 Last month, ProPublica and On The Media released We Don't Talk About Leonard, a new podcast that explores the web of money, influence, and power behind the conservative takeover of America's courts, and the man at the center of it all, Leonard Leo. Today, we're going to discuss Leo's path to power, how he wields his influence, and his ambitions beyond the court. We'll also answer your questions, which you can send us by clicking on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And now, allow me to introduce today's speakers. Joining us is Andrea Bernstein, Kate Shaw, and Julia Longoria. Andrea Bernstein is the Peabody and DuPont Columbia Award-winning co-host of We Don't Talk About Leonard. She previously co-hosted the ProPublica and WNYC podcast, Trump Inc., as well as Pineapple Street Studios, Will Be Wild. She currently covers Trump legal matters for NPR and is the author of The New York Times bestseller, American Oligarchs, The Kushners, The Trumps, and The Marriage of Money and Power. Kate Shaw is a professor of law at Cardozo Law School, a contributing opinion writer with The New York Times, and co-host of Strix Grootany, a podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. Julia Longoria is currently a freelance radio journalist. Most recently, she was the host and managing editor of More Perfect, WNYC's show about the Supreme Court. She was also the co-creator and host of the Atlantic magazine's flagship show, The Experiment. She began in public radio newsrooms in New York and her hometown, Miami, and her work has appeared on NPR and The New York Times. Thank you all for being here. I'll let Julia take it from here. Hello, everyone. I am so thrilled to be here with all of you watching and with these two brilliant people beside me in the little Zoom boxes. I met Andrea when I was a baby reporter at WNYC, so I was a little starstruck when she asked me to be the master of ceremonies here. And Kate Shaw, the team at More Perfect, are huge followers of your work, so I'm so thrilled to have you here. We are here today to talk about a very powerful man that people do not talk about as the ProPublica podcast title says. And with me today are two reporters who have talked about him. They've paid attention to him for a long time and uncovered the influence he has had on our third branch of government. I, like a lot of us here, I imagine, was very cool in high school. And I was on my high school's constitution team. And I think like a lot of Americans, I was taught to really venerate the courts. The Supreme Court was supposed to be the protector of our liberties above the fray of politics. And maybe it's that mythology that has made the institution vulnerable to behind-the-scenes influence. So, let's dive in. Andrea, I want to start with you. Can you take me back to the very first time you heard the name Leonard Leo? Oh, boy. Interesting question. I feel like probably I heard about Leo in conjunction with the Supreme Court. And his work, or the list that he gave to Ben candidate Donald Trump, which I really don't think we learned about that list until the end of the campaign and when Trump became president, that here was somebody who worked for the Federalist Society who was giving Trump a list of justices. And it sort of crossed my radar as well. That's a lot of power for one man. However, when I learned about it, I was working on the podcast Trump Inc. and very much focused on Trump's business and the relationships and conflict between the Trump business and the Trump presidency. After the Trump presidency, I worked on another podcast called Will Be Wild, which was about the insurrection. And then this Leo podcast, in some ways, I mean it's much broader than Trump, but we went back and sort of looked at Leo's relationship with Trump and how he got to be the person who gave Trump these lists of Supreme Court justices. And one of the people, one of the scholars that we spoke to when we were reporting the story was Amanda Hollis-Brusky, who wrote a book about the Federalist Society and teaches it at Pomona College. And she said to us something that really sort of stuck in my mind very early on in Leo reporting. And she said, giving Leonard Leo control over who would be his Supreme Court nominees was the only promise that Trump ever kept. And I thought to myself, wow, that is true. So that was the beginning. And then everything sort of spooled out from there. And Kate, my understanding is you've been watching Leo longer than that. You had your eye on him. Is that right? When did he first get on your radar? I have and yet I don't recall the first time I heard of Leonard Leo. I've been trying to think of it. I actually took constitutional law many, many years ago with Steve Calabrese, one of the founders of the Federalist Society, with whom I've remained very close over the years. And he founded the Yale chapter. He's usually credited as one of the founders. So I don't think I heard talk of Leo back in my law school days. But I kind of think I'm going to tell a brief story, if you'll indulge me, which is that when I was clerked for Justice Stevens in the 07 to 08 term and 2007 was the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society through a big gala union station, which kind of gets transformed into this gorgeous event space. And the Supreme Court has just stopped the road from Union Station. And at some point, all of the law clerks clerking that year got an email inviting us to the 25th anniversary gala. And my co-clerks and I said, we should go. And so we sent an email to the Thomas clerk who had forwarded the invitation. And she said, are you serious? And we said, well, was the invitation serious? And she said, sure, if you want to come. So anyway, we came. And it was a fascinating and revelatory evening, 25 years in and this extraordinarily powerful institution that still in many ways clearly conceived of itself as a set of insurgent outsiders, despite the presence of multiple Supreme Court justices, despite a recorded vo message from then President George W. Bush. It was really sort of a star studded affair. And yet that was the tenor of the event. And I feel like he must have been there. And yet I cannot confirm that fact. But certainly somewhere in my sort of years as a young lawyer, I heard the name as someone who is an important player in federal society circles. And certainly so for about almost five years, I've co-hosted the Strix scrutiny podcast with Leah Lippman and Melissa Murray. And for as long as we've had the podcast, we've spoken about Leonard, but definitely not as much as Andrea and her colleagues who have done just incredible reporting both in print and in the WNYC collaboration. So I've learned a ton from their work. But certainly I had a little bit of knowledge going in. That's so. I would need to fact check this, but I am pretty sure Leonard Leo not only was there, but spoke. He spoke at most of the annual. I think that's probably right. But I am a single source. And it's a hazy recollection. But I would love to know if that was true, because then I could actually confirm that's the first time I at least saw him in the flesh. Maybe we can check it in the course of this hour. But I mean, I think that Julia was one of the things that I think really motivated us was that here was somebody who made such a faint impression, even on people who were incredibly interested in what he was doing or would have been had they known. And that was one of the reasons why we wanted to do this podcast and the long-form article for ProPublica was to really bring it all out. Who is this person who has so immensely influenced all of us? I mean, if you take the Supreme Court, we always say, well, he didn't just. And then we have to put just in air quotes, because just helping to confirm or nominate six members of the Supreme Court is quite something for one human being. But then the series that we did is how he's done so much more than that. Yeah. And I want to rewind to the beginning of Leonard Leo's career, because it's kind of striking that someone who's never held office has had such an outsized influence on politics, on our courts. ProPublica published a high school photo of him that really struck me that he and his wife were apparently voted most likely to succeed. And they are pictured with these huge glasses and piles of money. And he certainly has been successful at reaching his goals. I mean, Kate, can you talk a little bit about how he began? How did he start to get so much power without holding office? Kate, you're muted, I think. Sorry about that. I don't know how that happened. I want to defer to Andrea on that, who I think has a much better sense of origin and trajectory. But I do think that there are individuals for whom the spotlight holds no appeal. And my sense has always been that he very early on had this incredible insight, which is that sometimes, whether it's that you can redirect the energy in ways that allow you to amplify your impact if actually self-promotion is not consuming any of your attention or time, whether it's that or whether it's a set of interpersonal skills, which I think are a very unique set. And those, I think, I have only really learned about from the reporting that Andrea and her colleagues have done. But that there was sort of a fire within him that I think everybody was able to perceive. That was a deep commitment to a set of deeply conservative legal principles and an ability to identify individuals, fellow travelers, and really cultivate relationships and help shape the trajectories of their careers and thus create this network of relationships and loyalty that was able to, over this is a very long term a project of many decades, I think it really sort of speaks to kind of long-term vision and patience in a way that you sort of have to admire whatever you think of the kind of substantive visions and values. So those are my impressions. But I really have to defer to Andrea in terms of actually having more sort of direct insights into how he was able to do all of it. So I have a story about that high school yearbook photo. But before I say that, I think that what Kate is saying is really essential because unlike, say, the Koch brothers or George Soros. Like, I mean, I used to cover, I covered the 2016 presidential campaign and Bernie Sanders would always have a line about the Koch brothers and like the whole crowd would say boo. And Trump similarly talks about George Soros and people say boo or they sort of metaphorically say boo on social media. But here's literally, it was not a wealthy person. He didn't come from wealth. The house that he grew up in was so modest. It's like a one story bungalow on a street in a sort of basically affluent suburb. But the street was sort of not fancy. The houses were closed together, the houses were small and that is where he grew up. But he understood very early on that understanding how to raise money was a key to success. And I had gone down to, I had been trying to find his high school yearbook just sort of like basic kind of investigative reporter 101. Like let's try to find out what it was like and try to track it down through the high school. And I had called the library and I said, well, do you have it? And they said, we don't have that year. And I thought, okay, well, I'll drive down there anyway. Maybe they'll have something from 19, you know another year that happens to have a picture of him and then I went there and I said, do you have 1983? And they said, yes, and they brought it out and I start paging through it. And there at the top of the class page is Leonard Leo and he's wearing a, you know, unlike everybody else, I mean, it was the 80s. So it was like, you know, muscle shirts and mustaches and, you know, big hair. And he has, you know, a blazer and vest and he looks very serious and he's the president of his class and then I'm flipping the pages and there is this most likely to succeed picture with the person who was the vice president of the class, now his wife, Sally Leo, then Sally Schroeder and they are the most voted, most likely to succeed with, as you say, this pile of money. And one of the interesting things is that, you know, Leo wouldn't do an interview with us because, I mean, well, no, let me rephrase that. He said, yes, I will do an interview but you can't ask me about my relationships with Supreme Court justices or my financial arrangements. So we declined, but then he did engage with us. He did answer our written questions and he answered that written question saying that he was, in high school, he was nicknamed money bags kid because he raised so much money for the senior class events that there was money left over to go back to the high school. And that was the beginning, I think, for Leo of understanding that raising money could be a route to power. And he got to start, my understanding from, you know, your reporting is that he got to start at the Federalist Society, which is kind of a hard organization to wrap your mind around, like, you know, more perfected some reporting at one of the Federalist Society meetings. And some members told producer Alyssa Eads, we're just a debate club. So can you talk a little bit about his early involvement in the Federalist Society and kind of how that started the whole project? Well, I would love to hear from Kate a little bit about this debate club thing, because I do think it's like, I mean, I think at one point it was true, but Kate, since you studied with Steve Calabrese, he was one of the founders, maybe you have some- By the way, he taught us a freshman seminar that I went to, so he's gotten around. Well, I don't know, you could probably speak to this as well. So maybe I'll say just to say something about Steve at the outset. I do think that he played it unbelievably straight in his, so as a con law professor, he did, I think, absolutely no sort of inculcation of conservative user values in the classroom. And I'm just great credit. I don't know about your experience if it's an undergrad. But it, but so I do think that, you know, even founders of the Federalist Society, I think that sort of classroom component should be divided out from what the mission of the organization more broadly was, was and is. But, you know, folks like Amanda Hollis-Brusky are, I think the real experts on this, Steve, both Amanda and Steve Tellus have wonderful books. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement is Tellus' book and Ideas with Consequences is Hollis-Brusky's book. I think both wonderful. You know, there are, it's a longer story than we could sort of tell here. I think you have a few different factions of both sort of anti-government, anti-regulatory lawyers. You have actual social conservatives. You have sort of a few different strains that fuse together with different sources of funding for different aspects of the project. But I think maybe broadly speaking, I think it's fair to describe the federal society and its inception in the early 1980s. The account given by a lot of members is that it's a reaction to the sort of liberalism of the Warren court in the 1950s and 1960s and to degree the kind of early Berger court and its sex equality jurisprudence and of course, you know, contraception and abortion in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. And that this kind of sense that the sort of institutions of law were captured by liberals and that conservatives needed to mount some sort of response to that. And that Supreme Court was a liberal institution and the constitution was being interpreted for the first time, in my view, in ways consistent with the equality promises of the 14th Amendment and in, you know, robust readings of the criminal procedure protections in, you know, the Bill of Rights and, you know, a correct sort of broad reading of the First Amendment, but one that was sensitive to dynamics of sort of power and money. And so, you know, there are, I think, new for sure, to my mind, correct, but new interpretations of many constitutional provisions. And I think for many conservatives in the law and that included really prominent folks in the Reagan administration, in particular the Justice Department under Ed Meese. And that included, you know, later Supreme Court justices like John Roberts and Sam Alito and, you know, Thomas, although he wasn't in the Justice Department, he's in the Reagan administration, EEOC. That was the sort of the kind of like initial, like animating force that they were responding to. I think that story gets told in both of the books I just mentioned. And then I think it's a kind of long and complex story in which you have a number of, you have both government actors who are really important players, a lot of individuals inside, you know, academic institutions and then funding that comes from various sources but is small in the beginning and then becomes not at all small. I think, and I guess I don't know exactly at what moments in time, Leo is the sort of driver of the sort of funding, but it becomes an incredibly powerful network that is, again, in its inception, sort of about responding to and correcting what is perceived as this kind of liberal overreach of the sort of institutions of law and the Supreme Court in particular and seeks to sort of offer a blueprint for reorienting in a correct way, a vision of the Constitution and of our law that, you know, protects corporate interests against regulation that does not read into the Constitution rights that are not explicitly written into it, that, you know, maybe is what is described as, you know, colorblind that will not permit race conscious measures by government, even those designed to ameliorate histories of subordination and discrimination or to advance values like equity and diversity. And so, you know, I think there's a grab bag of values. I think there's a through line to a lot of them, but I think they come in a couple of different buckets. And so, you know, it becomes this incredibly powerful institution with chapters in law schools and cities across the country. And to the debate society piece, and I'll just say maybe one word and I'll stop talking. I think that it has long been the case that the Federal Society has described itself that way. And I don't think it's false. It's just wildly incomplete. And I do think that FedSoc chapters historically put on often genuinely rich and illuminating debates in law schools and elsewhere on pressing legal questions. And I think that I haven't in years, but I once upon a time did occasionally participate in Federal Society debates. I definitely attended a lot as a law student and to a degree as a young lawyer. And I think that the part of the reason it's successful is that they partly because of funding, you can sort of put on a nice event and feed and, you know, water people well, but also to attract good people and pay airfare and things like that. You have really kind of high level debate about pressing legal questions. And so I think that's part of the way that sort of that's part of the identity that FedSoc sort of puts forward. And I think absent the kind of digging that, again, academics like Amanda and Stephen also investigative reporters like Andrea have done that might be the only thing that individuals really knew about the Federal Society, I guess, but for the famous Trump list. And that I think is what sort of catapulted into public awareness. The existence of this network and its unbelievable power and reach. Yeah, and I want to get into Andrea's reporting around Leo's influence beyond the Federal Society. So, you know, you uncovered just to name a few of the things that the role he's played in sort of setting up a pipeline for not only Supreme Court justices, but Supreme Court cases helping to put leaders and state leaders in place at a state level. Sorry, say that four times fast. Who would bring, you know, who would be bringing cases to the court and sort of move along a conservative agenda. So could you rewind to the beginning of your reporting Andrea? Like what were your questions? How did you go about answering them and what were some of the obstacles? Yeah, so when we started this project by we, I mean, so Ilya Maritz and I, Ilya and I have collaborated on a number of podcasts. We joined the ProPublica Democracy Team just a little bit after Andy Kroll had broken the story of Leonard Leo getting $1.6 billion to control in dark money from this electronics magnet named Berryside and it's kind of obscure person. It was at the time, the largest dark money contribution in American history. And we began asking ourselves, well, what does he want to do with $1.6 billion? So that was the origin. And we began sort of, you know, ask around and sort of look at the different things that had been written and the money trails. And I would say one of the early insights that we have that we could see was this, that Leonard Leo was the vice president of the Federalist Society. Even though there was a president, Leonard Leo sort of ran the organization in many ways, raised the money and not only worked on this sort of conservative legal nonprofit but cultivated relationships with presidents. So it became the outside advisor for George W. Bush. One Bush advisor described us, you know, as like the person on the PTA who comes to every meeting. So because they come to every meeting, they get the power. And this was how Leonard Leo cultivated access. Once he had access to President George W. Bush, he began suggesting Supreme Court nominees and he had also worked on the nomination of Clarence Thomas. So he was already connected to the U.S. Supreme Court very early on his career. So one of our earliest insights was that Leo went beyond this nonprofit world. He got access to Supreme Court justices and presidents and then in Washington sort of used that currency to raise money that he would plow back into the Federalist Society and also into an immensely influential and little known organization which was called initially the Judicial Confirmation Network. And this was even before Citizens United, a group that was spending money on first the Supreme Court nominations of Alito and Roberts but then quite quickly on something that we really didn't understand at all until he began to do this reporting which was the State Supreme Court Justice Races. And Leo got way down into the weeds. I mean, take one example, in Missouri, Leo and the Federalist Society, but Leo in particular wanted to change the way justices were selected. Going back to the thing that Kate was talking about, they felt like the nonpartisan plan that Missouri had was favoring centrist and left wing justices. So they wanted to get rid of that system and replace it with elections and or a way to have more direct political control. So they went right into Missouri and the strategy was that there was a new justice that was supposed to be selected and Leo started threatening the governor, basically saying through his chief of staff that if you select this person that we don't like, the fury of the conservative movement will come down on you like you've never seen before. And that's a paraphrase, but it's pretty close to the actual wording that Leo had. And one of the interesting things is I made calls and sent emails to people in Missouri for months. I spoke to the person who was the chief justice at the time this was happening. And I said, well, what about Leonard Leo or the Federalist Society? Were they involved? Maybe a little bit, I'm not sure. And then I came across these emails and that was sort of the pattern that repeated. But one of the things that Leo understood early on was that so much power lay in state courts because they could not only, I mean, it's not only a worse, I think 90 plus percent of the litigation is decided in the country, but they could send decisions up to the US Supreme Court. And that became the machine that Leo was working on was to not only get the justices, but to get the outcomes by working on state Supreme Court justices, working on supporting specific candidates for attorney general who can get cases off into the Supreme Court more quickly, supporting conservative law firms. So there was a whole machine to produce outcomes like say the Dobs decision of 2022, which Leo is very, very concerned with, but a whole bunch of other decisions that Kate and company have talked about a great deal on strict scrutiny having to do with the administrative state, climate law, voting rights, all of these things have gone up through the machine that Leo has built to influence the way the Supreme Court decides cases. Yeah, I'm a little bit more, because I just find it really remarkable that you've been able to uncover these emails and these kinds of relationships given how, what lengths Leo seems to have gone to like keep this out of the public eye, like what were some of the obstacles you hit, like how did you get people to talk to you? And yeah. Well, one of the things was that, I mean, one of the reasons why we didn't, why we called the podcast, we don't talk about Leo is, we put out, I mean, Leo is a public person. He was executive vice president of the Federalist Society and worked with many people. He had worked with law professors. He had worked with scholars. And we did something early on, which you do when you're reporting, which was we said, oh, we asked a bunch of those people. We said, we'd like to talk about Leonard Leo. And then we heard from his PR team and they were like, what is it you wanna know? We were like, well, we wanna talk to people who think highly of Mr. Leo because we wanna understand the full person. And it was very hard. And there were people who told us who were Leo associates, no one will talk to you because of his $1.6 billion and they're afraid of cutting off access or they're afraid that there might be some political repercussion if they wanna run for office. So people were very, very reluctant. I mean, at the end of the day, we were sort of joking because I think we settled on the title, but then people did talk to us for the podcast, his high school classmate, one of the co-founders of the Federalist Society, many former state Supreme Court justices spoke to us, some of them on tape, on the record and his neighbors. And so, but overall, I mean, I've reported on some people that don't wanna be reported on, the Trumps, the Kushners, I've run into a lot of obstacles, but I would say this was one of the tightest, hardest circles to penetrate. And also the thing that Kate was talking about earlier, the way he sort of glanced across the radar without making an impression. So it became, that was one of the hard things of really sort of like, he was somebody who, as Kate was talking about, sort of embraced being in the background, which is very unusual for Washington. And that meant that it was, hard to pull in those moments where he really made an impression. I feel like, can I jump in with a quick question, which is that I don't, I promise I'm not trying to take the moderator mic. I love it, more collaboration. Okay, thanks. I'll ask you back. So. Okay, great, great. It was just chaos is gonna ensue. No, but this is a question that I wanted to ask you, Andrew, when we had you one strict scrutiny, but we ran out of time and so I didn't get to, but I was curious if you were surprised at his willingness to participate at all. So you said he was willing to actually sit for an interview, although proposed parameters that you guys were not comfortable with, but then did answer written questions like really did. And I actually found that somewhat surprising. So I was curious if you expected a response at all and either way kind of to what do you attribute his willingness to participate in some form with your reporting? So we honestly didn't know. I mean, he had sat for interviews before he sat for an interview with the Washington Post, for example, there were a spate of interviews sort of mid Trump administration after Gorsuch, maybe after Kavanaugh, where he did sit down and talk to people about his role in pushing for these conservative justices who are now in the court, maybe also after Barrett, although there was so little time between that and the election that I couldn't say for sure. So he is somebody who's spoken publicly and we just didn't know if he would want to talk to us after the whole thing happened with the interview and we were like, you can decline to answer, but we can't put a parameter on what we're going to ask. I wasn't sure, but then very, very deeply, we sent out maybe 20 pages of sort of factual questions to fact check as well as just a number of reporting questions. And he engaged in a number of them and he confirmed many things. I mean, for example, just to take one, the judicial crisis network, Leo is not a part of it in any formal way. So investigative journalists over the years have like jumped through hoops to describe his relationships. They were on the same hallway, they were founded at a dinner that he hosted with Justice Scalia and he invited Robin Arkley who is a sort of mortgage magnate, if you will, and others to this dinner who would give money. But we said to Leo, you founded and supported the judicial crisis network and he's confirmed it. And that was like, okay, so all of these sort of hoops and things that we had prepared to do, we don't have to say because Leo has confirmed it. And some of that, I mean, one of the things, and maybe we're going to sort of talk to this now, but one of the things that he has made him so powerful is that he goes to these federal society meetings at law school and he meets people and he mentors them and he calls them and he makes calls on their behalf and he places them in jobs. And one of the people who had worked with him told me that once people got to, once he nominated them for judge or justice, they were people he'd known for 20 years. So we gave him a list of people that we had been, we understood that he had mentored, one of them was Lawrence Van Dyke. There was a number of other people, one of them was Eileen Cannon and he confirmed that he had Eileen Cannon, it was the Trump, the Florida, the Mar-a-Lago documents case judge and he confirmed that he had mentored these people. So we didn't know. So I don't know how the sort of answer to were we surprised by something that we didn't know, but we didn't know what to expect. But I feel like it certainly made the portrait more complete and I think it speaks to the fact that Leo, he's an image man. He runs a company called CRC Advisors, which advises people on public relations strategy and obviously cares about his own image and how it just shaped. So much of what you're talking about, the way he's sort of been successful at having influence has been building these networks of people, he knows them from the beginning of their careers and fundraising. So nothing we've talked about is illegal. I'm more perfect, we kind of joke that like everyone in the legal profession seems to be on the same group chat, like everyone kind of knows each other. And I wonder like an audience member actually asked like, should Leonard Leo's rise be seen as a scandal or is it just a blueprint for success? Do either of you want to answer that audience question? I'm interested in Kate, what you think about that? I think when Joseph Scalia passed away, Jamal Green, a professor at Columbia who's a wonderful scholar had a op-ed in the times that I can't remember that the headline said something like he was my hero, not that I believed in anything he thought about the Constitution but he was unbelievably effective and successful in convincing now a majority of the courts and the lower courts and the public writ large of the correctness of this method of constitutional interpretation, originalism and textualism, these are sort of the methods with which he's closely associated. Although I think both have evolved in ways that I'm not sure Justice Scalia could even have predicted or anticipated or even maybe would have wanted. And you have to give it to him that he was an unbelievably effective spokesperson for these methods. And there have not been justices on the left who have been effective communicators about their methods of interpretation in the same way. Now there are all kinds of reasons where that mess is a little bit of field. So I'll come back to Leo, but I think there's a related point to be made which is that I think that it's, I would say there's a combination. I think that there is the left has not had figures like Leonard Leo and I'm not saying that they should, but I think that that is a descriptive kind of observation. But I think that to the kind of questions where you said nothing that he is engaging in is illegal. And I think that's from what we know that seems right. Like there are certainly norms being violated. And I think that one of the sort of big important lessons of the last sort of six, eight years of our national life is how much of our sort of collective public lives. And that includes sort of both worlds of both law and politics have been governed by even in the law more norms than a hard law or at least a lot governed by norms in addition to hard law. And so I think things like lobbying and advocacy of elected officials in terms of the appointments that they will make to the state bench or the federal bench are longstanding practices and that administrations of both parties and groups both left and right have long engaged in, but that there have also long been kind of boundaries and lines respected and observed. So even in sort of settings in states where that voters have decided and state constitutions have decided to select judges in a way that is different than the federal system and to create judges where you run for office, you're not insulated the way federal judges are at least sort of structurally and formally from direct political accountability and feedback. Like they serve for life, things like that, states mostly make different choices. So even where some politics and law have been commingled and things like judicial selection, there have just been boundaries observed and maintained in terms of the kinds of lobbying, the kinds of sort of self-conscious efforts say to get judges with particular ideological profiles considered and you might say, well, a lot of that is just sort of etiquette or sort of circumvention. And in some ways, like what this did was the kind of efforts to sort of directly appeal to elected officials to sort of seek to have more conservative judges placed on the state bench. And also to seek, Andrew didn't mention, but one of the, I think sort of many wonderful things about the reporting is what it sort of, the light that it sheds on the one obscure office of the state solicitor general, this really, really important office inside states, inside state attorney general's offices that I think as, I'll garble this a little bit, but I think as Andrew said something like once upon a time, these were these offices that defended the state and did some financial protection of consumers, things like that. And now we're doing unbelievably high impact national stakes kinds of litigation that involve everything from sort of climate change to student debt, every major presidential policy seems to be subject to a very swift challenge typically by the state of Texas and often with other red states in tow. And that is a pretty new development and closely linked to the rise of the office of state solicitor general. And so there too, deliberately targeting AGs and seeking to convince them to appoint sort of young, highly, highly ideological lawyers in order both to allow those lawyers to use the office to promote a legal policy agenda, sorry, but the siren outside, but also to kind of burnish the credentials of those young lawyers in order then to help catapult them to these positions of sort of judicial office, federal appellate bench, things like that. That's not in any way legal, but those were just things that were not done because there were norms against doing them for a very long time. And so I think that if you sort of believe in institutions and norms as important institutions, and I do, I think that you don't necessarily want sort of a symmetrical effort on the part of, the legal left to respond. And on the other hand, sort of just a decision to kind of unilaterally fail to utilize tools that actually are now on the table and are important also seems really problematic and designed to lead to more kind of like asymmetry and a distortion of both like the kind of personnel on the bench and substantive legal outcomes. There's obviously a close connection between those two. So as my long answer probably reflects, I think I'm conflicted. There's much to admire. I don't think that I at least can't really deny that. And yet I don't think that it's conduct or a path that I would want to see emulated either. I just, you know, would, well, just a quick asterisk to that. Leo is being investigated by the DC Attorney General regarding a complaint about inappropriate sort of use of nonprofits. I mean, one of the things we haven't touched on but we talk about in our more in-depth in the article but also in the podcast series a little bit is about the way that Leo created a network of nonprofits. He's on the board of them or he raises money for them and they give to each other. And it becomes very confusing to sort of follow the money train which I think is another reason why it's very hard to talk about Leonard Leo because, you know, by the time you've explained the money that goes from, you know, JCN to students for life to et cetera, to et cetera, to et cetera. You've, you know, used up all your time especially if you're working in the audio format as we do. So, so, and then many of these nonprofits hire the company that Leonard Leo runs. So there's a question there but I don't think that that's really what people are talking about when they say illegal. I mean, I think what Leo figured out as Kate was just saying is like, you know we have called him like the Robert Moses of illegal infrastructure because he's figured out these mechanisms and places to exert power that nobody else thought of. And for example, one was the, you know all of episode two, much of it is about Lawrence Van Dyke who's now a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a very powerful position, very, very conservative particularly when it comes to the Second Amendment. He is somebody that Leo nurtured from early on. He was in the Federalist Society at Harvard. You know, we were told by various people who were familiar that Leo and his associates had called around making sure he had a job. He worked as in the Solicitor General's office or as Solicitor General for three different states and is now in the Ninth Circuit. And there's even a bit of a more of a surprise that I'll let people listen to episode two to hear what that is, but you know his sort of career prospects are even brighter than that. And this is the exact way that Leo sort of figured it out. And it takes a long, you have to focus for a long time. You have to focus for 20, 25 years if you're starting with law school and you know, you're looking all the way up to the highest levels of the federal judiciary as Leonard Leo is doing. And you know, we've talked about the ways that Leonard Leo has sort of elevated the Solicitor General position, the ways he's kind of influenced who's in power at the state level. But you know, over the past year, our understanding of Supreme Court justices and the norms around the Supreme Court around the Supreme Court have shifted thanks to some dogged reporting from ProPublica. So we found out that there are gifts that some Supreme Court justices are accepting from billionaire mega donors. And that's again, something that's not quite illegal but seems to violate a norm. Andrea, how does Leonard Leo fit into the picture of that arrangement? So he is actually in the picture in one of these trips when he and Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, who is a Texas real estate magnate ProPublica reported on a lot. Harlan Crow invited Clarence Thomas up to his mansion on Upper St. Regis Lake in the Adirondack Mountains and there was a picture painted. And Leo is in the picture with Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas and a couple of other legal associates. In on another trip with the Justice Alito took where there were Paul Singer was there who is a hedge fund magnate and ultimately had an interest in a case that was decided by the Supreme Court. It was a seven to two decision but Alito had voted in his favor. And they all go up to an Alaska fishing trip and our colleagues, Justin, Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan and Alex Meyer-Jesky discovered that the only link between these people between Paul Singer and Robin Arkley and Alito is Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo is in the middle of it all. Leonard Leo is setting these things up. He is arranging these trips. He even in fact arranged for Paul Singer to get his salmon that he had got from his fishing trip after it wasn't delivered to him. And that I think is something that was central to our understanding that Leo would befriend these very wealthy people who might have an economic interest in Supreme Court decisions. And they would donate money to Leo's causes that would then reinforce the sort of moral conservative the anti-abortion conservatives the ones that were pushing for decisions on religious liberty or on same-sex marriage. And but the money machine sort of was boosted by these encounters so far as we can tell from our reporting. And as these revelations have come out there's been sort of a, I think like an awakening from the public like, wait a second shouldn't this be against the rules? And like, wait, there's no rules and there's sort of been this call for an ethics code. There is an ethics code for lower court justices but the Supreme Court didn't have one until this week when they finally published one. And Kay, I wanted to get your take on the ethics code. Have you read it? Do you have any initial impressions, reactions? I hate it, I read it, I think it's but I think it's so important and just enormous, enormous credit to the folks of ProPublica and also the times and elsewhere who have done the reporting the dogged reporting that is 100% responsible for the fact that the justices felt enough heat that they put together this woefully insufficient document but the fact of it I think is enormously important. It's been characterized as worse than nothing and I think there is something to that in that the document in a very kind of defensive sort of preamble statement suggests that it is merely codifying the practices the justices have already followed, the rules the justices already adhere to. And I think that in Millheiser at Fox had a great I thought distillation of this aspect of the problem with the document but that is that it can be read essentially to retroactively bless everything that we have seen reported on that Andrea was just talking about because it says the justices already do this but here in order to says the document dispel a misunderstanding that the justices are not in fact bound by any ethical rules or guidelines we've basically put it in writing for you. So that I think is enormously problematic just as sort of a framing device and I also think the substance of it is wildly deficient. So there are even things like affirmative permission provisions for justices to engage in fundraising activities which I think was at least murky previously and here a justice may assist non-profit law related civic charitable education religious or social organizations in planning fundraising activities. Sorry, I'm reading here and maybe listed as an officer or director or trustee, et cetera, et cetera. So there are actually a few places where I think that there is an affirmative blessing given by the court to activities that at the very least the justices many of them believe themselves unable to participate in that of course they don't have to simply because the ethics code says it's not prohibited but there are other places where it seems as though the justices actually are not prohibited from using the prestige of the court or the office just prohibited from knowingly using the prestige of the court or their offices that seems like an important distinction they can simply claim ignorance if in fact they are engaging in activities and others responsible for organizing those activities are trading on the justices positions the physical building of the court things like that. So I think it is an incredibly underwhelming document so much so that I'm actually a little bit surprised that everyone joined them and they like to hang together in something like this that sort of put forth a unified front to the public but I can't imagine all nine of them think that this document goes far enough or does enough and yet I think the fact that they felt the need to do it that they felt the heat that is a testament to how important this reporting is and how important it is that it continues. Is it gonna result in a better document that actually clearly prohibits some of these activities in particular the ones involving accepting gifts? I don't know, but I think that it is a testament to it actually really mattering. I mean, I feel like, I mean, I've read a lot of critiques of it and Julia, I'm really curious to know what you think. I feel like a couple of things. One is that when when propublica started doing our reporting and there were discussions, are their laws broken and are there rules broken? Which is important part of obviously of journalism but when the story came out about Clarence Thomas taking $500,000 vacations like scrambling for a rules violation is not necessary. I think people understand that that is problematic. And I think that's one of the reasons why this reporting cut through is because it's just clear. And as somebody, I mean, I have spent probably more time of my life, more hours of my life than anyone should covering like corruption cases. And having something written down is not always a solution. So for me, the fact that there is a document is, it's encouraging because it suggests that maybe the court is responsive in some ways to what's going on in the real world. And also there's a framework to begin a conversation. So I think I'm less unhappy about it than people that, I mean, I'm not a lawyer. So I think people who are lawyers sort of see the deficiencies of which I will not disagree there are many but also I feel like, wow, there's a document. That's great. That's a starting point. But Julia, I know that you're the host but I am curious what you think because you've also spent so much time thinking about this court. What do you think about that document? Yeah, I think I feel similarly in that it's nice to at least get some kind of response. I think in the initial days after the reports came out the silence and the lack of response at all it seemed like was pretty discouraging. So it's nice to get a response. But yeah, I mean, I feel similarly to Kate in that even from the, they could have just adopted what the federal judges have, right? As far as their ethics code, but like the little detail that I found really amusing is like the federal judge ethics code says like justices shall not. And this code says justices should not which is already softer. It feels like that seems like a small like semantic thing that you could have just copy pasted. But anyway, yeah, it is, I hope it's the beginning of a conversation like you say, Andrea. We are running out of time. So I wanna get a couple of audience questions in. A lot of audience members have been asking about Leonard Leo's Catholic background and how that kind of plays into his goals and his sort of outlook in his political project. Do one of you wanna take that, Kate? You wanna take that? Sure, I don't know. I can't really pretend to speak to it. I presume that his sort of pro-life views seem to have been forged from a very young age. And I am sure that Catholicism played a role in that. And I think that that maybe there are other, I guess I don't know where he is on things like the death penalty, honestly. And sort of, so I presume that that is an important through line. And I think it was a site of sort of bonding and solidarity with like Justice Scalia and other Catholics on the court. But that's probably the only, I am sure it has played a central role, but I don't really have anything else to say about it. Yeah, I mean, I think I would just, I mean, I would refer people especially to the ProPublica article about Leonard Leo because we do dive into this in depth and we ask him about it and he addresses it. It is a fundamental part of who he is. And he gave a speech that we quote at the very beginning of the podcast to the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC, which is sort of a meeting ground for powerful Catholics. He gave a speech in just about a year ago where he really spoke of feeling aggrieved, which was extraordinary to me because he'd won dobs. He had six people on the US Supreme Court. He had $1.6 billion to spend, but he spoke in the language of we are losing and it was a very sort of religious interpretation. So I will refer people to that. I mean, I do think it, and he's a devout Catholic, he goes to mass maybe every day of the week and talks about how his faith really fundamentally influenced where he went. And all of the justices that he supported are now Catholics. And there are, what's seven, right? Seven of the nine, so. Right. And I think we have time for one more question. So I'll throw it to the both of you. A reader wrote in asking what Leo's end game is. What do you think his end game is? I wanna give Andrew the last word on this and I do think that's a good segue to the sort of Taneo kind of federal society for everything. If that's something the audience would be interested in hearing about, I think it's endlessly fascinating. I will talk about Taneo and the other things he's working on, but I'm wondering, Kate, do you have an answer to that? What is the end game is? I don't, clearly I think the fact that there is this sort of sentiment of aggrievedness that is still on display makes quite clear to me that he does not believe his work to be done. And so there is certainly another end game control of the US Supreme Court, which is quite an accomplishment is not enough. And so there is certainly more and maybe more inside the law, but definitely expanding the reach outside of the law is on the agenda. Yeah, I mean, I think that Taneo is a group, the Taneo network is a group that Leo recently took over that we have characterized as a federal society for everything. Leo in a promotional video says, I've been successful in the conservative legal movement and I wanna bring that to all of culture. So Hollywood media, education, really sort of infusing it with his values. There are some very concrete things that organizations that he has supported are working on. One of them is called the honest elections project, which has backed many efforts to, for example, limit mail-in balding, limit the franchise in other ways. And I think also we're watching closely to see how he maneuvers the 2024 election. It is obviously, I mean, in the Trump administration, he not only recommended justices, he recommended general councils, he recommended DOJ personnel, he recommended cabinet secretaries. And we are watching for signs of how that will go in a potential second Trump administration. How would he try to influence staffing? Should that come about? How are they preparing? And I think that is something that must be very much on his mind, the sort of how does he keep it going? I mean, one of the things about these court structures is you have to keep it going. And we're watching that closely. So I don't know if that's an end game, but it's continuing to expand the influence that he's had in the ways that he has. And I hope that people will, we have more of that in the podcast. So I hope that people will listen to all three episodes, which you can find. If you just put, we don't talk about Leonard in your podcast search engine, you will find it. Great. Well, that's a perfect place for us to end. I wanna thank all of our speakers, Andrea, Kate, and Julia for this illuminating conversation. And to all of you listeners, thanks so much for tuning in. We hope to catch you next time. Thanks again. Have a good night. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.