About Leonard Leo, the 3rd most powerful American, & the unholy trinity

At his Prevail substack, Greg Olear wrote at great length last Feb. about Leonard Leo, a truly rich and very powerful radical right American authoritarian. Here are key parts of his article:

Leonard Leo and the Unholy Trinity (with Tom Carter)

How the reactionary legal activist, radical Catholic zealot & dark money maestro built alliances to capture the Court and impose his extremist agenda on America

On these pages, I’ve written extensively about Leonard Leo. In February of 2021—three full years ago—I wrote a piece called “Leo the Cancer,” an introduction to a dark money maestro his BFF Clarence Thomas once called, without hyperbole, the third most powerful man in the country. Citing great investigative journalism by Jay Michelson at the Daily Beast, ProPublica, Heidi Przybyla at Politico, and Nina Burleigh at the New Republic, I’ve also detailed how Leonard Leo personally cashed in on his legal activism; how Leonard Leo wangled $1.6 billion—billion with a B—out of the reclusive nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Said, and the malefic effect that will have on our democracy; and how many powerful people exist in the network he’s built over the last three decades of activism.

Here is a synopsis of who Leo is, for those unfamiliar:

• He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. But most Americans, including many working in Washington, have never heard of him.

• Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful than he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden. 

• [He] is the individual most responsible for stripping away federal abortion rights. (The anniversary of the odious Dobbs decision was this past weekend.) As his admiring chum Ed Wheelan presciently wrote in 2016, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”

Tom Carter knows more about Leonard Leo than anyone not in the Federal Society co-founder’s inner circle. Tom worked in Washington for years, in journalism and then in PR. For three years, he handled media relations at USCIRF, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where his boss was—you guessed it—Leonard Leo. He soon realized that Leo was a zealot, whose ideas were incompatible with, among other things, religious freedom.

Over the subsequent decade and a half, Tom became a dedicated Leo watcher. He reads every article about him. He’s developed his own network of sources. And he warns everyone who will listen about how powerful Leonard Leo is—and how dangerous to our democracy.

Whenever I write about Leo, someone on social media will invariably bring up Jeff Sharlet and The Family, as if Leonard Leo and his crew are the same thing. They are not. Leo & Co. are radical Catholics; The Family are Protestants. Yes, both are Christians, but being Christian didn’t stop Catholics and Protestants from fighting each other in Europe for centuries. Conflating the two mischaracterizes who Leo is and what he ultimately wants.

Carter has a smart way of breaking down the relationship between 1) Leo and his radical Catholic cohorts; 2) Evangelical Christians; and 3) Mammon-worshipping rightwing billionaires. He calls it the “Unholy Trinity.” (Another name might be “The Devil’s Triangle,” if we felt like hat-tipping Leonard Leo’s penultimate SCOTUS appointment, the odious Brett Kavanaugh.)

“The libertarian billionaires want something,” Carter explains. “In 1980, one of the Koch brothers ran for vice president, got less than 2% of the vote—on a platform which is very much today’s MAGA platform. So it was not a popular platform. It’s never been a popular platform, but they knew [they didn’t] have the votes. So the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Uihleins, Paul Singer, Harlan Crow, Barre Said, all of these guys have different individual wants, but in general, what it boils down to is they want lower taxes on their multi-billion-dollar companies, and they want no federal regulation.”

Basically, these soulless gajillionaires, many of whom inherited their wealth, would rather spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in lobbying efforts—funding all manner of vile rightwing fuckery to make sure their hard-inherited cash doesn’t help the less fortunate—than pay their fair share.

“So where do we get the votes? Where do we get the votes?” Carter explains. “Well, Paul Weyrich, a very devout, hardcore Catholic, who has said the more people vote, the less people will like our positions,” had a planning sesh with Jerry Falwell—“a top Catholic meeting with a very, very top Evangelical.”

I keep posting this short video 

for good reasons

[Racism] is not going to sell in the [] late 1970s, early 1980s. ‘What do we want? What do we want? I know. Let’s get behind abortion. Let’s become anti-abortionists.’ So this was a political marriage between Paul Weyrich—conservative Catholics—and Jerry Falwell—conservative Evangelical Christians. And that’s how the anti-abortion movement really came about. It wasn’t Roe that started it. It was these two guys basically in a backroom deal.”

And that’s how the second prong of the Unholy Trinity fits into the picture. Falwell’s community, Carter explains, “are the votes. Those are the infantry. Those are the door knockers, the Evangelical Christian nationalists, which we’ve read so much about.

“At the same time, Leonard Leo and his Catholic cabal was beavering away in Washington trying to rig the judicial system. It’s been said if you want to create a fascist society, the first thing you do is get the judges, and that’s what Leonard was doing,” Carter tells me. “It’s what I call the Unholy Trinity. You’ve got the libertarian billionaires; you’ve got the Christian nationalist foot soldiers, the infantry; and you’ve got the extreme Catholic—Leonard Leo—cabal, driving the tanks, or to use a different analogy, kicking the goals. They’re the ones that are getting stuff done. They are putting the scores on the scoreboard.”

“There’s been a lot of stories, ink, books, articles on Christian nationalism and how there is no separation of church and state, and we want Jesus at the top of the heap, our version of Republican Jesus at the top of the heap. There’s been very little on the [radical] Catholics, and they’re actually the ones that are doing a lot of the lifting,” Carter says. The goal is to not just eliminate the separation of church and state, but to elevate the church to the dominant position—where it was in the Middle Ages, when the Pope crowned the emperors.

The thought leaders of this extremist Catholic movement are quite open about the necessity of force to get their way. “Force will be required,” Carter says, paraphrasing the thought process of these leaders. “Force is going to be needed, because not everybody is going to want to do what we say we want to want done. So if you’re Jewish, or Catholic [but don’t] believe in integralism, or an atheist, or anything else, you automatically become a second-class or third-class citizen in this Christofascist world. Think about the Spanish Inquisition or, more recently, think about Franco’s Spain or, today, Orbán’s Hungary. These are autocratic societies run according to religious principles, whoever happens to be at the top of the heap.”

If this unholy power grab is complete—which, if Trump wins re-election, it will be—it ain’t going to be pretty for the rest of us. Which is to say: most of us.

Carter sums up the situation succinctly—and ominously: “They’re bringing the Inquisition.”

Q1: Although Olear refers to the billionaire prong of the unholy trinity as libertarian (roughly the opposite of authoritarian), they support DJT and his authoritarianism, so is Olear using the wrong label for the unholy billionaires, who actually are authoritarian, not libertarian?

Q2: If they get enough power, is it more likely than not that one or both of the two Christian prongs of the unholy trinity, authoritarian (theocratic) Catholicism and Protestantism, will try to bring back old-fashioned Catholic inquisition tactics (like those shown below), or will they more likely try to impose a softer, more modern and woke variant, with less torture and murdering replaced by more subtle means of force, e.g., making people opposed into second-class or third-class citizens (like what modern China does today to its citizens who resist)?

A DJT crime confession, but of no importance; About the Trumpified DoJ

The HuffPo and lots of others are reporting about comments DJT made in an interview with Mark Levin, a RRA (radical right authoritarian), that RRA Faux News broadcast. What DJT said amounted to a confession that he interfered in the 2020 election. He said:

“Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up.”

But, his confession is of no importance. Why? Well, if it is up to Merrick Garland to do anything about it, he won't because he is as corrupt as DJT and actively protects DJT and his toxic RRA legacy. Maybe Jack Smith or some state prosecutor can use that admission as evidence in some prosecution or another. But given the way our rule of law routinely fails to touch rich and/or powerful people and businesses, odds of this being significant evidence is a court case appear to be low.

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The American Prospect writes about one lingering ill-effect on the DoJ (Dept. of Justice) that is left over from DJT's time in office and before even then:

Garland Has Yet to De-Trumpify His Office of Legal Counsel

The Department of Justice has failed to revise dubious decisions made to shield Trump from scrutiny

One former employee of the Office of Legal Counsel, upon quitting her job during the Trump presidency, described the OLC’s work to The Washington Post succinctly: “using the law to legitimize lies.” Three years later, and a year after Trump left office, most of those legitimized lies remain intact.

It will come as no surprise that former President Trump abused the powers of the Department of Justice. But in reviewing the opinions released by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel over Trump’s four years, its deference to his agenda, in spite of those abuses, stands out. Deferring to the president has been the OLC’s norm since the pre-2016 era, which is itself troubling; that impulse becomes particularly alarming when the president is charting a course to sabotage American democracy.

The OLC is both a powerful and secretive force within the executive branch. It provides authoritative legal opinions to the president and executive branch agencies, opinions that can form the basis for controversial executive actions. Most of the OLC’s determinations are never released to Congress or the public. A few are published without fanfare on its website.

We have no idea how many confidential opinions, formal or informal, the OLC offered Trump or anyone else during Trump’s term, and no idea if any of them have been reconsidered since. That’s an obvious problem. In the aftermath of a presidency marked by a norms-shattering regime of corruption, the usual procedures—like the OLC’s stubborn secrecy, and reluctance to depart from its past opinions—have become unacceptable. The Office of Legal Counsel requires new transparency and deserves renewed scrutiny.

While we don’t know the full extent of the OLC’s misdirection under Trump, we do know that of the 48 opinions published on its website during Trump’s presidency, only three have been publicly revisited under President Biden. (Again, 48 isn’t the full number of released opinions, since some aren’t listed on the website—like the 2017 OLC memo approving Trump’s travel ban, which was released in response to a FOIA request. Visibility of the office remains patchwork.)

Strengthening executive power and undercutting legislative power is a running theme throughout the Office of Legal Counsel’s Trump-era opinions, so it’s significant that the OLC in 2021 acknowledges that it “failed to accord the respect and deference due a coordinate branch of government.” In fact, it weaponized the separation of powers to undermine congressional oversight of the executive branch. By that same token, the OLC can now play a role in restoring congressional oversight. All it takes is Garland deciding it isn’t his job to defend the last president’s loathsome legacy.

All it takes is Garland deciding it isn’t his job to defend the last president’s loathsome legacy. Really? 

From what I can tell, Garland firmly believes it is his job to defend the last president’s loathsome legacy because he has done a damn good job of doing just that so far.

Merrick Garland revisited: Not a timid incompetent, but a corrupt, complicit traitor?

Early on, in May of 2021 it was clear to me that Merrick Garland was not going to seriously go after DJT and his cadre of thugs, traitors and grifters. Thus calling for firing him for timidity and gross incompetence seemed like sound reasoning based on the evidence I relied on. One of the deeply disturbing things that set me off in 2021 was an informed assessment that the Mueller report faded away, as if it had all been for nothing. To this day, DJT crimes the Mueller report clearly documented  have not been prosecuted. That bit of nastiness is footnoted in my blog post.

Legal analysis of 4 documented instances of obstruction

of justice felonies that DJT committed during the Mueller 

investigation -- all 4 are documented in detail in the Mueller report

Garland never prosecuted any of those felonies

Now, after being made aware of some information, I'm not at all sure that timid incompetence was the correct way to view the situation. That assessment was very likely wrong. It definitely was based on incomplete knowledge. That is always a danger. 

Anyway, I was just made aware of some deeply disturbing things about Garland and his mentor Jamie Gorelick I was ignorant about. Although what I quote below might sound to some like deranged crackpot conspiracy theory, there seems to be at least a reasonably good and defensible basis in circumstances to support the idea that Garland is not a timid incompetent, but instead is a deeply corrupt, complicit traitor. 

The information comes from Sarah Kendzior, an author, anthropologist, researcher, and scholar. She has a Wikipedia page. From that information, she does not appear to be a crackpot. At her substack, Sarah Kendzior's Newsletter, she wrote this in Nov. of 2023 in a very long article, Servants of the Mafia State; Merrick Garland, Jamie Gorelick, and the truth:

I have told this story in pieces over the years. I am now putting the information in one article to make it easier to find. The story touches on so many atrocities that it is impossible for me to cover them all, and I encourage folks to pick up where I left off. The point of describing a crisis is to give people tools to fix it. This shadow network affects everyone, regardless of where you live or for whom you voted.

It is common to hear Garland described as an institutionalist. This is true. He protects a broken and corrupt institution, the Department of Justice. He protects it instead of protecting the United States or its people. He protects it above democracy or freedom or a future. He protects it over justice itself.

The DOJ Industrial Propaganda Complex that emerges when any critique of Garland is made insists that justice is imminent. They bleat that Garland is merely “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s”.

Which he is, in the word COMPLICIT.

Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.

The FBI and DOJ need to protect Trump, because in doing so, they protect themselves.

Many fail to understand Garland’s role due to an elaborate propaganda network (the mechanics of which I will break down) and a reluctance to recognize complicity among officials who are often portrayed as feuding. It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.

Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.

As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family, to the point that Benjamin Netanyahu slept in Jared’s bed when visiting the United States.

Garland has refused to investigate Kushner. A likely reason is that, were he to investigate Kushner – who remains a profound national security threat – he would also be investigating his best friend.

It is one big club, and it is destroying our country.

Crises of institutional integrity are beyond partisanship. They cannot be fixed by elections. They can only begin to be remedied when the rot is revealed. The road to accountability begins with evidence, context, and history.

Reckoning with this horror is difficult, but an informed public is a powerful public. Never forget that state officials are paid to serve you. You deserve more than a plate of platitudes meant to weaken your capacity for critical thought.

Merrick Garland gained national prominence when he was blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans in 2016. The refusal of the GOP to hold hearings gave the Americans the false impression that Garland is a staunch Democrat and defender of liberty.

In reality, the GOP refusal had little to do with Garland, but with their desire to pack the court with right-wing extremists once Trump ascended. Garland is not a right-wing extremist. He is a cog who serves corrupt interests under the guise of being “moderate” and “cautious” – stalling investigations and blocking evidence from public view. That is what he did during his brief tenure at the Clinton DOJ from 1994-1997. That is what he does at the Biden DOJ now.

GOP extremists have long praised Garland. In 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, Mitch McConnell suggested that Garland become the FBI director.

“I have spoken with the president about it. I recommended Merrick Garland,” McConnell said in May 2017. He recited the propaganda line that Garland “was the prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case.” (Garland was not. The lead prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case was Joseph Hartzler, and how that lie gets circulated will be explained later.) McConnell added that Garland “would make it clear that President Trump will continue the tradition at the FBI of having an apolitical professional.”

In October 2021, Donald Trump praised Garland as “a good man” and said he was glad Garland was Attorney General. At that point, the DOJ had not even opened an inquiry into the Capitol attack, a dereliction of duty that was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears, but which Garland’s backers staunchly denied until time had run out, and it was too late.

In other words, once Garland and Trump had achieved their goals.

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There is much more. I am only including highlights because if I were to list every crime she [Jamie Gorelick] abetted, I would have an epic.

It is time to move onto another job for which she remains largely uncredited: Merrick Garland’s chief propagandist.

From evidence like that, Kendzior says that 

the DoJ has a troll bot propaganda farm that

made the DoJ and Garland look good

It does look sort of suspicious

Kendzior's article about Garland and his close friend and mentor Jamie Gorelick is very long and packed with depressing details of corruption and sleaze, and including links to information that back up those details. Maybe all of this sounds like crackpot conspiracy theory to some, but to me it has the feel of truth, sad and discouraging as it is.

Based on this, I reassess Garland. He is not a timid incompetent defending his valiant DoJ institution. He more likely is a corrupt, complicit traitor who maintains the moral rot in the DoJ. If so, Garland's moral rot is on a level with DJT himself. 

Q1: Is it plausible that Garland is a corrupt, complicit traitor instead of a timid incompetent?

Q2: In view of the evidence that Kendzior cites, did Biden make a major mistake in making Garland attorney general, or did Biden know what Garland was but nominated him anyway (or did Obama err in nominating Garland for the supreme court)? 

Exactly what are you, just a scared and 

inept "institutionalist" or something far worse?

Christianity directly attacks Johnson Amendment in federal court

The Baptist Standard reports:

The National Religious Broadcasters association has joined a complaint alongside two East Texas churches calling for the Johnson Amendment to be declared unconstitutional. The complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler on Aug. 28.

Congress approved then-Senator Lyndon Johnson’s amendment to the U.S. tax code in 1954 that prohibited 501(c)(3) organizations such as charities and churches “from engaging in any political campaign activity.” In 1987, Congress added a clarification that the amendment also applies to statements opposing candidates.

According to a National Religious Broadcasters statement, the complaint details how organizations have “engage[d] in electoral activities that are open, obvious and well-known, yet the IRS allows some, but not all, such organizations to do so without penalty.”

The Internal Revenue Service, it continued, routinely “acts in an arbitrary and capricious manner” toward nonprofit organizations “that disfavors conservative organizations and conservative, religious organizations.” Such an unequal enforcement, it determines, constitutes “a denial of both religious freedom and equal protection.”

This is a very big deal, huge actually. The current USSC will probably declare the JA (Johnson Amendment) unconstitutional on grounds of undue burden on free speech, undue burden on religious freedom and/or anything else they can think of. The court might even find a way to apply the history and traditions test. If the JA is overturned, theocratic Christian nationalist (CN) church leaders will be free to fill their sermons with all the lies, slanders, fake American history, and poisonous bigotry, e.g., seething hate of the LGBQT community, that dominates dark free speech from CN elites. 

Paragraph 14 of the federal complaint reads as follows:

Plaintiffs [Christianity] contend that the Johnson Amendment, as written and as applied by the IRS, violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause, Free Exercise Clause, the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (Void for Vagueness), the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (Equal Protection), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

To be clear, if the JA is overturned, priests, pastors and other church elites will be free to openly threaten their flocks with things like excommunication, ostracism, expulsion from the church and condemnation to eternal damnation in Satan's lake of fire if they vote for the wrong candidate according to God's sacred and infallible will. 

The really interesting aspect of this lawsuit is the nature of the JA itself. The JA was passed into law as an explicit condition on a church maintaining its tax-exempt status, not an outright prohibition on speech or religious freedom. As it is now, CN churches and religious leaders still have significant freedom to speak on political and moral issues - they just can't explicitly endorse or oppose candidates while maintaining tax-exempt status. One source comments:

Repealing the Johnson Amendment would either require an act of Congress or the Supreme Court ruling that the law is unconstitutional. Neither of these possibilities have occurred. While there is frequently language introduced by Republican lawmakers to repeal it, such legislation has historically been unsuccessful. Most recently, in the Republican tax reform bill in 2017, repeal language was dropped due to the Senate’s reconciliation rules.

Radical Republican theocratic politicians failed to repeal the JA, most recently in 2017, so the next line of attack on the JA is the USSC. Churches already can implicitly endorse and oppose candidates but even that is not enough for the aggressive, kleptocratic CN wealth and power movement. Theocratic Christianity wants to rip off the JA fig leaf and go full Monty in politics. Churches can already say, for example, that politicians who support abortion rights are agents of Satan or otherwise terrible people in God's eyes. Churches already know exactly how to implicitly endorse or oppose a candidate without running afoul of the JA. 

The courts have consistently held that tax exemption is a privilege, not a right, and organizations can choose to forgo tax-exempt status if they wish to engage in prohibited political activities. That is the main barrier that the USSC has to somehow knock down if the authoritarian CN theocratic agenda is to take its power to the highest level so far. This lawsuit is the clearest example of the ravenous greed that constitutes a major motive and goal of the elites who control America's authoritarian radical right Christian nationalist wealth and power movement.[1]

Given the radical, theocratic intend of this USSC, this lawsuit is terrifying. If the JA does get invalidated, that will happen most likely in June-July of 2026 or 2027. In normal times with a normal USSC, the chances of repeal of the JA would seem to be low. But with this radical theocratic court, certain things that are implausible but important to the CN movement become possible, maybe even likely. 

No one thought the Roe v. Wade would be overturned, but it was. 

Footnote:

1. An anti-CN source comments about the CN wealth and power movement:

Is Christian nationalism Christian?

No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation.

Why should Christians oppose Christian nationalism?

Pro-democracy, pro-love Christians must speak out together to show the country that Christian nationalism does not represent Jesus or our faith. When we do this, we prove that the biggest critics of the Christian-nationalist ideology are in fact Christians, and thus disprove the source of its biggest power: the false perception that the religious-right speaks for all American Christians.

I am not the only person who sees CN as bigoted (anti-love) and authoritarian (anti-democracy).