Elliott Mgmt singer

SEE THREE

see main and vultr tag

arm of singer hedge fund

why does he care about US pol? MI?

zombied elise stefanic

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https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-episode-1-part-1-on-the-media

on the media pro pub; singer ~ OLA orderly liq assests post gr recession, lost ; leo boost SG sol gen'l; ~ dodd frank, cfinance eliz w cfpb

leo makes a big push to promote SG sol gen’l , many more cases state scotus than scotus, and former are pipeline to latter

very good, detailled pt 2 Part 1: Leonard Leo Throws a Party | On the Media | WNYC Studios

fed soc sep of powers comm? states rights?

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no lnx missoulian

Architect of US court shift used Montana as stepping stone

EDITOR'S PICK TOPICAL

Architect of US court shift used Montana as stepping stone

Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz - ProPublica Oct 17, 2023 3

Editor's note: ProPublica and WNYC’s “On The Media" reporters investigated 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.

Historians and legal experts say there is no comparable figure in American jurisprudence. To the extent Leo is known, it’s for his role helping to install the conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court. But his reach extends far beyond that. Decades ago, he realized it was not enough to have justices on his side. Those jurists needed to decide the right cases, brought by the right lawyers and heard by the right lower court judges. He built a machine to do just that.

Find “We Don't Talk About Leonard” wherever you get your podcasts or read the complete text version here.

The following excerpt covers Leonard Leo’s influence placing Federalist Society-backed lawyers in state attorneys general offices, including Montana’s, to influence the national legal agenda.

In 2013, Mike Black, Leo’s former classmate at Cornell Law, was leading the civil division of the Montana attorney general’s office as a career employee. A new attorney general had just been elected, bringing with him a number of new staffers to the office. Black had a matter to discuss with one of them: a tall, rangy Harvard Law School graduate named Lawrence VanDyke. VanDyke had been hired as solicitor general, the top appellate litigator in the attorney general’s office, responsible for defending state laws.

Standing in VanDyke’s office, Black noticed several bobblehead dolls on a shelf. “There was like Scalia for sure. And I think probably Alito, there were like four or five. And then there was this one younger-looking guy, and I said, ‘Well, who the heck is this?’” Black recalled. “And he goes, ‘Well, that’s Leonard Leo.’”

Black was astonished.

What Black did not know was that by that time Leo had helped to cultivate an entire generation of conservative lawyers on the rise. The system was like a positive feedback loop: Young attorneys could accelerate their own careers by affiliating with the Federalist Society and then prove their worth by advancing bold, conservative doctrines in the courts. Leo himself would suggest candidates to state attorneys general. According to one former Republican attorney general: “He won’t say, ‘Hire this person,’ in a bossy way. He’ll say: ‘This is a good guy. You should check him out.’”

Senate OK's appeals court judge over home-state opposition

In this Sept. 23, 2014, file photo, former Montana Solicitor General Lawrence VanDyke, center, talks with law students Jason Collins, left, and Tyler Dugger before a Montana Supreme Court candidate forum at the University of Montana. The Senate confirmed VanDyke as a federal appeals court judge despite a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association and sharp opposition from his home-state senators.

Lido Vizzutti, Associated Press

In 2014, the Republican Attorneys General Association, a campaign group, became a standalone organization. The first 17 contributions were for $350 apiece. Then came a donation of a quarter of a million dollars. It came from JCN (Judicial Crisis Network). Rebranded as The Concord Fund, the group remains RAGA’s biggest and most reliable funder today. (In response to questions for this story, RAGA’s executive director said, “Leonard Leo has done more to advance conservative causes than any single person in the history of the country.”)

Attorneys general are more likely than private plaintiffs to have the ability, or standing, to bring the types of high-impact cases prioritized by Leo and his network. After the federal government itself, state attorneys general collectively are the second-largest plaintiff in the Supreme Court.

National approach to law

VanDyke had been a Federalist Society member since his time at Harvard Law. He was an editor of the conservative Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He worked at a major firm in Washington under Gene Scalia, the Supreme Court justice’s son, before becoming assistant solicitor general in Texas.

Despite his skill and credentials, VanDyke quickly alienated colleagues in the Montana attorney general’s office. Black said VanDyke had little appetite for the bread-and-butter state court cases that came with the job. Instead, emails show, VanDyke was excited by hot-button issues, often happening out of state. For example, he recommended Montana join a challenge to New York’s restrictive gun laws, passed after the Sandy Hook school massacre, adding as an aside in an email, “plus semi-auto firearms are fun to hunt elk with, as the attached picture attests :)” VanDyke persuaded Montana to join an amicus in the Hobby Lobby case, which led to the Supreme Court recognizing for the first time a private company as having religious rights.

For many years, solicitor general was considered a slow-metabolism job. VanDyke, who declined to comment, represented a new generation who had a distinctly aggressive, national approach to the law. Just recently, state solicitors obtained an injunction blocking federal agencies from working with social media companies to fight disinformation, persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to undo the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan and limited the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Dobbs, the ruling that ended women’s right to an abortion, was argued by Mississippi’s solicitor general.

For VanDyke, state solicitor general was a stepping stone on the judiciary path, especially with Leo’s hand at his back. In 2014, he quit the Montana attorney general’s office to run for state Supreme Court, in what turned out to be a bitter contest inflamed by record independent expenditures. The Republican State Leadership Committee, which received funding from JCN, spent more than $400,000 to support VanDyke. He lost. After that, Leo made at least one call on VanDyke’s behalf to an official who might be in a position to give him a job, a person with knowledge of the situation said. This was not an uncommon move.

Leo said he did not recall making calls on VanDyke’s behalf. He acknowledged nurturing the careers of a whole generation of young conservative attorneys, among them VanDyke; Andrew Ferguson, the Virginia solicitor general; Kathryn Mizelle, the federal judge who struck down the federal mask mandate for air travel; and Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case.

After Montana, VanDyke landed in Nevada as solicitor general under Adam Laxalt, an ally of Leo’s. In the Trump administration, VanDyke worked briefly for the Justice Department before the president nominated him to be a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Less than a year later, Trump released a fourth list of potential Supreme Court nominees. More than a third of the names were alumni of state attorneys general offices.

The final name on the list: Lawrence VanDyke.

'Entirely nutty'

In August 2012, the attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, had a conference call scheduled with Leo. It was Leo’s third calendar meeting with Abbott that year, records show. (Abbott is now the governor.) This meeting included not only Abbott and Leo, but also hedge fund manager Paul Singer. Two attorneys representing a small Texas bank, which had sued the Obama administration over its rewrite of banking laws, were invited. The meeting, which hasn’t previously been reported, highlights another key lever in Leo’s machine: The ability to bring donors’ policy priorities to public servants who can do something about those priorities.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, aimed at preventing another meltdown. Singer became one of the law’s biggest critics. In op-eds and in speeches, he argued that the new banking rules were unworkable and that efforts to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail could in fact make the system more fragile. Singer was especially critical of a provision known as “orderly liquidation authority,” which allows regulators to quickly wind down troubled institutions, calling it “entirely nutty.”

Leo took up the cause. According to interviews and meeting details obtained by the liberal watchdog group Accountable.US, Leo spoke with attorneys general in at least three states about a legal challenge to Dodd-Frank. He scheduled conference calls with the Oklahoma and Texas attorneys general at the time, Scott Pruitt and Abbott, respectively, to talk about what they could do about Dodd-Frank.

Oklahoma and Texas joined the bank’s case as co-plaintiffs. Montana joined, too. A person who worked in the Montana attorney general’s office said Leo called its newly elected leader, Republican Tim Fox, about the case. Montana would not have joined the suit, this person said, if Leo had not called Fox. VanDyke, then Montana’s solicitor general, became an attorney of record on the case.

Singer, Fox, Abbott and VanDyke did not comment for this story. Leo told ProPublica he didn’t recall a meeting with Abbott and Singer, and didn’t remember placing a call to Fox. He said he supported a legal challenge to the Dodd-Frank law on the grounds that its creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional.

In total, 11 states signed on. When they joined, the suit was amended to specifically challenge orderly liquidation authority as unconstitutional — the provision that Singer had singled out for criticism. For two years, the suit advanced through the courts, landing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2015. After an adverse ruling there, the attorneys general dropped out.

There had been doubters. A high-ranking attorney in the Texas attorney general’s office thought the suit was likely to fail. One former Republican attorney general from a different state said he didn’t believe the suit was critical to his state’s interests.

Leo’s network made an example of one. After Greg Zoeller, Indiana’s Republican attorney general, did not sign on, The Washington Times ran an opinion piece by JCN’s policy counsel — himself a former assistant attorney general in Missouri — speculating that Indiana’s attorney general may have been motivated by “strong alliances with Wall Street banks.” After two terms, Zoeller chose not to run for reelection in 2016, saying before he left office, “I don’t know if I fit today’s political arena.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. See all its reporting at propublica.org

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DN 6 30/23 sackett v epa alito wife property lease;singer HEAD of manhat amicus; website gay marriage fake doc adf; missouri loan no $ 15 yrs, no intention, no knowledge used by AG for standing; KBJ scathing dissent let them eat cake obliviousness; change law no change life

https://www.alternet.org/otomayor-military-academies-arbitrariness-ruling/

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https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-singer-block-student-loan-forgiveness-2023-6

biz insider

no lnx

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, Jr. took a fishing trip with a billionaire who has donated to — and serves as chairman for — a group that asked the Supreme Court to block student-loan forgiveness.

That news comes as borrowers are waiting for the Supreme Court to announce a decision this month on whether or not to uphold President Joe Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 for federal student-loans.

On Wednesday, ProPublica published an investigation on a vacation Alito took in July 2008 at a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska that reportedly cost over $1,000 a day. He was accompanied by Paul Singer, a billionaire whose hedge fund appeared before the Supreme Court at least ten times following the fishing trip and won votes from Alito in some of those cases.

As ProPublica reported, Singer has given over $80 million to Republican political groups — including the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank for which Singer has served as chairman since 2008. That group also filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court asking it to block Biden's relief plan — a decision the court is expected to hand down in the coming days.

"If the government's purpose were truly to reduce the harm of more frequent defaults, there are far more direct means available to that end," the Manhattan Institute wrote in its February brief referring borrowers who risked defaulted on their debt following the pandemic. "These include more aggressive measures to put borrowers on income-based repayment plans and, perhaps even more straightforward, waiving some of the legal consequences of missed payments."

"A $400 billion debt-forgiveness plan is a major policy decision that must be made by Congress, and Congress has declined to enact that policy," it added. "The administration's debt-forgiveness action should be vacated."

A spokesperson for Singer told ProPublica that Singer was not aware Alito would be on the fishing trip when he chose to attend, and that Singer "never discussed his business interests" with Alito during the trip. The spokesperson also said that Singer did not have "any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review."

Meanwhile, instead of responding directly to ProPublica's questions on the investigation, Alito wrote an opinion piece published on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, in which the conservative justice denied the claims the investigation made and wrote that "I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups."

"On no occasion have we discussed the activities of his businesses, and we have never talked about any case or issue before the Court," Alito wrote.

ProPublica also reported that Alito delivered a keynote address in 2010 for donors to the Manhattan Institute, during which Singer called Alito "a model Supreme Court justice" in his introduction. Of course, it's unclear how the Supreme Court will rule on Biden's student-debt relief plan — just as it's unclear how big of an influence donors could have on the impending decision.

Following ProPublica's report, advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center sent a letter to Alito on Wednesday — obtained by Insider — that demanded he recuse himself from the two lawsuits seeking to block Biden's debt relief: Biden v. Nebraska, and Brown v. US Department of Education.

The SBPC wrote in its letter that the Job Creators Network, which represented the plaintiffs in Brown v. US Department of Education, received financial support from the Judicial Crisis Network — a group that Singer has donated to in the past.

"Paul Singer's direct and indirect financial ties to parties in Brown and amici in Brown and Nebraska raise serious questions about your ability to decide neutrally and impartially," the SBPC wrote.

Along with the conservative groups who filed amicus briefs on the issue earlier this year, Democratic lawmakers and advocates did the same — and expressed confidence in the legality of student-debt cancellation for millions of borrowers.

"As these diverse groups made clear today, student loan borrowers from all walks of life suffered profound financial harms during the pandemic and their continued recovery and successful repayment hinges on the Biden Administration's student debt relief plan," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said of the briefs in January. "We will continue to defend our legal authority to provide the debt relief working and middle-class families clearly need and deserve."

POLITICS

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote a WSJ op-ed instead of commenting for a story that revealed his ties to a billionaire who had 10 cases before SCOTUS

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[[ ===

// clarence req extension on disclose $

kickass

https://www.alternet.org/supreme-court-2661651070/

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6 23 an badash

no lnx

supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito said that a controversial fishing trip he took in 2008 with billionaire Paul Singer didn’t need to be disclosed, and in fact, saved the United States money.

Alito wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in response to a ProPublica report that slammed the justice for not recusing himself from cases involving Singer following a fishing trip to Alaska with the billionaire. He was also accused of not disclosing the trip as a gift. Justices are required to report gifts costing more than $415, however there are exceptions for “personal hospitality.”

ProPublica alleged that Alito was flown to Alaska on Singer’s private jet, which the outlet says would have cost over $100,000 if Alito had charted the plane himself.

The justice says this is a misrepresentation of the situation. Alito says that he was asked to join the trip as there was an open seat on the plane, and so Singer’s cost would have been the same whether or not Alito was there.

READ MORE: Failed Leak Probe Will ‘Add to Public Distrust’ and ‘Accelerate Partisan Rancor’ Surrounding Supreme Court: Analyst

“Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me,” Alito wrote.

When a Supreme Court Justice takes a domestic trip, the United States Marshal Service provides security, but only if they’re asked, according to USMS policy via advocacy group Fix the Court. The costs for USMS security is generally reimbursed to the agency by the judiciary.

Alito argued there was no need to disclose the gift since his presence on the trip didn’t cost Singer any additional funds, and that the food and accomodations at the King Salmon Lodge, provided by the owner of the venue, did not reach disclosure levels.

“I stayed for three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a comfortable but rustic facility. As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000,” Alito wrote.

Alito also addressed the argument that he should have recused himself on cases involving Singer. He said that prior to the trip, his staff checked through the pending cases, and Singer’s name did not come up. In one case, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, Ltd., though Singer was the founder and CEO of NML Capital, Alito says his name didn’t appear in any of the filed documents, and thus, Alito didn’t know.

Alito also argued that despite the trip, he was not close with Singer at all.

“My recollection is that I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups. On no occasion have we discussed the activities of his businesses, and we have never talked about any case or issue before the Court,” Alito wrote.

In a timeline from ProPublica, NML Capital first asked the Supreme Court to become involved in the case in May 2007, which the court declined; the fishing trip was a little over a year later. In the following two years, Singer introduced Alito at two events.

Meanwhile, in December 2009, seven of eight additional requests for the Supreme Court to step in to the case were turned down, and in 2014, the remaining appeal was ruled on. The Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, Ltd. case was decided in favor of NML Capital in a 7-1 decision, led by Justice Antonin was the only dissent.

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Tillis, Thom (R-NC)	$122,200
Sullivan, Dan (R-AK)	$119,200
Daines, Steven (R-MT)	$118,200
Stefanik, Elise (R-NY)	$107,966