBD. One of the things that's so interesting — and obviously, we did this podcast on Leonard Leo, our colleagues at ProPublica have written about these lavish vacations and other gifts that Supreme Court justices have received from wealthy donors. It was certainly interesting to us that the Senate Judiciary Committee chose to, earlier this month, subpoena two individuals, and one of them was Leonard Leo. And I think it is because of his central role in all of this.

Now, this was a big move. They had tried for months to negotiate with Leonard Leo. Leo refused to cooperate. When they actually had the vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republicans really reacted extremely strongly against the idea that these individuals should be subpoenaed. But the vote along partisan lines succeeded. Leonard Leo has said he refuses to cooperate. And I just checked recently with the Senate Judiciary Committee to see if there'd been any updates just today and they said no, no further updates. So we're at a bit of a standoff.

But if they are successful, if the subpoenas were ever to go through, I think we would really learn some things about how this very secretive network works. Now, of course, we did all this reporting, but there's nothing like subpoena power to actually elicit documents and information that investigative reporting can only go so far with.

BECKER: Right. Because this is a really sophisticated, as you've mentioned, a sophisticated network of groups that have changed their names, have taken great strides to make sure their donors aren't revealed. There's a lot of behind the scenes secretive stuff going on here. So I can't imagine what it was like to try to track all of that down as a reporter.

But you're thinking that perhaps — I mean, I'm guessing you're thinking — this podcast will shed some light on this and perhaps there will be further information to get a better idea. Do you think what you saw or what you've reported on is just the tip of the iceberg? Do you think there's more there?

BERNSTEIN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we — and I should say that you can send tips to us at ProPublica. You can go to the podcast. If you click on the podcast page, there's information about how to do that, if you have tips.

But one of the things that is very clear is we had to choose-- I mean, Leo's worked in so many states and we chose a few to look at and we chose a few individuals. But there is a lot more out there. And we are certainly interested in information about that, anybody that has interacted with him. I think one of the challenges of covering Leonard Leo is that he's been in so many places that you have to pick which ones. So there are certainly many other states — Ohio, Tennessee — where Leonard Leo has worked where we just didn't do that because we had to make choices about what we were going to look into.

BECKER: Mm-hmm. And it's very dense, right? It's a lot of subject material here, and you've done a lot of work on this. What would be the main message you want folks to take away from this story?

BERNSTEIN: Well, I think that it is really important for people to look at, to be able to see the courts in the way that we have, as players in the democracy and not just floating above it. And I think as we go into 2024, court rulings are going to become more more and more important. And, you know, the system is really being tested. I mean, all of the criminal cases against Trump, the Colorado case that just came up, the civil case in New York, which I've been covering separately for NPR.

Trump's response to it all is that these systems are biased, and what happens when you say that. It's a little bit reminiscent of what he said before the 2020 election, which is, "The system is biased, don't trust it." That, as we've learned, has a consequence. And paying attention to that and the forces that made it thus are going to be the way that we navigate our ways out of it.

BECKER: Andrea Bernstein, Peabody award-winning journalist, who along with Andy Kroll and Ilya Marritz, have a three part podcast called We Don't Talk About Leonard. It's about conservative activist Leonard Leo. Andrea, thanks so much for being with us.

BERNSTEIN: Thank you. It's always great to be on your show.