corkery, ann neil

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see JCN

see judic educ pgt leo ginnikellyanne pass thru

overlap to koch

catholic legal mafia much more apparent barr acb...

SEE LEO 3 4 MARBLE, teneo Rule of Law Trustetc

opus dei

html Whelan endit1

bak 4 23

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templeton?

her name just popped CNP? ginni? Neil Liberty Central

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===

an 12 23

Trump's unofficial Supreme Court advisor who was actively involved in all three of his justice nominations has been revealed as the sole trustee of a perplexing group that generated more than $80 million in dark money in 2018.

A unfiled tax return for Rule of Law Trust (RLT) shows the name of Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo, according to CREW. The mysterious tax return also includes a number of questionable details that raise alarms about the origin of the money.

In its first year of operation, there were no employees or volunteers working the firm's main address which appears to be a virtual office located in Virginia. The only people associated with RLT have statuses similar to Leo being Federalist Society officials who now work as "consultants" or have a long history of ties to companies circulating dark money.

The company's mission statement also notes that it strives "to advance conservative principles and causes through communications, research, strategy and assistance to other organizations."

In addition to the mysterious cash circulating and the business' hallow history, it also appears to have funneled nearly $2.7 million in company expenditures through another business known as the BH Group.

*"The filing vastly expands the amount of money known to be flowing into the growing constellation of dark money groups tied to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo."

Leo is also listed as the partial owner of that firm. While there has been speculation of Leo's affiliation with the company, his true status within the company had not been confirmed until recently. The BH Group garnered attention back in 2016 after it donated a cool $1 million to Trump's first presidential election campaign. The firm also has a history of funneling funds for the purpose of campaign contributions.

Wellspring Committee and Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), both 501(c)(4) social welfare groups relatively similar to RLT, also funneled money through the BH Group to sway elections and Supreme Court nominations.

Here is a quick timeline of how dark money has influenced politics over the last four years:

In 2016, JCN shelled out millions of dollars to dissuade senators from considering President Barack Obama's last Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.

In 2017, JCN dumped millions into having Trump's first Supreme Court nominee Justice Neil Gorsuch fill the seat Obama's nominee was denied.

In 2018, the group repeated the same process to back Trump's second nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Now, in 2020, JNC has poured millions into the confirmation of Trump's nomination, Amy Coney Barrett to quickly fill the seat of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the upcoming election.

---

https://www.alternet.org/playing-fast-loose-megadonor-watchdog/

an no lnx

How a Republican megadonor is 'playing fast and loose' to push 'dangerous, extreme agenda': watchdog

Maya Boddie June 18, 2023

Republican billionaire Leonardo Leo's trust fund, Marble Freedom Trust's latest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filing, revealing the former President Donald Trump donor's mission to control right-wing politics, Truthout reports.

Progressive watchdog Accountable.US obtained the recent IRS filing, which according to Truthout, shows the Federalist Society leader "has dumped at least $411 million into fueling right-wing infrastructure in the U.S. since mid-2020."

Furthermore, according to Truthout, the filing reveals "Leo has spent at least $182 million during the Biden administration to fund right-wing groups from May 1, 2020, through April 30, 2022," noting, "This surge has come as Leo has become more publicly outspoken in attacking reproductive rights as well as efforts to protect our environment and crucial measures that advance Americans' equality."

READ MORE: Conservative activist arranged for Clarence Thomas’ wife to get secret payouts

Additionally, it "adds to the growing public knowledge of how Leo's for-profit business works in tandem with nonprofit groups he funds to change the rules in our democracy, and also provides a glimpse of how lucrative this effort is."

The news outlet reports prior to Accountable's findings, "the Campaign for Accountability filed an IRS complaint against Leo based on other filings showing that seven of his affiliated nonprofits had sent $73 million to his for-profit CRC Advisors."

Truthout also notes:

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has noted, before the public learned of the existence of Marble Freedom Trust, Leo rose to prominence as a volunteer advising Trump by creating the list of Supreme Court candidates that Trump chose from, as well as by helping to secure the confirmation of three controversial high court nominees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett (and helped get numerous other lower court judges appointed). As True North documented, Leo's network played a central role in this right-wing court packing, raising over $600 million from 2014 through the 2020 election. This dark money network has received more than $2 billion when accounting for Marble.

Accountable President Kyle Herrig told Truthout he believes "Leonard Leo is playing fast and loose with his $1.6 billion slush fund, enriching himself and doling out paychecks and favors for his cronies," adding, "This kind of corruption is par for the course for Leo. It clearly pays to do his bidding."

READ MORE: Charities often move 'dark' money that shapes public policy: report

Herring said, "This is just the latest development in Leonard Leo's decades-long scheme to push his dangerous, extreme agenda and get rich while doing it. From personal enrichment for himself and his inner circle to his machine of nonprofits advancing the MAGA agenda, we’ve only scratched the surface of Leo’s devastating impact on our democracy."

READ MORE: 'Largest political donation ever': Trump ally received $1.6 billion through Federalist Society contact

Truthout's full report is available at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

New report details Clarence Thomas’ 'shady ties to sprawling network of dark money' ›

'No mention of Ginni': Kellyanne Conway may have confirmed payments made to Clarence Thomas’ wife ›

Trump Supreme Court advisor Leonard Leo tied to more than $80 mllion in dark money ›

Donor at the Center of the Supreme Court Ethics Scandal Backs Scharf

Real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and his wife Kathy, close friends of Leo and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, maxed out contributions at $2,650 each to Scharf, according to his April campaign filing.

In April, ProPublica:{reported:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: that Thomas has been accepting luxury trips and lavish gifts from Crow for over 20 years without disclosing them. The story featured a painting—:{unearthed by True North Research:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:— hanging in Crow’s private resort that depicts him, Thomas, Leo, and others “discussing the law” and illustrates the extremely tight relationship between these men.

Another close associate of Leo’s, the right-wing philanthropist Roger Hertog, gave https://www.mec.mo.gov/CampaignFinanceReports/Generator.aspx?Keys=B2G41dEVPKgI8cDcdGFsgJsm99XwPL2GsUCWbUlfMr0QoUFTilTH3rvZPcTKwORHP6frqbjz1kQ%2bQsn%2fLxrZKI7CJPRcva8W" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: inherit; background: 0px 0px; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; color: rgb(0, 156, 244); text-decoration-line: none;">

$50,000, the second largest donation made to Defend Missouri. He and Leo have been working together in similar activist circles since at least 2005....Rounding out the leading contributions to Defend Missouri are right-wing donors IsaacPerlmutter, chairman of Marvel Entertainment, and his wife Laura,who together gave :{$25,000:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:. Perlmutter has emerged as a major GOP donor since Trump’s first presidential run in 2016.

According to Scharf’s :{January:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: and :{April:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: filings, other major GOP donors who have jumped in early to support his campaign committee include:

Ken Kendrick, owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team: $2,825
Randy Kendrick, general manager of the Diamondbacks: $2,825
Suzie Kovner, wife of retired billionaire hedge fund manager Bruce Kovner: $2,000
Robert Kraft, chairman of Kraft Group and owner of the New England Patriots football team: $2,825
Bernard Marcus, retired founder and CEO of Home Depot: $2,825
Paul Singer, billionaire co-CEO of Elliott Investment Management: $2,650...">Deborah Hochberg, senior advisor at The Paul E. Singer Foundation: $2,82

https://www.alternet.org/activist-arranged-thomas-wife-payouts/

an 5 23

no lnx

clarence Thomas' wife, "Ginni" Thomas, reportedly received tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work, and her name was intentionally left off of the paperwork.

Ginni Thomas received the funds from conservative activist Leonard Leo—who has also helped former President Donald Trump select judicial nominees—according to the Washington Post's investigation. The news comes at a time when Clarence Thomas himself is under firefor reportedly receiving undisclosed gifts.

Leo made the arrangements through former Trump Administration official Kellyanne Conway, according to the Washington Post's report.

"In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas, the documents show," according to the report. "The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case."[shelby]

The investigation further uncovered the circumstances surrounding how the payments were made secret.

"Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to 'give' Ginni Thomas 'another $25K,' the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have 'No mention of Ginni, of course,'" according to the Washington Post.

The Polling Company, Conway's firm, reportedly sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill, and listed the reason only as "Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting."

"In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas's firm, Liberty Consulting,$80,000 between June 2011 and June2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012," according to the Washington Post's investigation. "The documents reviewed by The Post do not indicate the precise nature of any work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or the Polling Company.

In a statement, Leo reportedly told The Post that, "Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Ethics be damned': Legal experts aghast over bombshell report on Clarence Thomas’ luxury lifestyle ›

Why Clarence and Ginni Thomas have done more than anyone to 'damage the High Court’s reputation': journalist ›

Ex-GOP rep. slams 'slimy and unethical' Clarence and Ginni Thomas business enterprise ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

twt

@mrspanstreppon

Nov 27, 2018

Replying to

@mrspanstreppon

@runPattirun

and

@RobertMaguire_

Maybe the Corkerys w/an assist from CPA Thomas Conlon, are hiding the names of the Wellspring Committee board members so no one asks them any q.s about the committee's operations. Or to disguise related party transactions.....

Nov 27, 2018

Kathleen Marie Corker married Thomas S. Mellon in Nov '16 & is,of course, a George Mason U. grad. She is now developmental director at her father's "not-for-profit" , the Sudan Relief Fund. Curious what Mr. Mellon does for a living....

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/04/new-nonprofit-tied-to-stealthy-circle-of-dark-money-groups/

april 2016

Leading the pushback from the outside against President Obama’s attempt to bring the Supreme Court back up to its full complement of nine justices, the Judicial Crisis Network claims to have spent $4 million on a TV, radio and digital campaign attacking nominee Merrick Garland and arguing that the next president should fill the vacancy.

Additional politically active, nondisclosing nonprofits, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, the Susan B. Anthony List and the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, have also made noise to try to shore up Senate Republicans who want to forestall voting on Garland’s confirmation.

One right-leaning group has weighed in more quietly:The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) has demanded Harvard University release records having to do with Garland’s role in the debate in the early 1970s over whether to allow ROTC recruiters on that campus. In late March, FACT’s executive director, Matthew Whitaker, wasquoted saying that “Americans have a right to know about Garland’s views of the military.”

Turns out JCN and FACT have something in common, beyond a penchant for keeping the names of their donors secret: Neil Corkery, who is treasurer of the judicial group and also the treasurer and a member of the board of directors at FACT, a 501(c)(3) organization.

Longtime readers of OpenSecrets News or The Daily Beast may remember that Corkery’s wife, Ann, had a big hand in getting JCN off the ground, back in early2005 when the “C” in its initials stood for “confirmation,” not “crisis.” At the time, Justice Antonin Scalia himself — whose death two months ago precipitated the current battle over the vacancy — attended a small dinner that included JCN organizers and at least one funder.

JCN originally promoted President George W. Bush’s nominations to the high court; conversely, it has attacked Obama’s. But many observers were surprised last fall when the group mounted an ad campaign criticizing Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts, both appointed by GOP presidents, in an apparent effort to pressure them to take a harder conservative line. In addition, JCN has been involved in several state supreme court elections as well as attorneys general races.

FACT is a much newer creation, organized in 2014 as a conservative counterweight to watchdog groups viewed as more left-of-center, such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The newer outfit took its first public action about a year ago when it filed acomplaint with the Federal Election Commission against Democratic voter data firm Catalist.

Since then, FACT has, on rare occasions (possibly just once), gone after a Republican, but most frequently accuses Democrats — particularly frontrunner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — of ethical or legal violations.

Its funding — $600,000 in 2014, according to the only tax return it has filed to date — comes entirely from a conservative donor-advised fund called DonorsTrust,which means it could come from anywhere. DonorsTrust is a pass-through vessel that manages the charitable contributions of wealthy individuals and foundations to organizations that are “dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,” according to its website while allowing the donors to remain anonymous. Charles Koch is among the many conservatives who have filtered money through DonorsTrust.

In other words, an organization “dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency” gets 100 percent of its funds from a group that exists mainly as a vehicle for donors to elude transparency.

Meanwhile, Corkery adds FACT to a long list of nondisclosing nonprofits at which he holds or has held, a key position,often treasurer, and which often have overlapping slates of directors or officers.For instance, at two other groups where Corkery is treasurer, the Judicial Education Project and Catholic Voices, a close family ally by the name of Dan Casey is president and director, respectively. Casey is also the secretary of JCN. At the Sudan Relief Fund, Corkery is president, Casey is treasurer, and Ann Corkery, Neil’s wife, is a director.

Ann Corkery is also president of theWellspring Committee, from which JCN receives substantial funding, including more than $6.6 million in 2014; Kathleen Corkery, the couple’s daughter, is on Wellspring’s board of directors, and its secretary-treasurer is Casey’s son. Neil Corkery draws salaries from several of the groups where he’s an office; Ann is paid by Wellspring. (Venn diagram in the works.)

Many of the groups list the same Georgetown address as their office, with different suite numbers. In reality, the address is that of a UPS store, and the suite numbers are post boxes. FACT’s listed address, in downtown Washington, D.C., has no markings; it appears to be an address that is cited by more than one organization without actually being physically used by any of them, with a receptionist who answers the phone with the names of various groups depending on which line is called.

Neither Corkery nor Whitaker, FACT’s executive director, returned calls seeking comment.

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/10/13/senator-whitehouse-calls-out-dark-money-networks-behind-amy-coney-barretts-scotus-nomination

no lnx grafs

Senator Whitehouse Calls Out Dark-Money Networks Behind Amy Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS Nomination

By ExposedByCMD Editors | October 13th, 2020

Bradley Files, Democracy, Featured Investigations, Koch, News, RAGA, Trump7 Comments

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of remarks made by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in the October 13, 2020, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thank you, Chairman, Judge Barrett. You can take a bit of a breather on your return to the committee, because what I want to do is go through with the people who are watching this now the conversation that you and I had when we spoke on the telephone. You were kind enough to hear out a presentation that I made, and I intend to ask some questions in that area, but it doesn’t make sense to ask questions if I haven’t laid the predicate, particularly for viewers who are watching this.

So, I guess the reason that I want to do this is because people who are watching this need to understand that this small hearing room and the little TV box that you are looking at, the little screen that you are looking at, are a little bit like the frame of a puppet theater, and if you only look at what’s going on in the puppet theater you’re not going to understand the whole story. You are not going to understand the real dynamic what is going on here, and you are certainly not going to understand forces outside of this room who are pulling strings and pushing sticks and causing the puppet theater to react.

So first, let me say, why do I think outside forces are here pulling strings?Well, part of it is behavior. We have colleagues here who supported you, this nominee, before there was a nominee. That’s a little unusual.

We have the political ram job that we have already complained of driving this process through at breakneck speed in the middle of a pandemic while the Senate is closed for safety reasons and while we are doing nothing about the COVID epidemic around us. We have some very awkward 180s from colleagues. Mr. Chairman, you figure in this. Our leader said back when it was Garland versus Gorsuch, that of course, of course, the American people should have a say in the Court’s direction. Of course, of course, said Mitch McConnell. That’s long gone.

Senator Grassley said the American people shouldn’t be denied a voice. That’s long gone. Senator Cruz said you don’t do this in an election year. That’s long gone. And our chairman made his famous hold-the-tape promise if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term we’ll wait until the next election. That’s gone too.

So there is a lot of hard-to-explain hypocrisy and rush taking place right now, and my experience around politics is that when you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows. Now people say well, what does all this matter? This is a political parlor game; it’s no big deal. Well, there are some pretty high stakes here that we have been talking about here on our side, and I will tell you three of them right here.

Roe v. Wade, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases. Here’s the GOP platform, the Republican platform, the platform of my colleagues on the other side of this aisle say that a Republican president will appoint judges who will reverse Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases. So if you have a family member with an interest in some autonomy over their body under Roe v. Wade, the ability to have a marriage, have friends marry, have a niece or a daughter or a son marry someone of their same-sex they have – you’ve got a stake, and if you are one of the millions and millions of Americans who depend on the affordable care act you’ve got a stake.

It’s not just the platform. Over and over again, let’s start by talking about the Affordable Care Act. Here is the president talking about this litigation that we are gearing up this nominee for for November 10. In this litigation, he said we want to terminate healthcare under Obamacare.

That is the president’s statement, so when we react to that, don’t act as if we are making this stuff up. This is what President Trump said. This is what your party platform says: reverse the Obamacare cases. Senator after senator, including many in this committee, filed briefs saying that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out by courts. Why is it surprising for us to be concerned that you want this nominee to do what you want nominees to do?

One quick stop on NFIB v. Sebelius, because a lot of this has to do with money. This is an interesting comparison. National Federation of Independent Businesses, until it filed the NFIB v. Sebelius case, had its biggest donation ever of $21,000. In the year that it went to work on the Affordable Care Act, ten wealthy donors gave $10 million. Somebody deserves a thank you.

So let’s go on to Roe v. Wade. Same thing. Same thing. The president has said that reversing Roe v. Wade will happen automatically because he is putting pro-life justices on the Court. Why would we not take him at his word? The Republican Party platform says it will reverse Roe. Why would we not comment on that and take you at your word?

Senators here, including Senator Hawley,have said I will vote only for nominees who acknowledge that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided, and their pledge to vote for this nominee. Do the math. That’s a really simple equation to run.

The Republican brief in June Medical said Roe should be overruled, so don’t act surprised when we ask questions about whether that’s what you are up to here. And finally, out in the ad world that you have spared yourself wisely Judge Barrett, the Susan B Anthony Foundation is running advertisements right now saying that you are set, you are set to give our pro-life country a Court that it deserves.

Here is the ad with the voiceover. She said – she said. And then Roe, Obamacare cases and Obergefell, gay marriages. National Organization for Marriage, the big group that opposes same-sex marriage, says in this proceeding, all our issues are at stake. The Republican platform says it wants to reverse Obergefell. And the Republican brief filed in the case said same-sex relationships don’t fall within any constitutional protection, so when we say the stakes are high on this, it’s because you have said the stakes are high on this. You have said that is what you want to do. So how are people going about doing it? What is the scheme here?

Let me start with this one. In all cases, there’s big anonymous money behind various lanes of activity. One lane of activity is through the conduit of the Federalist Society. It is managed by a guy – was managed by – a guy named Leonard Leo, and it has taken over the selection of judicial nominees. How do we know that to be the case? Because Trump has said so over and over again. His White House counsel said so. So we have an anonymously funded group controlling judicial selection run by this guy Leonard Leo.

Then in another lane, we have again anonymous funders running through something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which is run by Carrie Severino, and it is doing PR and campaign ads for Republican judicial nominees. It got $17 million – a single $17 million donation in the Garland-Gorsuch contest. It got another single $17 million donation to support Kavanaugh. Somebody, perhaps the same person, spent $35 million to influence the United States Supreme Court. Tell me that’s good.

And then over here you have a whole array of legal groups, also funded by dark money, which have a different role. They bring cases to the Court. They don’t wind their way to the Court, your Honor, they get shoved to the Court to by these legal groups, many of which ask to lose below so they can get quickly to the Court to get their business done there. And then they turn up in a chorus, an orchestrated chorus of amici.

Now I’ve had a chance to have a look at this. And I was in a case, actually, as an amicus myself, the Consumer Financial Protection Board case. And in that case there were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 amicus briefs filed, and every single one of them was a group funded by something called DonorsTrust.

DonorsTrust is a gigantic identity-scrubbing device for the right wing so that it says DonorsTrust is the donor without whoever the real donor is. It doesn’t have a business. It doesn’t have a business plan. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just an identity scrubber.

And this group here, the Bradley Foundation, funded eight out of the 11 briefs. That seems weird to me when you have amicus briefs coming in little flotillas that are funded by the same groups but nominally separate in the court.

So I actually attached this to my brief as an appendix. Center for Media and Democracy saw it, and they did better work. They went on to say which foundations funded the brief writers in that CFPB case. Here is the Bradley Foundation for $5.6 million to those groups. Here’s DonorsTrust, $23 million to those brief writing groups. The grand total across all the donor groups was $68 million to the groups that were filing amicus briefs, pretending that they were different groups.

Right-Wing Foundations Fund Anti-Consumer Protection Groups, 2014-present

Sixteen right-wing foundations gave nearly $69 million to groups urging the Supreme Court to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since 2014.

Donor Amount

DonorsTrust $23,460,705

Charles Koch Foundation $12,986,462

Sarah Scaife Foundation $7,550,000

L&H Bradley Foundation $5,579,500

Searle Freedom Trust $4,550,000

Dunn Foundation $4,450,000

Donors Capital Fund $2,522,680

John William Pope Foundation $1,895,175

Bradley Impact Fund $1,363,000

Mercer Family Foundation $1,200,000

Adolph Coors Foundation $1,155,000

F.M. Kirby Foundation $672,500

Charles Koch Institute $517,134

Ed Uihlein Family Foundation $408,000

Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation $395,000

William H. Donner Foundation $167,000

TOTAL $68,872,156

And it’s not just in the Consumer Financial Protection Board case. You might say well that was just a one-off. Here’s Janus, the anti-labor case that had a long trail through the Court, through Friedrichs, and through Knox, and through other decisions.

And SourceWatch and ProPublica did some work about this. Here’s DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. And here’s the Bradley Foundation. And they totaled giving $45 million to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15groups that filed amicus briefs, pretending to be different groups, and both of the lawyer groups in the case, funded by DonorsTrust, funded by Bradley Foundation in Janus.

This is happening over and over and over again, and it goes beyond just the briefs. It goes beyond just the amicus presentations.The Federalist Society– remember this group that is acting as the conduit and that Donald Trump has said is doing his judicial selection? They’re getting money from the same foundations, from DonorsTrust, $16.7 million and the Bradley Foundation, $1.37 million. From the same group of foundations total, $33 million.

Donors to the Federalist Society, 2014-present

The same 16 foundations that fund the amicus brief filers all give to the Federalist Society

donor Amount

DonorsTrust $16,733,100

Mercer Family Foundation $4,850,000

Donors Capital Fund $4,231,120

Charles Koch Foundation $2,419,264

Searle Freedom Trust $1,551,000

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $1,375,000

Ed Uihlein Family Foundation $1,000,000

John William Pope Foundation $250,000

Adolph Coors Foundation $230,000

Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation $210,000

Dunn Foundation $150,000

F.M. Kirby Foundation $120,000

William H. Donner Foundation $45,000

Bradley Impact Fund $15,250

Charles Koch Institute $6,400

TOTAL $33,286,134

So you can start to look at these, and you can start to tie them together. The legal groups, all the same funders over and over again, bringing the cases and providing us orchestrated, orchestrated chorus of amici. Then the same group also funds the Federalist Society over here. The Washington Post wrote a big expose about this, and that made Leonard Leo a little hot, a little bit like a burned agent. So he had to jump out. And he went off to go do anonymously-funded voter suppression work. Guess who jumped in to take over the selection process in this case for Judge Barrett? Carrie Severino made the hop. So once again, ties right in together.

So, Center for Media and Democracy did a little bit more research. Here’s aBradley Foundation memo that they’ve published. The Bradley Foundation is reviewing a grant application asking for money for this orchestrated amicus process, and what do they say in the staff recommendation? It is important to orchestrate – their word, not mine – important to orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts before the Court.

Page 3 of 2015 Bradley Summary Judicial Education Project Proposal 150K

Contributed to DocumentCloud by Staff 18 of Documented • View document or read text

They also note that Bradley has done previous philanthropic investments in the actual underlying legal actions. So Bradley is funding – what do they call – philanthropically investing in, the underlying legal action and then giving money to groups to show up in the orchestrated chorus of amici. That can’t be good.

And it goes on, because they also found this email. This email comes from an individual at the Bradley Foundation, and it asks our friend, Leonard Leo, who used to run the selection process, is there a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to which Bradley could direct any support of the two Supreme Court amicus projects other than DonorsTrust? I don’t know why they wanted to avoid the reliable identity-scrubber DonorsTrust, but for some reason they did.

Page 6 of 2014 Bradley Leonard Leo Neil Corkery Carrie Severino Judicial+Education+Project

Contributed to DocumentCloud by Staff 18 of Documented • View document or read text]

So Leonard Leo writes back on Federalist Society address – so don’t tell me that it isn’t Federal Society business – on Federalist Society, on his address, he writes back, yes, send it to the Judicial Education Project, which could take and allocate the money. And guess who works for the Judicial Education Project? Carrie Severino,who also helped select this nominee, running the Trump Federalist Society selection process.

So the connections abound. In the Washington Post article, they point out that the Judicial Crisis Network’s office is on the same hallway in the same building as the Federalist Society, and when they sent their reporter to talk to somebody at the Judicial Crisis Network, somebody from the Federalist Society came down to let them up.

This more and more looks like it’s not three schemes, but it’s one scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, and then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do.

On the Judicial Crisis Network, you’ve got the Leonard Leo connection, obviously. She hopped in to take over for him with the Federalist Society. You’ve got the campaigns that I’ve talked about, where they take $17 million contributions. That’s a big check to write, $17 million, to campaign for Supreme Court nominees. No idea who that is or what they got for it. You’ve got briefs that she wrote. The Republican senators filed briefs in that NFIB case signed by Ms. Severino.

The woman who helped choose this nominee has written briefs for Republican senators attacking the ACA. Don’t say the ACA is not an issue here. And by the way, the Judicial Crisis Network funds the Republican attorneys general. It funds RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association, and it funds individual Republican attorneys general. And guess who the plaintiffs are in the Affordable Care Act case? Republican attorneys general.

Trump joined them because he didn’t want to defend, so he’s in with the Republican attorneys general. But here’s the Judicial Crisis Network campaigning for Supreme Court nominees, writing briefs for senators against the Affordable Care Act, supporting the Republicans who are bringing this case, and leading the selection process for this nominee.

Here is the page off the brief. Here is where they are. Mitch McConnell, and on through the list, Senator Collins, Senator Cornyn, Senator Hoeven, Senator — who’s still here? Marco Rubio. It’s a huge assortment of Republican senators who Carrie Severino wrote a brief for against the Affordable Care Act. So this is a, to me, pretty big deal. I’ve never seen this around any court that I’ve ever been involved with, where there’s this much dark money and this much influence being used.

Here’s how the Washington Post summed it up. This is “a conservative activist behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts,” and it’s a $250 million dark money operation. $250 million is a lot of money to spend if you’re not getting anything for it. So that raises the question, what are they getting for it?

Well, I showed the slide earlier on the Affordable Care Act. And on Obergefell and on Roe v. Wade, that’s where they lost. But with another judge, that could change. That’s where the contest is. That’s where The Republican Party platform tells us to look at how they want judges to rule, to reverse Roe, to reverse the Obamacare cases, and to reverse Obergefell and take away gay marriage. That is their stated objective and plan. Why not take them at their word?

But there is another piece of it, and that is not what’s ahead of us, but what’s behind us. What’s behind us is now 80 cases, Mr. Chairman, 80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts that have these characteristics. One, they were decided five to four by a bare majority. Two, the five-to-four majority was partisan in the sense that not one Democratic appointee joined the five. I refer to that group as the “Roberts Five.”

It changes a little bit as–with Justice Scalia’s death, for instance – but there’s been a steady “Roberts Five” that has delivered now 80 of these decisions.And the last characteristic of them is that there is an identifiable Republican donor interest in those cases, and in every single case, that donor interest won. It was an 80 to zero, 5 to 4 partisan rout, ransacking.

And it’s important to look at where those cases went, because they’re not about big, public issues like getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, undoing Roe v. Wade, and undoing same sex marriage.They’re about power. And if you look at those 80 decisions, they fall into four categories over and over and over again. One, unlimited and dark money and politics.Citizens United is the famous one, but it’s continued since with McCutcheon and we’ve got one coming up now. Always the five for unlimited money in politics. Never protecting against money dark money in politics, despite the fact that they said it was going to be transparent.

And who wins when you allow unlimited dark money in politics? A very small group. The ones who have unlimited money to spend and a motive to spend it in politics. They win. Everybody else loses. And if you’re looking at who might be behind this, let’s talk about people with unlimited money to spend and a motive to do it. We’ll see how that goes.

Next, knock the civil jury down. Whittle it down to a nub. The civil jury was in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in our darn Declaration of Independence, but it’s annoying to big corporate powers because you can swagger your way as a big corporate power through Congress. You can go and tell the president you put money into to elect what to do. He will put your stooges at the EPA. It’s all great until you get to the civil jury, because they have an obligation, as you know, Judge Barrett, they have an obligation under the law to be fair to both parties irrespective of their size.

You can’t bribe them. You’re not allowed to. It’s a crime to tamper with the jury. It’s standard practice to tamper with Congress. And they make decisions based on the law. If you’re used to being the boss and swaggering your way around the political side, you don’t want to be answerable before a jury. And so one after another, these 80 5-to-4 decisions have knocked down, whittled away at, the civil jury, a great American institution.

Third – first was unlimited dark money, second was demean and diminish the civil jury – third is weaken regulatory agencies. A lot of this money, I’m convinced, is polluter money. The Koch Industries is a polluter, the fossil fuel industry is a polluter. Who else would be putting buckets of money into this and wanting to hide who they are behind DonorsTrust or other schemes?

And what are – if you’re a big polluter – what do you want? You want weak regulatory agencies. You want ones that you can box up and run over to Congress and get your friends to fix things for you in Congress. Over and over and over again, these decisions are targeted at regulatory agencies to weaken their independence and weaken their strength. And if you’re a big polluter, a weak regulatory agency is your idea of a good day.

And the last thing is in politics. In voting. Why on earth the Court made the decision, a factual decision – not something appellate courts are ordinarily supposed to make, as I understand it Judge Barrett – the factual decision that nobody needed to worry about minority voters in preclearance states being discriminated against, or that legislators would try to knock back their ability to vote. These five made that finding in Shelby County against bipartisan legislation from both houses of Congress, hugely passed, on no factual record.

They just decided that that was a problem that was over, on no record with no basis, because it got them to the result that we then saw. What followed? State after state after state passed voter suppression laws. One so badly targeting African Americans that two courts said it was surgically, surgically tailored to get after minority voters.

And gerrymandering, the other great control. Bulk gerrymandering where you go into a state, like the Red Map project did in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and you pack Democrats so tightly into a few districts that all the others become Republican majority districts. And in those states, you send a delegation to Congress that has a huge majority of Republican members, like 13 to 5, as I recall, in a state where the five, the party of the five actually won the popular vote.

You’ve sent a delegation to Congress that is out of step with the popular vote of that state and court after court figured out how to solve that, and the Supreme Court said nope. 5 to 4 again. Nope. We’re not going to take an interest in that question. In all these areas where it’s about political power for big special interests, and people who want to fund campaigns, and people who want to get their way through politics without actually showing up, doing it behind DonorsTrust and other groups, doing it through these schemes over and over and over again, you see the same thing.

80 decisions, Judge Barrett. 80 decisions. An 80-to-0 sweep. I don’t think you’ve tried cases, but some cases, the issue is bias and discrimination. And if you’re making a bias case as a trial lawyer – Lindsey Graham is a hell of a good trial lawyer. If he wanted to make a bias case – Dick Durbin is a hell of a good trial lawyer. If they wanted to make a bias case and they could show an 80-to-0 pattern, A, that’s admissible, and B, I’d love to make that argument to the jury. I’d be really hard pressed to be the lawyer saying no, 80-to-0 is just a bunch of flukes.

All five-four. all partisan, all this way. So something is not right around the Court. And dark money has a lot to do with it. Special interests have a lot to do with it. DonorsTrust and whoever is hiding behind DonorsTrust has a lot to do with it, and the Bradley Foundation orchestrating its amici over at the Court has a lot to do with it.

So I thank you, Judge Barrett, for listening to me now a second time and I think this gives you a chance for you and I to tee up an interesting conversation tomorrow. And I thank my colleagues for hearing me out.

2x?

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/11/trump-inauguration-money-links-secretive-dark-money/

Notorious “dark money” conduit Wellspring Committeegave $14.8 million to the primary spender on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and paid $919,900 to the mysterious LLC that made a $1 million donation to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, according to a new tax return obtained Nov. 27 by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Wellspring has acted as a conduit for large contributions from secretive donors since it was set up, effectively laundering multi-million dollar donations with no substantive disclosure or accountability.

Despite operating behind the scenes with a name unknown to most of the American public, Wellspring is at the crux of Ann and Neil Corkery’s network of politically active dark money groups, funneling millions from anonymous financiers to political causes they don’t want their names attached to — and doing ostensibly little else.

Wellspring has continued to be the chief financier of the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), with a $14,814,998 contribution last year.

JCN is another nondisclosing politically active nonprofit linked to the Corkerys’ network of conservative dark money groups. It has become the predominant dark money spender in Supreme Court confirmation fights as a vehicle for deep-pocketed donors to funnel millions of dollars behind or against judicial nominees.

Since 2010, Wellspring has funneled more than $54.2 million to JCN, according to tax returns obtained by CRP.

The bulk of Wellspring’s funds that came from three multi-million dollar secret donors in 2017, a shift from prior years in which the biggest amount the group received from a single mystery donor increased with each passing year. The largest donor accounted for $8.9 million, another gave $5.5 million and a third secret donor provided $2 million — but all of their identities remain hidden from the public.

The biggest anonymous contribution to Wellspring in 2016 was nearly $28.5 million, a jump from $8.5 million in 2015 and $6.96 million in 2014. That one secret donor accounted for around 90 percent of Wellspring’s funding in 2016, a year it gave $23 million to JCN.

As a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, JCN is not required to report its donors to the IRS — and chooses not to disclose its funders’ identities to the public — so its only discoverable donors are other entities like Wellspring that act as conduits for the anonymous money directed at JCN.

JCN was back in the limelight this year as the biggest spender in support of Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Following its tried and true playbook, JCN launched its first ad about Kavanaugh before Trump even finished announcing his nomination and soon after announced plans to spend $10 million on his confirmation. JCN pledged $10 million to support the successful confirmation of Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, the prior year and reported spending $7 million to block the confirmation of Merrick Garland before President Barack Obama left office.

JCN has also spent substantial sums on lobbyists, including Jon Kyl, who lobbied to help JCN marshall in Gorsuch’s nomination before becoming the official White House “sherpa” guiding Kavanaugh through that same process. He was later appointed to fill the late Sen. John McCain’s seat — ultimately enabling him to vote for the confirmation he was once tasked with helping Kavanaugh secure.

JCN spent $483,246 in total on Facebook ads and just $1,900 on Google platforms around the fight to confirm Kavanaugh with an estimated reach of potentially millions of Facebook users.

TV advertising made up the bulk of JCN’s reported spending on Kavanaugh with around $3.9 million going TV ads, according to Kantar Media/CMAG estimates — leaving millions of dollars JCN had pledged to spend unaccounted for.

The puzzle of Trump’s mysterious inaugural gift

The only contractor paid by Wellspring last year wasBH Group, the mysterious LLC created four months to the day before it made a $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural committee on Dec. 22, 2016.

The newly discovered payment for “public relations” follows a $750,000 payment to the newly minted BH Group the prior year as well as $947,000 from JCN to the BH Group around when the LLC made its inaugural donation.

While it initially appeared that BH Group was merely a shell company created solely for the purpose of laundering money into the Trump inaugural committee, more information about the LLC has only added to its mystery.

New tax returnsreviewed by CRP reveal that Judicial Education Project, JCN’s sister 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, also paid an additional $1.3 million to BH Group LLC last year. Judicial Education Fund keeps its donors anonymous but CRP tracked the bulk of the group’s recent funding to DonorsTrust, which accounted for more than 99 percent of its money last year. Like JCN, Judicial Education Fund has also been funded by Wellspring in prior years.

One name that CRP has tiedto the mysterious LLC is Leonard Leo,the executive vice president at the Federalist Society, an influential conservative and libertarian legal organization, who listed “BH Group” as his employer in a campaign finance filing reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Leo’s more widely known affiliation with the Federalist Society has gained attention after reports that it played a substantial role guiding the hand of Trump’s White House in its judicial nomination process, including in the selection of Supreme Court justices.

Ann Corkery, the Wellspring Committee’s former president and wife of current president Neil Corkery, has reportedly worked closely with him in this process and Leo has been “directly involved” in raising much of the anonymous money the Wellspring Committee brings in every year.

A public records request revealed that Leo and another Federalist Society vice president have also been involved in a nonprofit called the BH Fund, which was set up to enforce a donor agreement between an anonymous $20 million donor and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, whose president came under fire for allowing donors to dictate conditions in return for financial gifts.

Incorporation records list BH Group’s address as a virtual office in Arlington, Va. and the only identified point of contact is Donna Smith, whose name matches that of a longtime paralegal at Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, the law firm that shared a Warrenton, Va. office with the address the Trump inaugural committee on its tax return.:{

Continuing the money churn

Staying the course from prior years, Wellspring also gave $400,000 to the Catholic Association, $48,000 to the Annual Fund and $350,000 to the Foundation for Government Accountability’s 501(c)(4) arm, FGA Action.

Another appendage of the Corkerys’ dark money web is theFoundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonprofit run by acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker before he became Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, as CRP first reported in 2016. Like Wellspring, JCN and the Judicial Education Project, Neil Corkery is also the treasurer of FACT. Nearly 100 percent of FACT’s funding came from a single anonymous donor each year since the group was created in 2014, which CRP discovered came entirely from a donor-advised fund called DonorsTrust.

In addition to longstanding dark money stalwarts that have realigned their priorities for the Trump era, new groups spending heavily in support of Trump’s agenda also weighed in on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation battle but are not entirely isolated from the Washington swamp Trump pledged to drain.

Wellspring was one of the early donors of 45Committee, another 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit that primarily exists to support Trump’s agenda which spent on ads supporting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation this year.:{

Another spender was America First Policies, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization staffed by former Trump campaign and White House personnel that has become the main dark money group supporting Trump’s agenda.

Although America First Policies itself does not reveal donors’ identities, CRP traced over a quarter of its funding to major corporate players, including Reynolds American and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group representing the drug company industry’s lobbying interests.

New tax documents filed by another pro-Trump nonprofit, Great America Alliance, show it raised and spent around $3.4 million during that period. Unlike America First Policies, which reported millions more in previously undisclosed political spending it its new tax return, Great America Alliance claimed that it “educated voters through direct and indirect political advocacy messaging nationwide within the scope of applicable laws and regulations.”

This highlights one of the many legal grey areas emerging in the wake of Trump’s unprecedented move to register as a candidate for the 2020 presidential election on his first day in office — leaving the vast majority of financiers behind the growing network of dark money groups spending on his agenda a mystery.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/right-wing-groups-gearing-up-onslaught-merrick-garland-supreme-court/

no lnx

Wednesday, President Barack Obama picked Merrick Garland, a federal court of appeals judge with a stellar and moderate reputation, to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His strategy was obvious: present obstructionist Republicans with a nominee with little or no baggage. But Senate Republicans immediately signaled that the Garland nomination would not change their calculations—that the fight to block any nominee was on. And prior to Obama’s announcement, conservative groups were already gearing up for this crusade, perhaps the last big battle of the right’s war on Obama.

The political players leading this effort are the usual suspects. The Republican National Committee had already announced plans to oppose Obama’s nominee—whoever it might be—and to run ads in competitive Senate races in Colorado, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and elsewhere, in addition to targeting Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The tea party group FreedomWorks is rallying grassroots voters to the cause. On the other side of political spectrum, liberal advocacy groups such as the Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way are girding for a massive fight.

This face-off could well be nastier and more expensive than past confrontations over the Supreme Court. It’s the first political fight of this kind since the controversial Citizens United decision allowed money to flow freely into the political system. The influx of money has also helped create a well-funded extra-party political infrastructure that is now turning its sights on the SCOTUS fight.

Thanks to Citizens United, campaign finance rules that once limited the use of corporate and union money for certain advertisements no longer exist. Meanwhile, dark-money groups—which can get involved in campaigns but don’t have to disclose their donors—are supposed to spend slightly more than half of their money on nonelection activities to keep their nonprofit status. As a result, they “may funnel a lot of the rest of their money into Supreme Court-related ads,” says Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California-Irvine law school

Here’s a look at the groups launching the assault against Garland:

Judicial Crisis Network: Perhaps the biggest player in the Supreme Court fight is the Judicial Crisis Network, launched in 2005 and long a dark-money conduit for a number of rich conservative donors. Founded by Ann Corkery, a low-profile conservative fundraiser and lawyer, the group reportedly launched with startup money from California foreclosure king Robin Arkley II, a wealthy conservative who helped bankroll the effort to unseat former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle (D). Corkery’s husband Neil is JCN’s treasurer.

Other early JCN supporters included Jay Sekulow, a longtime culture warrior and chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (which was created by televangelist Pat Robertson), and Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a leading conservative legal group. Originally called the Judicial Confirmation Network, the group was formed to help push through George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. After Obama was elected in 2008, the group shifted its focus to blocking his federal court nominees.

In 2008, JCN ran ads attacking then-candidate Obama for associating with former Weatherman Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The group went all in to oppose the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, setting up state-level opposition groups to pressure vulnerable Democratic senators. It also ran attack ads against Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan the following year.

Since Citizens United, JCN has become more heavily involved in elections,particularly judicial and attorney general elections at the state level. It has spent millions of dollars to swing state supreme courts to the right and to elect business-friendly attorney generals. The group is a beneficiary of significant amounts of dark money.The bulk of its budget in 2014 came from an outfit called Wellspring Committee, a secretive nonprofit group that isn’t required to disclose its donors.

According to Wellspring’s most recent tax filing, it gave JCN nearly $7 million that year. Wellspring was a creation of the Koch brothers, the billionaire industrialists who have pumped millions of dollars into conservative political campaigns over the past several years. According to Ken Vogel’s book Big Money, Wellspring was one of the Kochs’ first forays into using a nonprofit entity to funnel money secretly to other political organizations to obscure the source of the funding. The Koch brothers reportedly broke with Wellspring in 2008 and moved on to other projects, but Wellspring still apparently maintains ties with members of their donor network.

Within a week of Scalia’s passing, JCN announced the launch of a $1 million ad campaign calling on Senate Republicans to refuse Obama a hearing on any Supreme Court nominee.The ads praised senators in competitive 2016 races who had already pledged to block any Obama nominee. (Last week, the group ran ads attacking Judge Jane Kelly, a federal appeals court judge who was briefly on Obama’s Supreme Court short list, for once having represented a “child molester.”) After Obama announced Garland’s nomination, JCN disclosed that it would spend another $2 million on ads opposing his confirmation.

Carrie Severino, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who serves as JCN’s chief counsel and policy director, said last month, “We cannot allow President Obama turn the Supreme Court nomination process into another partisan game, where Obama’s goal is to dominate the court with extremist liberal ideologues.”

America Rising:A super-PAC, America Rising was founded in 2013 by Mitt Romney’s former campaign manager, Matt Rhoades. The PAC’s biggest donor this cycle is Republican hedge fund mogul Paul Singer. Close behind is Mike Fernandez, a big Jeb Bush donor. The outfit has made a name for itself by sending out trackers to follow Democratic congressional candidates during the 2014 election—looking for material for attack ads. The trackers scored a big hit when they captured Senate candidate Bruce Braley calling Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school,” a comment that hurt Braley’s campaign.

America Rising’s involvement in the Supreme Court fight is coming largely through a subsidiary, America Rising Squared, run by a former communications director for Sen. John McCain, that was created to do opposition research on Democratic candidates. Before the Garland pick was announced, JCN and the Republican Party each hired American Rising to dig up dirt on potential Supreme Court nominees. After Garland’s nomination, America Rising Squared executive director Brian Rogers released a statement warning of the judge’s liberal leanings. “Merrick Garland has been called the ideal judge to move the Supreme Court to the left and cement President Obama’s liberal legacy for decades into the future.” And he told the Washington Post, “We’ve done a good deal of research on Judge Garland so far and now we’re in the midst of a big surge to get after the record to make sure the American people have all the information they need to weigh this debate.”

One Nation:Republican strategist Karl Rove’s dark-money monster, Crossroads GPS, will be a key player in Senate elections, though under a less familiar name. That outside spending group, created in the wake of Citizens United, has lately been operating using an entity called One Nation. The new group is headed by Crossroads’ President Steven Law, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has made obstructing Obama’s Supreme Court nominee a priority. One Nation has already spent several million dollars trying to help endangered GOP senators such as Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

The group has said it will likely focus its Senate campaign efforts on the Supreme Court fight, honing in on the impact of a new potential liberal justice and the effect on core conservative issues. Ian Prior, a spokesman for the group, told Politico last month, “The consequences of our next Supreme Court justice and what that will do to shape the court for 20 years is certainly an issue that One Nation will be front and center in addressing over the next several months.”

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/05/an-influential-dark-money-group-turns-off-the-lights-for-the-last-time/

One of the most influential “dark money” groups you’ve probably never heard of has officially shut its doors.

The Wellspring Committee’s existence has come to an apparent end, according to state incorporation records showing the dark money group’s termination. Wellspring was just shy of eleven years old.

The group died as it lived, surreptitiously. Officially shutting down in December 2018, its fate was not discovered until May 19, 2019.

The name Wellspring Committee may already be forgotten — or entirely unknown — to most, but its life’s efforts were certainly not in vain.

Many of the facets of modern-day society that we now take for granted, such as the multi-million dollar price tag on each Supreme Court confirmation fight, can be traced back to Wellspring’s efforts. What Wellspring lacked in name recognition, it made up in largesse. Operating behind the scenes, Wellspring leaves behind countless dark money groups it helped sire and judges now on the bench thanks in part to its anonymous financiers’ generosity.

Wellspring is survived by Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), another 501(c)(4) nonprofit that has established itself the preeminent vehicle for deep-pocketed donors to funnel millions of dollars behind or against judicial nominees in Supreme Court confirmation fights, largely bankrolled by Wellspring.

Since Wellspring’s birth from a short-lived union of the Koch network and GOP political operatives leading up to the 2008 election, it has accounted for more than 90 percent of JCN’s total funding.

Wellspring’s delivery into the world came at the hands of Republican operative Ann Corkery while her husband Neil took the reigns of the more publicly visible JCN and an allied 501(c)(3) “charitable” nonprofit, Judicial Education Project. Like JCN, it’s sister “charity” has received considerable funding from Wellspring and other closely-tied dark money groups like DonorsTrust, a pass-through vessel managing the money flow from wealthy donors to conservative and libertarian groups — including other groups in Corkery’s network — while allowing the donors to remain anonymous that has earned it the reputation of being a Koch-linked “dark money ATM.”

Wearing multiple hats for various groups in the network, Neil Corkery worked impossibly hard. At one point tax returns showed him working a combined 100 hours a week between his various nonprofits.

JCN’s existence has not always hinged entirely on Wellspring. For its first three years in operation under the Judicial Confirmation Network moniker before rebranding following Obama’s 2008 election, JCN received initial support from California “foreclosure king” Robin Arkley II and raked in seed money from the American Center for Law and Justice under Jay Sekulow, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and a member of the Federalist Society, the influential conservative and libertarian lawyers network that does disclose its donors in annual reports.

Since then, the organizations had been inseparable. Sitting at the crux a powerful network of dark money groups, Wellspring and JCN have existed in this symbiotic relationship for over a decade, with JCN operating as the operation’s public-facing mouthpiece and Wellspring as its money bag.

After all that, years of investigations and speculation about the identity of donors bankrolling the operation have yet to produce a definitive answer about the ultimate source of the operations funds.

Tax returns have revealed the groups behind a few hundred thousand in grants from other dark money groups like American Democracy Alliance and Rosebush. But that accounts for a drop in the bucket — less than a percent — of Wellspring’s overall earnings and, even then, the ultimate financier behind those groups remains a secret.

A central player in orchestrating Wellspring’s dark money network has been Leonard Leo, Trump’s judicial adviser and a longtime executive at the Federalist Society.

While the identity of their donors remains a secret, dark money groups like JCN and Wellspring are required to disclose the amount received from different donors. In their most recent tax returns, JCN received most of its funds from two multi-million dollar donors, with roughly 90 percent of that accounted for by Wellspring and the remainder for a mystery donor. Most of Wellspring’s funds came from three multi-million dollar secret donors, a shift from prior years in which the biggest amount the group received from a single mystery donor increased with each passing year. Wellspring’s largest donor in their most recent tax return accounted for $8.9 million, another gave $5.5 million and a third provided $2 million. All of their identities remain hidden.

Financial information for Wellspring’s final year of operation is not required to be reported until months following the end of their final fiscal year, long after the group’s official termination.

While much of its money has ended up in the judicial advocacy space, Wellspring helped seed a number of other politically active nonprofits that took on a life other their own and went on to have other significant impacts. A few that gained particular notoriety in recent years include American Job Security, the pro-Trump 45Committee and the American Dream Initiative, which was later rebranded as the pro-Trump Great America Alliance.

[https://cdn1.opensecrets.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/23113231/WellspringsWeb1-1024x670.png

map graf]

Conservative activists have continued honoring the memory of the recently deceased group by doing what it loved best: creating opaque vehicles to secretly funnel millions of dollars into groups aiming to reshape the legal system.

At least one new group has already risen from Wellspring’s ashes: the Article III Project (A3P).

Formed to “fight to confirm President Trump’s judicial nominees” and defend sitting judges, A3P was launched as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit May 18, indicating it will not disclose its donors. Any money funneled to A3P through another nonprofit organization is not required to be disclosed until tax returns are due months after the end of the fiscal year when that payment took place, and other funding from individuals or opaque entities like limited-liability companies may remain hidden from the public.

A3P was sculpted in the mold of its predecessors and plans to work closely with JCN. “Excited to work hand-in-glove with @JCNSeverino,my other longtime friends at JCN, and many others on the outside who understand the critical importance of the judicial fight,” A3P president Mike Davis tweeted.

Davis was chief counsel for Senate Judiciary Committee during the most recent Supreme Court confirmation battles and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s former law clerk. His talks at Federalist Society events have earned the distinction of being included in the congressional record at the request of his former employer, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). During Davis’ time at the Senate, he played a pivotal role in securing votes for Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Dubbed the Kavanaugh confirmation fight’s “warrior” and the “general” of the Gorsuch confirmation battle, Davis has differentiated A3P from other groups with a more militant approach, promising to “punch back” with a “brass knuckles approach.”

According to Davis, these punches are warranted. A3P was launched partly in response to Demand Justice, a liberal dark money group launched in 2018 as the left’s counterweight to Wellspring and JCN. Demand Justice’s arrival on the scene brought with it a significant shift to the judicial money race, which has traditionally been one-sided with the vast majority of funds from the right, most of which can be traced to JCN and Wellspring.

Indeed, Wellspring’s legacy lives on not only in the conservative dark money infrastructure it helped build but also in the inspiration it provided to their equivalent on the left.

Wellspring may be gone, but its indelible impact on the American legal landscape will long be remembered.

In addition to its enduring judicial legacy through attempts to reshape the legal system, Wellspring and the operatives behind it have reshaped the way the game is played. By helping shepherd in their chosen judges onto the Supreme court and across the federal judiciary, Wellspring and its operatives ushered in a new era of increasingly expensive judicial battles largely fueled by deep-pocketed donors whose identities remain secret.

As groups on the left put the same clandestine tactics and big money traditionally characteristic of more conservative judicial advocacy groups into play, those battles across the country may have given way to a full-blown war for the future of the judiciary.

But conservative judicial activists are not just building a covert network anymore, they’re building an army.

ref

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/11/trump-inauguration-money-links-secretive-dark-money/

2x?

Notorious “dark money” conduit Wellspring Committee gave $14.8 million to the primary spender on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and paid $919,900 to the mysterious LLC that made a $1 million donation to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, according to a new tax return obtained Nov. 27 by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Wellspring has continued to be the chief financier of the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), with a $14,814,998 contribution last year.

JCN is another nondisclosing politically active nonprofit linked to the Corkerys’ network of conservative dark money groups. It has become the predominant dark money spender in Supreme Court confirmation fights as a vehicle for deep-pocketed donors to funnel millions of dollars behind or against judicial nominees.

Since 2010, Wellspring has funneled more than $54.2 million to JCN, according to tax returns obtained by CRP.

JCN spent $483,246 in total on Facebook ads and just $1,900 on Google platforms around the fight to confirm Kavanaugh with an estimated reach of potentially millions of Facebook users.

The puzzle of Trump’s mysterious inaugural gift

The only contractor paid by Wellspring last year was BH Group, the mysterious LLC created four months to the day before it made a $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural committee on Dec. 22, 2016.

New tax returns reviewed by CRP reveal that Judicial Education Project, JCN’s sister 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, also paid an additional $1.3 million to BH Group LLC last year. Judicial Education Fund keeps its donors anonymous but CRP tracked the bulk of the group’s recent funding to DonorsTrust, which accounted for more than 99 percent of its money last year. Like JCN, Judicial Education Fund has also been funded by Wellspring in prior years.

One name that CRP has tied to the mysterious LLC is Leonard Leo, the executive vice president at the Federalist Society, an influential conservative and libertarian legal organization, who listed “BH Group” as his employer in a campaign finance filing reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Ann Corkery, the Wellspring Committee’s former president and wife of current president Neil Corkery, has reportedly worked closely with him in this process and Leo has been “directly involved” in raising much of the anonymous money the Wellspring Committee brings in every year.

Incorporation records list BH Group’s address as a virtual office in Arlington, Va. and the only identified point of contact is Donna Smith, whose name matches that of a longtime paralegal at Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, the law firm that shared a Warrenton, Va. office with the address the Trump inaugural committee on its tax return.:{

Continuing the money churn

Another appendage of the Corkerys’ dark money web is the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonprofit run by acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker before he became Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, as CRP first reported in 2016. Like Wellspring, JCN and the Judicial Education Project, Neil Corkery is also the treasurer of FACT. Nearly 100 percent of FACT’s funding came from a single anonymous donor each year since the group was created in 2014, which CRP discovered came entirely from a donor-advised fund called DonorsTrust.

Although America First Policies itself does not reveal donors’ identities, CRP traced over a quarter of its funding to major corporate players, including Reynolds American and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group representing the drug company industry’s lobbying interests.

New tax documents filed by another pro-Trump nonprofit, Great America Alliance, show it raised and spent around $3.4 million during that period. Unlike America First Policies, which reported millions more in previously undisclosed political spending it its new tax return, Great America Alliance claimed that it “educated voters through direct and indirect political advocacy messaging nationwide within the scope of applicable laws and regulations.”

https://truthout.org/articles/one-six-figure-donor-funds-whitaker-nonprofit-with-dark-money/

Asingle six-figure donor accounted for 100 percent of funding raised by a nonprofit run by acting Attorney General Matthew Whitakerbefore he became Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff last year, new tax documents obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics reveal.

President Trump tapped Whitaker to become acting Attorney General earlier in November after Jeff Sessions was asked to resign.

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) is a self-proclaimed 501(c)(3) “watchdog” nonprofit.

This is not the first year a single big donor has accounted for the entirety of FACT’s funding, according to an exclusive new analysis by CRP. Nearly 100 percent of FACT’s funding — all but a few dollars in interest accrued on money left-over from prior years — came from a single anonymous donor again in 2015, 2016 and again last year.

CRP discovered FACT’s first tax return back in 2016, revealing its funding — $600,000 for 2014, its first year of operation — came entirely from a donor-advised fund called DonorsTrust, which acts as a pass-through vessel managing the money flow from wealthy individuals and foundations to nonprofit organizations while allowing the donors to remain anonymous. Beneficiaries of DonorsTrust include a breadth of conservative and libertarian initiatives. Due to DonorsTrust’s design, although CRP is able to reveal the direct funder of FACT by piecing together grants from different tax returns, the ultimate donor remains hidden.

New tax returns obtained by CRP show that wasn’t the only time DonorsTrust was FACT’s main funder. In fact, DonorsTrust accounted for 100 percent of FACT’s income from donations again in 2015, in 2016 and its most recent tax return — meaning Whitaker’s organization that claimed to be “dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency” has gotten all of its funds from a group that exists mainly as a vehicle for donors to elude transparency every year since its inception.

deep Ties to Dark Money Networks

In their application for tax-exempt status, FACT — then called the Free Market America Educational Foundation — told the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that its purpose was to “conduct research and provide informational studies on free market concepts in relation to environmental regulations and policy.” The IRS approved the group’s application for tax-exempt charity status on July 21, 2014, according to its determination letter.

Tax-exempt status in hand, the nonprofit changed its address to a UPS store and its name just weeks later, according to Virginia incorporation records. The nonprofit changed its name again that October, first to the Working for Rights to Express & Communication before finally landing on its current name — ultimately changing its name three times in the months following IRS approval for tax-exempt status, twice in just one day. That month, Whitaker, took control of the organization after losing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Iowa. :{

As the Free Market America Educational Foundation, the group was started by Ray Wotring, an operative who had long ago been tied to another shadowy network of politically active nonprofits. Wotring also served on another conservative nonprofit, Americans for Limited Government, which has close financial ties to the network and shared the same UPS story mailing address as FACT’s first iteration as the Free Market America Educational Foundation as well as Free Market America’s 501(c)(4) nonprofit arm.

Free Market America’s nonprofit arm has remained active and began to spend on lobbying in 2018, reporting six-figure spending.

FACT’s dark money ties don’t end there.

The treasurer and a member of the board of directors at FACT is Neil Corkery. Corkery, along with his wife Ann, sit at the helm of a network of conservative “dark money” groups organized to influence public policy and has become a key player promoting Trump’s agenda.

The network has become well-known for the Judicial Crisis Network(JCN), a nondisclosing group that emerged as the predominant dark money spender in Supreme Court confirmation fights since its launch in 2005, allowing deep-pocketed donors to funnel millions of dollars opposing or supporting judicial nominees, including a pledge to spent $10 million on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. JCN’s primary benefactor over the years has been the Wellspring Committee, an even more opaque nonprofit run by the Corkerys that accounted for over 80 percent of its total revenue in 2016.

Many of the groups tied to the network list the same address as their office, with different “suite” numbers. In reality, the address is also a UPS store and the suite numbers are PO boxes.

Links to Trump’s Mysterious Inaugural Donor

In addition to its ostensible political spending fueled by secret donors, disclosures by groups in the Corkery’s network have also raised question about other vehicles of influence behind the scenes, most notably in ties to a $1 million gift to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee from a mysterious Northern Virginia company called BH Group, LLC.

Little is known about the LLC other than the seven-figure check on Dec. 22, 2016, almost a month before President Trump was sworn in, and a trail of clues pieced together from tax documents and other disclosures.

These clues have also led to Leonard Leo, the executive vice president at the Federalist Society, who listed “BH Group” as his employer in a filingwith the Federal Election Commission.

Tax documents previously obtained by CRP show that the Wellspring Committee made a $750,000 payment to BH Group for “public relations” and that JCN made an additional cash infusion of $947,000to the BH Group around when the LLC made its inaugural donation.

New tax documents first obtained by Maplight and reviewed by CRP reveal that Judicial Education Project, JCN’s sister 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, paid an additional $1.3 million to BH Group LLC last year.

As a 501(c)(3) organization, Judicial Education Fund is not required to reveal its donors and chooses to keep them secret. However, CRP has been able to trace the source of the bulk of the group’s 2017 funding. Like FACT, Judicial Education Fund received millions of dollars coming from DonorsTrust accounting for more than 99 percent of the group’s funding.

That newly revealed payment from Judicial Education Fund brings the total known income for the BH Group to more than $3 million, according to CRP’s analysis — over three times the $1 million it gave to President Trump’s inaugural committee and raising more questions about its other activities that have yet to be reported.

Whitaker’s Watchdog

FACT’s own activities since 2014 have largely revolved around legal and ethics complaints, mostly targeting Democrats and with a particularly aggressive focus on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.

FACT has paid more than half-a-million dollars to Republican opposition research firm America Rising LLC,according to its most recent three tax returns.

FACT raised just over $3.4 million since it was conceived in 2014, according to tax filings obtained by CRP. Whitaker’s salary accounts for more than a third of FACT’s entire revenue since its exception, making him its single largest expense.

Whitaker received more than $1.2 million from FACT over the three years he led the organization, according to CRP’s analysis of the group’s tax returns, with the salary he drew from FACT rising precipitously — in some cases increasing by more than six-figures with each passing year.

Whitaker made $502,000 in 2017 — around half of FACT’s spending — despite having left the organization to take a position at the Justice Department as then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff in September of that year.

[graph]

FACT provided the vast majority of Whitaker’s income for the entire span of time covered by his financial disclosures on file with the Office of Government Ethics and released by the Justice Department the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, following weeks of scrutiny and multiple requests.

Whitaker’s selection as acting Attorney General has been contested on multiple fronts, and the release of his financial disclosures has only fueled the dumpster fire.

Disclosures revealed that Whitaker’s unsuccessful 2014 campaign received four donations totaling $8,800 this year — years after he lost the election and just months after he joined the Justice Department. The donations were the only money the campaign has received in over two years, raising questions about the potential implications of the donations under the Hatch Act, a federal law that generally prohibits federal officials from knowingly soliciting or accepting campaign donations and a separate Justice Department memo further restricting political activity by its personnel in the hopes of keeping the agency as apolitical as possible.

A provision of the Hatch Act allows officials to raise money to retire campaign debt, but the campaign’s only reported spending was 2018 were $228 to reimburse “data services” and $500 to Whitaker’s old law firm for renting office space, according to the New York Times.

Whitaker’s law partner of eight years, William Gustoff,who was treasurer for Whitaker’s unsuccessful 2014 Senate campaign and also serves on the board of FACT, signed off on the FEC filings.

“The checks came in. I, as the treasurer, deposited the checks, and I retired the debt that I knew I could without talking to Matt,” Gustoff told the New York Times, “I don’t talk to Matt about the campaign.”

Gustoff did say that FACT had been “well received” by Republican donors.

2017 Form 990 tax returns for DonorsTrust and Judicial Education Project were first obtained by Maplight’s Andrew Perez and reviewed by the Center for Responsive Politics.

FACT whitaker

...

The Post determined from other tax filings that the money came from DonorsTrust,a large nonprofit organization that wealthy contributors have used to anonymously give millions to conservative nonprofits in recent years.

The president of DonorsTrust, Lawson Bader, declined to identify the source of the funding contributed to FACT through his organization.

FACT launched its advocacy efforts shortly after Whitaker took over, describing itself in a news release as a “new watchdog group.”

On its website and in tax filings in 2014, FACT said that its mission was “to educate the public about unethical conduct on the part of public officials by publicizing these actions through media outlets throughout the country” and through its own website.

The new three-member board now comprised Whitaker, Whitaker’s former law partner and a conservative activist,Neil Corkery, who is involved in operating or funding multiple conservative charities.

Whitaker’s former partner, William Gustoff, did not return calls for comment. Corkery did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

...

Annual Fund

Centreville, VA (Legal domicile: DE)

Parent OrganizationN/ATypeCivic Leagues, Social Welfare Organizations, and Local Associations of EmployeesYear Founded2010Reported Political Activity to IRS?NoPeriod of Last ReportJul 2011 - Jun 2012IndustryN/A

Total number of volunteers0Total number of employees0

Overall FEC-reported spending from Jul 2011 - Jun 2012 $0 Overall Political Spending of all known grant recipients $738,188 Recipient Political Spending Attributable to Donor $100,000 FEC-reported spending since last IRS filing $0

Longterm Political Activity Ranking105

2014:

Wellspring Cmte

12/31/2014

$49,000

AMC Annual Fund

josesph stuart, neil corkery am action network 100K$

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-anti-catholic-playbook/ no lnx

CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS

CORRUPTIONPODCASTS OPP-ART: DISPATCHES FROM THE RESISTANCE

The Nation

SUPREME COURT The ‘Anti-Catholic’ Playbook

SUPREME COURTRELIGIONBRETT KAVANAUGH

The ‘Anti-Catholic’ Playbook

Does Brett Kavanaugh think abortion should be illegal? A secret network of right-wing activists has spent millions attacking such questions as anti-religious bigotry.

By Sarah PosnerTwitter SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, began yesterday with a sustained uproar from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who protested Republican efforts to barrel through the process. From the opening moments, Democrats prevailed on committee chair Charles Grassley to postpone the hearings—or entertain their motion to adjourn—because so many of Kavanaugh’s records as associate White House counsel, and all of his records as staff secretary to President George W. Bush, have yet to be released.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow. Additional research by Eli Clifton, Richard Salame and Maia Hibbett.

Committee Republicans, undaunted by this breach of transparency, turned to laying the groundwork for the questioning of Kavanaugh, set to begin this morning, by sowing fear in the Republican base about what Democrats would do if he were not confirmed and they gained more control of the confirmation process after the midterms. Senator Ted Cruz reminded the public of litigation brought by religious groups, including Catholic nuns, against the Obama administration, claiming that employer-provided contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act violated their religious freedom. Democrats, Cruz charged, “want justices who will further that assault on religious liberty.”

The hearings were fast-tracked by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who is pressing the Senate to confirm Kavanaugh by October 1. The rushed timeline is just the latest maneuver in an aggressive Republican campaign to make sweeping, long-lasting changes to the federal judiciary by packing it with judges hostile to civil rights, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ equality, and church-state separation—while at the same time taking extreme measures to block Democratic nominees. If he is confirmed, the 53-year-old Kavanaugh could tip the balance of the high court for decades, potentially overturning the right to an abortion and dramatically expanding religious exemptions to civil-rights laws and reproductive-health services. He could play a pivotal role in matters that could decide the future of the Trump presidency, from the scope of executive power, which Kavanaugh has argued is vast, to whether or not a sitting president may be subpoenaed or charged with a crime. On a wide range of issues with a profound impact on the daily lives of Americans, a Justice Kavanaugh could prove the decisive vote that cements conservative gains, while wiping out past civil-rights advances.

In the coming days, the 21 senators on the judiciary committee will have an opportunity to ask Kavanaugh tough questions about his legal philosophy on abortion, LGBTQ rights, executive power, and, as the point person on government faith-based initiatives while in the White House counsel’s office of George W. Bush, the proper role of government in the face of faith-based discrimination. Civil-rights advocates say these are precisely the questions that must be posed, given the stakes in choosing a successor to Anthony Kennedy, long the Court’s crucial swing vote on many of these issues. But if a tight-knit network of conservative activists has its way, these senators will instead pull their punches, fearing ferocious, well-funded attacks that deliberately misrepresent such scrutiny as signs of anti-religious bias.

Conservatives, including Kavanaugh himself, have long awaited and carefully prepared for this moment. In the wake of the crushing defeat of conservative legal hero Robert Bork, nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, and deep disappointment that subsequent, more-moderate Republican appointees Kennedy and David Souter failed to adjudicate as conservative ideologues, right-wing political operatives began building a new strategy for the courts. The Federalist Society continued to build a pipeline of conservative nominees, but strategists bruised from the Bork fight knew they also would need a hard-hitting public-relations campaign to press for their confirmation. They would have to successfully portray rigid ideologues as mainstream, while intimidating lawmakers from grilling them on their more extreme views.

A key tactic would be to shut down questioning on how the nominee would approach cases on abortion or LGBTQ rights by accusing Democratic senators probing these issues of being anti-religious—even anti-Catholic—bigots.

That campaign, honed over more than a decade, has been fueled by tens of millions of dollars in dark-money donations, designed by conservative political consultants and PR firms, disseminated byadvocacy groups such as the Catholic League and the Judicial Crisis Network, and validated by GOP senators such as Orrin Hatch,who in past confirmation battles has accused “the left” of “trying to enforce an anti-religious litmus test.” The network also includes Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo, who famously delivered a list of judicial nominees to then-candidate Trump, and has continued to closely advise him on his picks as president.

In his East Room speech accepting Trump’s nomination in July, Kavanaugh spoke often about his faith. He recalled his Jesuit education at Georgetown Preparatory School, in the suburbs of Washington, DC, which taught him the motto “men for others,” a creed Kavanaugh said had inspired a lifelong dedication to public service. He highlighted his standing in “the vibrant Catholic community” in Washington, noting that “the members of that community disagree about many things, but we are united by a commitment to serve.” He hit the same notes yesterday in his opening remarks, referencing his Jesuit education and his volunteer work with Catholic Charities.

In emphasizing his Catholic faith, Kavanaugh had perfectly teed up conservative activists to launch a preemptive attack on anyone who might question his views on abortion, LGBTQ issues, and religious liberty.Within hours of his nomination, one conservative Catholic advocacy organization, Catholic Vote, which claims nearly half a million lay Catholics as members, declared Catholic voters to be “thrilled” with the pick, but warned that they would be vigilant for “any whiff of anti-Catholic bigotry” in the confirmation process. “The experience of past judicial confirmation battles suggest attacks on a nominee’s personal religious views are inevitable,” the group’s president, Brian Burch, said. Op-eds warned of “another explosion of public anti-Catholicism” and predicted the “ugly insinuation” of “the same ‘dual loyalties’ chestnut that bigots have smeared Catholic candidates for public office for going on 200 years in this country.”

Kavanaugh’s nomination was not even a day old, yet Burch was already issuing a warning: “CatholicVote.org is prepared to defend Judge Kavanaugh from any such personal smear campaign by anti-Catholic zealots. We intend to hold every Senator, of both parties, accountable. Any whiff of anti-Catholic bigotry must be met with universal condemnation by every senator. This is especially true for those senators seeking re-election in states won by President Trump.” These senators include North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin—all Democrats in close races. All three are Catholic, and all three have been targeted with ads over the Kavanaugh nomination by Catholic Vote and the Judicial Crisis Network.

It’s unlikely that anyone on the Senate Judiciary Committee missed Burch’s meaning. The network had bludgeoned Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, for a year over a single sentence she uttered during confirmation hearings last September for Amy Coney Barrett,a Notre Dame Law School professor and conservative Catholic whom Trump had nominated to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Barrett insisted that as a judge she would follow Supreme Court precedent, Feinstein asked how Barrett would resolve conflicts between her religious beliefs and the law as a judge. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein told Barrett. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.”

The clip caused an immediate uproar among conservatives. Catholic Vote published a piece on its website, “Dear Anti-Catholic Left: Bigotry Lives Loudly Within You.” The Judicial Crisis Network, the dark-money group at the center of the conservative march to stack the courts, leapt to Barrett’s defense with an inflammatory, six-figure ad campaign, titled “Catholics Need Not Apply.” It accused Feinstein and fellow Judiciary Committee Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, himself a Catholic, of having “mocked” Barrett’s faith. “Their hypocrisy knows no limits,” the ad charged. “They attack a woman for her Catholic faith, make it a religious test, while they are afraid to call radical Islam, radical Islam.”

The Senate confirmed Barrett, who became an instant celebrity to Trump’s Christian-right base, a standing that soon landed her on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court. Meanwhile a variation on Feinstein’s phrase—“the dogma lives loudly within me”—became a right-wing meme, appearing on T-shirts and coffee mugs sold on conservative websites, and her quote continues to provide fodder for right-wing pundits.

But while conservative Catholic activists have succeeded in claiming loudly that they have been oppressed, many liberal Catholic leaders argue that their views don’t represent all Catholics. “The religious right, including ultraconservative Catholic special-interest groups, are the squeaky wheel in American politics,” said Jon O’Brien, President of Catholics for Choice. “They get heard and privileged above the majority of Americans of faith or no faith. We are incredibly concerned that Kavanaugh and the special interests he is backed by will radically redefine religious freedom in America to mean religious privilege for a few at the expense of everyone else, including women and LGBT individuals.”

Indeed, yesterday, as Kavanaugh’s hearings got underway, 1,550 Catholic nuns, priests, deacons, and other leaders wrote to the Senate raising concerns about Kavanaugh’s views on health care, immigration, workers’ rights, voting rights, and the death penalty. “As Catholics,” they wrote, “we believe that any government official—including a Supreme Court Justice—must be concerned with the needs of people who are marginalized, not just the rich and powerful or a member of one’s own political party.”

Kavanaugh, it turns out, is deeply familiar with this playbook built around allegations of bias, as it dates back to his days as a top adviser in the George W. Bush White House during the religion wars over Bush’s judicial nominees, some of whom had out-of-the-mainstream views on abortion, gender, and LGBTQ rights.

From 2001 through the middle of 2003, Kavanaugh served as associate White House counsel, helping Bush shepherd his judicial nominations through the Senate. In mid-2003, Bush named Kavanaugh his special adviser and staff secretary; shortly afterward, he nominated Kavanaugh to be a judge on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Throughout this period, Bush’s judicial nominees—many of whom, like Trump’s nominees, had been cultivated and vetted by the Federalist Society—provoked pitched confrontations in a narrowly divided Senate.

In 2003, while Kavanaugh was still in the White House counsel’s office, conservatives accused Democrats of anti-Catholic bias during confirmation hearings for James Leon Holmes, whom Bush had nominated to be a federal trial judge in Arkansas. Holmes had a history of misogynist writing in which he had argued, with his wife, that “the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man” and insisted that an abortion ban would not violate the rights of women who had been sexually assaulted. “Concern for rape victims is a red herring,” he wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, “because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”

The “controversy around Leon Holmes,” according to an account by conservative Catholic political operative Deal Hudson, provided a “perfect opening” for Republicans to accuse Democrats of being anti-Catholic. According to documents related to Kavanaugh’s White House tenure released by the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Manuel Miranda, at the time counsel to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, circulated an e-mail blast to White House staff, including Kavanaugh, from the arch-conservative Catholic League. “catholicism on trial: religious test applied to judicial nominee,” it read, going on to describe Holmes as “a man of deep religious conviction” and accuse Democrats of having “unfairly tagged him a misogynist, misunderstanding what the pope, the U.S. bishops and Holmes have said regarding this matter.”

“It does not get better than this,” Miranda enthused in his cover note. Miranda later left his post over a scandal in which he was implicated in secretly accessing and leaking Democratic computer files about judicial nominations. Holmes was confirmed.

The religion wars only intensified when Bush nominated William Pryor to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.Because he was up for an appellate seat, Pryor generated more adamant Democratic opposition than had Holmes. Senators probed his hard-line beliefs on abortion, church-state separation, and LGBTQ rights, including questioning him about his rescheduling of a family vacation to Disney World because it coincided with “Gay Day,”and an amicus brief he authored as Alabama attorney general in the landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, in which he argued that gay sex should remain criminalized because the Court had “never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy.” Pryor supporters, again, portrayed legitimate questions about a nominee’s position on abortion—a constitutional right that enjoys majority support among not only Americans as a whole but also among Catholics—as a de facto litmus test against Catholics.

“Their intention is smearing senators as anti-religious for asking questions,” said Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at People for the American Way, which has been in the thick of judicial nominations for decades. “In doing that they’re hoping to intimidate the senator somehow. They raise these questions when senators are asking the nominees about important issues like Roe v. Wade.”

Throughout this entire period, Kavanaugh was specifically enlisted by the Bush White House to engage the Catholic community, including about judges. He was asked, along with Karl Rove, to address supporters of the Catholic magazine Crisis. He also spoke about judicial nominations to a Pro-Life Pilgrimage from Legatus, a conservative Catholic network created by Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, for Catholic business leaders who have “committed themselves to study, live and spread the Catholic faith in their business and personal lives.” And he volunteered to be the office’s specialist on faith-based initiatives, “given my general interest and my previous religious liberty work in my pre-WH days.” Kavanaugh had served on the Religious Liberty Practice Group at the Federalist Society; in private practice he authored an amicus brief in a school-prayer case, arguing that student-delivered prayers at football games were constitutional (the Supreme Court held that they were not).

It was during the Pryor nomination fight that conservative advocacy groups first aggressively advanced the claim that Catholics were being excluded from the bench by the left. The Committee for Justice, led by former George H.W. Bush White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, and the Ave Maria List, a political-action committee funded by Monaghan, ran newspaper ads in support of Pryor that targeted moderate and swing-state Democratic senators. The ads featured a picture of a closed courtroom door with a sign over it reading, “Catholics Need Not Apply”—the first of the phrase’s many appearances in confirmation campaigns.

Senate Republicans helped press the charge that Democrats were anti-religion. Hatch, then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters, “It appears that nominees who openly adhere to Catholic and Baptist doctrines, as a matter of personal faith, are unqualified for the federal bench in the eyes of the liberal Washington interest groups. Period.”

But the Committee for Justice ads drew condemnation from other quarters, including from the Anti-Defamation League, which protested that they were “misleading and inflammatory.” A Washington Post editorial described them as “beyond the pale.” Senate Democrats mounted a filibuster, consigning Pryor to a recess appointment, but he was eventually confirmed in 2005 in a bipartisan deal.

The political battle, however, turned out to be far more damaging to the senators who had opposed Pryor’s confirmation.As the 2004 election season got underway, it became clear that an attack machine sounding the alarm about anti-Catholic bias was perfectly comfortable with harsh assaults on Catholic Democrats. Then–Senate minority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, both Catholics themselves, had denounced the Committee for Justice ads on the Senate floor. Daschle, declaring himself “proud of my Catholic faith,” said, “I know about the bias against immigrants and against Catholics. That was real discrimination. What is being spread this week is a falsehood uttered for partisan political purposes.”

Despite his public declaration of pride in his Catholic faith, Daschle would become a target of conservatives—including conservative Catholics—who sought to oust him from the Senate in order to pave a clear path for confirmation of Bush’s judicial picks. The 2004 elections, with John Kerry, another liberal Catholic at the top of the presidential ticket, featured brutal attacks on both men’s faith.

The Republican National Committee attacked Kerry’s Catholicism, launching a website, KerryWrongforCatholics.com, critical of his positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and judicial nominations, noting that as senator he had pledged to “filibuster any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on the right to choose, on civil rights and individual liberties, on the laws protecting workers and the environment.” Kerry was also being Swift Boated, a campaign conceived in part by a PR firm, Creative Response Concepts, that would go on to become a player in the Catholic judicial-nominations network. The Committee for Justice launched a website and ad campaign called “Kerry’s Scary” to attack his views on abortion, same-sex marriage and the pope, as well as his judicial philosophy, calling the latter issue urgent because “Court watchers believe as many as four Justices might retire in the next four years.”

Conservatives also raised questions about Daschle’s Catholicism during his 2004 reelection bid, attacking him in ads over his stance on the judiciary, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. The stakes were high for those who dreamed of a conservative takeover of the courts: If Democrats reversed Republicans’ razor-thin margin in the Senate, they would control the chamber, giving them the ability to block Bush’s nominees, including for anticipated Supreme Court vacancies, or push through those nominated by a potential president Kerry.

Even before the campaign got underway, conservative magazines spread stories that Daschle’s bishop was denying him communion because he was divorced. Then the ads started. The Ave Maria List PAC spent $100,000 running ads accusing Daschle of misinforming South Dakota voters that he was against abortion. One ad said Daschle had once called abortion “an abhorrent practice,” but had later supported pro-choice groups as senator. “Tom Daschle tries to claim he’s pro-life even though his voting record and actions in Washington prove he’s not,” the ad charged. “Tom Daschle has changed and it’s time for South Dakota voters to make a change of their own.”

Another anti-Daschle ad campaign, titled “You’re Fired”—modeled on Trump’s reality-television show The Apprentice—was produced by the You’re Fired PAC and funded by Robin P.Arkley II, a California real-estate magnate. Arkley donated over half a million dollars to the effort.

“The people of South Dakota want to protect traditional marriage,” an affiliated website declared. “You’re Fired Inc. believes the Federal Marriage Amendment is the only way to prevent liberal, activist judges from imposing same sex marriage as they have in Massachusetts—on the rest of American society.” The site depicted a boardroom meeting, during which an executive concluded, “We have one too many Democrats around here and that’s not a good thing,” punctuating his statement with the trademark “You’re fired.” Another Arkley ad charged that Daschle “refused to protect marriage” and “would let liberal, activist judges redefine it.”

Daschle lost his reelection bid, the Republicans retained control of the Senate, and Bush beat Kerry, winning reelection to a second term during which he put John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.

With the White House and Senate in Republican hands, and with the GOP riding high on passing same-sex marriage bans at the ballot box in 11 states, conservative activists set to work on getting Bush’s conservative judicial nominees confirmed. After the 2004 election, one of Arkley’s top aides, Ann Corkery, who had directed philanthropy at his loan-servicing firm, founded the Judicial Confirmation Network. The group blandly described itself as “an organization of citizens joined together to support the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States.” Yet Corkery and her husband Neil would soon become pivotal figures in a broadening coalition of conservatives as they prepared for the confirmation battles ahead.

That coalition, according to a 2006 account in Crisis magazine, was directed by a “war room” of activists “acquainted with each other through Catholic and conservative public causes.” Among them were major players from the Bush reelection campaign, including Gary Marx, who had led the campaign’s outreach to social conservatives, and Greg Mueller, described by Crisis as “the group’s public-relations maestro,” whose public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, had advised Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today, CRC represents the Judicial Crisis Network as well as the Catholic Association, another advocacy group the Corkerys helped launch in 2007, to influence policy-makers on issues concerning “the family, Catholic institutions, religious liberty, and cultural values.” CRC did not respond to repeated requests to interview representatives of JCN and the Catholic Association.

According to Crisis, “Mueller, Leo, and their colleagues would provide the main talking points, media training, rapid response to any attacks on the nominees, assistance with ad buys, and ongoing legal analysis.”

“Our most important goals were to support the idea of judicial restraint, to define the character of the nominee within the first 24 hours, and to continue to provide support as the process wended its way,” Leo told Crisis, reflecting on the war room’s role in the successful confirmation of both Roberts and Alito. “To accomplish this, we engaged in a variety of approaches—an aggressive paid media effort, rapid response activity, and positive messages.”

Mueller described the war room in far more political terms. “We tried to take the approach of corporate crisis management, along with the daily political communications that go on in a political campaign.” It fell to Marx, fresh off the Bush-Cheney campaign and newly appointed as JCN’s first executive director, as Crisis wrote, to develop “a state-based strategy that would target the political pressure points—an organization that would make Democratic senators in Republican states feel the political heat.”

During Bush’s second term—as Kavanaugh’s nomination to the DC Circuit was held up over a period of years, with Democrats arguing that his role in drafting the Starr Report and in the investigation of the suicide of Clinton aide Vince Foster had marked him as too partisan to warrant his confirmation as a judge—the war room kicked in. JCN openly threatened Democratic senators with the Daschle treatment. If lawmakers filibuster Kavanaugh, JCN warned in 2006, a midterm-election year, “Americans in key states will react just as they did when former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle did the same thing. Americans care about judges and the role of the courts in our society.” The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh two weeks later, by a vote of 57-36.

Today, thepresident of JCN is not a public figure like Marx but a player so behind-the-scenes as to barely leave a public trace. But Daniel Casey, a public-relations, political, and “crisis” consultant, is a veteran of the Bork confirmation battle—a fight that conservatives painfully lost, triggering the scorched-earth organizing JCN spearheads today.

Then the executive director of the American Conservative Union, Casey was “a crucial player” in the Bork fight, said Patrick McGuigan, who worked then for the Free Congress Foundation, a political advocacy group founded by religious-right architect Paul Weyrich that helped push the GOP to the right. The dust jacket of Ninth Justice, a book McGuigan wrote with Weyrich’s daughter Dawn, detailing each move and countermove in the Bork fight, describes McGuigan and Casey as “intensely Republican, devout Catholics, ardent admirers of the nominee—who understood from the first moment of the battle that they were involved in the most significant political confrontation of their lives.”

McGuigan, who now works as a journalist in Oklahoma, described his relationship with Casey as “co-captains” in the Bork battle, in which conservatives were heavily outspent and outmaneuvered by the liberal opposition. He said that at the time, there was “insufficient organization of ideas and messaging on the conservative side of things compared to the left side.” Casey’s forte, said McGuigan, was “neighborhood by neighborhood, precinct by precinct, household by household organization patterned after the labor unions, but on the conservative end of the spectrum instead. I think that’s what Dan was good at.” (Casey declined to be interviewed for this article, referring interview requests to Peter Robbio at CRC, who did not respond.) In the years after the failure of the Bork nomination, conservatives saw the appointment of Kennedy, and then of Bill Clinton’s nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Although Kennedy was nominated by a Republican, he proved a bitter disappointment to conservatives, particularly for his majority opinion in Lawrence in 2003, ruling anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional—a ruling that led, 12 years later, to the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide.

During the Bork hearings, Casey argued that “the American people should be outraged that the liberals are spending millions of dollars to try to buy a Supreme Court seat.” Three decades later, Casey is the president of the moneyed advocacy organizations JCN and the related Judicial Education Project, as well as of Catholic Voices. He is also treasurer and director of the Catholic Association Foundation and the Catholic Association. Together, they are part of a multimillion-dollar dark-money campaign backing a relentless drive by Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate to reshape the federal judiciary for generations, from federal trial courts all the way to the Supreme Court, and to shape public opinion about Catholicism and religious liberty.

JCN does not disclose the identity of its donors. But the group has said it anticipates spending at least $10 million advocating for Kavanaugh’s nomination. While many of the early ads focused on promoting Kavanaugh as a mainstream, impartial jurist admired by former clerks of all political stripes, the most recent ads touted him a “grand slam for conservatives” and warned Democrats against succumbing to “pressure from East Coast liberals.”

After 2008, the Judicial Confirmation Network changed tacks, from battering the opponents of Bush’s court nominees to blocking President Barack Obama’s. JCN, now renamed theJudicial Crisis Network, was the first conservative organization to blast Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor—a Catholic—as “a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.” Although JCN had repeatedly claimed that liberal Democrats had unfairly attacked conservative Catholics, it again did not hesitate to attack a liberal Catholic.

John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal group that advocates for progressive expressions of faith in politics, said that for conservative Catholics, Obama’s presidency “was very formative to the idea that Catholic identity was under siege by an administration that had elitist contempt for what the church believes.” The University of Notre Dame’s invitation to the pro-choice Obama to deliver a commencement speech in 2009, said Gehring, triggered “a huge divide” and “an earthquake in Catholic political conversation.” The Obama administration’s policies, particularly the contraception benefit written into the Affordable Care Act, which became the core target of conservatives’ legal strategy on religious freedom, further inflamed the world of conservative Catholicism.

But Gehring argues that this “well-funded, deep network” has “had disproportionate influence on what Catholic identity is in the public square and in politics.” He said the network has helped to create the distorted impression that Catholic priorities are limited to opposing abortion and LGBTQ rights, when traditional Catholic social-justice teaching includes a range of issues such as immigration, poverty, and the environment. Gehring pointed out, as an example, that conservative Catholics ignore the 1891 papal encyclical, “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor,” written in support of workers rights, including the right to unionize.

What’s more, the conservative network’s position on abortion doesn’t represent the majority of Catholics. According to the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. O’Brien, of Catholics for Choice, also points out that “Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as women of other faiths or no faith.” Kavanaugh’s decisions as an appellate judge on reproductive rights and the role of religion in politics, O’Brien added, “underscore just how out of touch he is with the majority of Catholics who are pro-choice and who support a healthy separation between church and state.”

During the Obama era, the dark money ramped up. The Wellspring Committee, a nonprofit formed in 2008 where both Corkerys have served as president, became the chief funder of JCN, bankrolling its campaigns to block Merrick Garland’s confirmation, and, under Trump, to support the nomination of Neil Gorsuch and other nominees to federal courts. According to an investigation last year by the Center for Responsive Politics, “most of Wellspring’s funds, in turn, came from a single mysterious donor who gave the organization almost $28.5 million—nearly 90 percent of its $32.2 million in revenues” in 2016. According to this report, Wellspring gave more than $23 million to JCN in 2016, quadrupling its 2015 donation to the group of $5.8 million.

Wellspringalso donated money to the Catholic Association, another nonprofit the Corkerys helped found, this one to advocate on behalf of “religious liberty,” and to the Federalist Society. In yet another sign of the intimacy of this network, the association paid Leo, known as Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, $120,000 for “management consulting.” (Leo also earned $435,000 from the Federalist Society that year, according to its tax return.) Neither Leo nor the Corkerys responded to requests for comment.

Another mysterious Corkery-linked company, BH Group LLC, created in 2016, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Not much is known about what BH Group does, or who its principals are, but in 2016, the Corkerys’ Wellspring Committee paid BH Group $750,000 for “public relations,” according to its tax return, and JCN paid the firm $947,000 for “consulting services.” And Leo later identified BH Group as his employer in an FEC filing.

In early May 2017, about a month after Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Leo was awarded the prestigious Canterbury Medal from the Becket Fundfor Religious Liberty, billed by the organization as “religious liberty’s highest honor.” A major Christian-right legal firm, the Becket Fund is best known for its victory in 2014’s landmark Hobby Lobby case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement of contraceptive coverage violated the company’s religious freedom. In his acceptance speech at a gala held at The Pierre, a New York luxury hotel overlooking Central Park, Leo, in white tie, could barely conceal his elation that Trump had beaten the odds to win the White House. Looking back on the campaign, Leo recalled the “fear that permeated every day in that countdown to November 8” and rejoiced at the “amazing turn of events, thanks to our 45th president.”

With Trump as president, Leo is, for all practical purposes, on the inside, as a handsomely compensated guide to judicial nominees who will satisfy religious conservatives. JCN runs the outside game,spending its mounds of dark money to promote the president’s—or rather, Leo’s—judicial nominees.

But even as the Trump administration was already well on its way to stacking the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with judges inclined to expand the reach of Hobby Lobby, Leo had not quite let go of the urgency of the Obama years—or what he’d seen as the threat of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency suppressing religious freedom. “As government policy becomes more grudging toward religious freedom, that attitude spreads in the broader culture. A hostile stance in Washington creates space for groups with kindred ideological designs,” Leo said, going on to warn of even more dire consequences. “A government that suffocates something so elemental as freedom of religion is not likely to be respectful of any other right.”

At one point, he released the tension with a joke at Clinton’s expense. “Of course everyone thought they knew how the election was going to go,” Leo said. “The Democratic nominee looked so confident, so relaxed, so content. With just days remaining, what could possibly go wrong?” And then, “Well, not everyone had access to Rebekah Mercer’s crystal ball.”

At the time Leo spoke, Mercer’s family’s data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, was not yet under federal investigation for harvesting private Facebook data and potentially violating US election laws. But even so, it was striking that he referenced the Mercer family—whose political giving is led by Rebekah and her father Robert, the reclusive, Trump-supporting, Republican financier—at a celebration of religious freedom, given that one of the family’s pet projects, Breitbart News, has long been a hotbed of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. It turns out that Mercer had also long been a generous funder of an array of organizations in Leo’s orbit—the conservative legal and Christian organizations that claim to represent ordinary citizens fed up with Democrat-appointed “judicial activists” and Democratic “gridlock” in holding up Republican nominees.

Charity filings show that between 2013 and 2016, the Mercer Family Foundation gave a million dollars to the Becket Fund, on whose board Leo has served since 2014. Between 2013 and 2015, the foundation donated nearly $6 million to the Federalist Society. In fact, Rebekah Mercer’s ties with Leo go even deeper.

In 2014, Leo joined the board of a new group called Reclaim New York, led by Mercer and Steve Bannon, then ensconced at Breitbart. The group claims to provide citizen trainings to “empower citizens to engage their state and local government,” but critics call it an astroturf organization dedicated instead to sowing distrust in state and local government and laying the groundwork for far-right Republican candidates to win elections. In 2015, Reclaim New York shared office space with Cambridge Analytica in midtown Manhattan and paid the firm for data-analytic services. (Reclaim New York did not respond to a request for comment about Leo’s role.) In 2016, Leo, along with Mercer and Kellyanne Conway, now a top adviser to President Trump, incorporated a related lobbying organization, the Reclaim New York Initiative.

A core element of Leo’s strategy, throughout the Bush and Obama years, was to portray religious freedom, a treasured American virtue, as under siege by supposed government overreach and disdainful, elite liberal culture. In another May 2017 speech, this one before the ActonInstitute, a conservative think tank, Leo placed the blame on the left for making confirmation battles “so intense.” Liberals, he said, want to invest the Supreme Court with “something close to absolute power,” including the“creation of rights found nowhere in the text or structure of the Constitution,” citing Griswold v. Connecticut, from 1965, which struck down laws criminalizing the sale of contraception; Roe v. Wade, from 1973, which legalized abortion; and Obergefell v. Hodges, from 2015, which legalized same-sex marriage.

But now, he said, thanks to Trump, liberals were finally losing control of the courts. “For constitutionalists,” Leo told the Acton Institute, “our improbable 45th president has turned out to be, to borrow a phrase from his predecessor, the change we’ve been waiting for.”

Sarah PosnerTWITTERSarah Posner is a Reporting Fellow with the Investigative Fund and expert on the intersection of religion and politics.

Most Americans have probably never heard of Leonard A. Leo, who has long served as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, an organization of conservatives and libertarians who “place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values and the rule of law.” But as Mr. Trump begins the process of filling what could be the most federal court vacancies left to any president in nearly a half-century, Mr. Leo is playing a critical role in reshaping the judiciary.

He sits at the nexus of an immensely influential but largely unseen network of conservative organizations, donors and lawyers who all share a common goal: Fill the federal courts with scores of judges who are committed to the narrow interpretation of the Constitution that they believe the founders intended.

“The Supreme Court needs to be an institution that helps to undergird limited constitutional government,” said Mr. Leo, 51, whose cerebral, unassuming demeanor belies the enormous clout he has developed in Washington.

It is a worldview that has brought Mr. Leo and his allies together with a range of conservative players. In addition to major corporate backers such as Google and Chevron, the Federalist Society’s supporters include well-known industry-oriented and libertarian-minded business leaders like Charles G. and David H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family, which gave significantly to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and helped start Breitbart News.

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Cardboard cutouts of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch at the Judicial Crisis Network’s booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

This judicial reformation is being coordinated from Washington by a relatively small team closely aligned around Mr. Leo, who is on leave from the Federalist Society while he helps the White House shepherd the Gorsuch nomination. The network includes John G. Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation and Ann Corkery, a Washington lawyer who along with her husband, Neil, oversees the Judicial Crisis Network and related dark-money groups that also support the cause.

While a free-market agenda and the desire to place judges who will be more skeptical of federal and state regulations is a driving force, several central players in the group are also motivated by intense religious beliefs.

“We can have an incredible impact,” said Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network. Ms. Severino counts among her clients Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, a group of Catholic nuns who participated in a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court alleging that Obamacare limited their religious freedom.

With my client Mother Assumpta in front of the Supreme Court - tons of nuns supporting religious freedom! pic.twitter.com/sIxJ0TqZgp

— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) March 23, 2016

Judge Gorsuch, 49, is their first test case, with his confirmation hearing set to begin on Monday — but the conservative activists say more is at stake than just the Supreme Court.

“Make no mistake,” Mr. Leo said in a speech last month at the Ronald Reagan Dinner at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “How we deal with this vacancy now, the strength that we as the pro-Constitution movement demonstrate in this fight, will determine the extent to which we are able to both nominate and confirm pro-Constitution judges as we move forward.”

Document

The Money Behind Conservative Legal Movement

Tens of millions of dollars flow each year to a collection of non profit groups — from the Federalist Society to the Judicial Crisis Network — that are trying to reshape the federal and state judicial systems. Most of the money moves anonymously, other is disclosed. Here we take a look.

OPEN Document

Mr. Trump already has 124 judgeships to fill — a backlog created by Senate Republicans who blocked the confirmation of many of President Barack Obama’s nominees. That includes 19 vacancies on the federal appeals courts.

Because of the age of many judges today, the White House expects between 70 to 90 appeals court positions to open up over the next four years. That would give Mr. Trump the opportunity to fill anywhere from one-third to half of all appellate seats — a profound impact considering that those courts are often the final word on thousands of cases that never reach the Supreme Court.

The scale and sophistication of the right’s judicial confirmation efforts would seem to portend a dark period ahead for the left, which, despite having made great strides under Mr. Obama, finds itself outmaneuvered.

“The right wing, very purposely and methodically, has built a stable of nominees that fit their ideological profile, and it’s been a national movement, well organized and strategized,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “Frankly, I think the progressives of the Democratic Party have been less vigilant and vigorous than the right.”

Hitching to Trump

There was little question to whom Mr. Trump would turn when he was putting together his list of possible Supreme Court nominees last year: Mr. Leo, who has spent almost his entire legal career at the Federalist Society, after graduating from Cornell Law School in 1989.

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A bookshelf in Mr. Leo’s office displays trinkets related to Supreme Court justices. Credit Lexey Swall for The New York Times

The father of seven children and fond of speaking in biblical allusions, he rose to prominence more than a decade ago as the Republican Party’s co-chairman of Catholic outreach. At Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral last year, he read from the Old Testament.

When President George W. Bush made his two nominations to the Supreme Court in 2005, picking Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Mr. Leo assumed the responsibility of coordinating outside campaigns to buttress their Senate confirmations. It is a role — which he has described as analogous to running a political campaign — that he has reprised with the Gorsuch confirmation.

Mr. Leo has an exalted reputation among conservatives, including Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who is now head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Pruitt recalled in a speech last year at the conservative bastion Hillsdale College how he was in Washington for a Federalist Society meeting in 2013. Mr. Leo asked him to stay an extra night for dinner, without giving a hint of who might show up.

“Any time that Leonard asks you to go to dinner, you stay, because he feeds you well,” Mr. Pruitt said. But it was not only the menu that was impressive. Mr. Pruitt arrived to see Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas at the table.

“We spent three hours talking about the Constitution and things that we were involved in as attorneys general,” Mr. Pruitt recalled. “It was a fabulous time.”

Graphic

Older Judges and Vacant Seats Give Trump Huge Power to Shape American Courts

Mr. Trump could soon find himself responsible for appointing a greater share of federal court judges than any first-term president in 40 years.

OPEN Graphic

Mr. Leo has been at the center of Mr. Trump’s judicial selection process since last spring, when Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s campaign lawyer and now the White House counsel, introduced them. It helped enormously that Mr. Leo came to the campaign at a critical time of need.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with the conservative moment was tenuous at best. Last March, a prominent group of Catholic leaders in the United States, including several with close ties to Mr. Leo, published an open letter in National Review, a conservative magazine, declaring Mr. Trump “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.” It was the type of rejection that was becoming all too worrisome for Mr. Trump. At the same time, a faction of delegates threatened to block his nomination.

So in May, in an unprecedented move for a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump shrewdly released the first of two lists of people he was considering to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Scalia, at first with help from Mr. Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation. Judge Gorsuch’s name was added in a second version of this list, with Mr. Trump thanking the Federalist Society and Heritage for their help.

Polls showed this published list of 21 names was a significant factor in the election. Of the one-fifth of voters who said the Supreme Court was the most important issue in their decision, 57 percent voted for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump gave broad discretion to Mr. Leo and his colleagues. Mr. Trump’s most important criterion, these lawyers said, was that he wanted judges who were “not weak” and of “high quality.”

Photo

Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, said efforts to secure Judge Gorsuch’s seat on the Supreme Court reflected the consensus of voters who put President Trump in power. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Their approach in coming up with candidates was similar to President Ronald Reagan’s. “They had this very sophisticated, detailed frame of reference from which they could begin to say, ‘O.K., well, who understands these things like we do?’” Mr. Leo said in an interview, referring to the Reagan era. “As opposed to an administration that might sit around and say, ‘Who’s a really smart lawyer who’s been really accomplished?’ Or, ‘Hey, what about my frat buddy from 1964?’”

And as Reagan did by nominating Justices Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy, Mr. Leo and his conservative colleagues have looked for judges who can serve as long as possible. “Young is good,” Mr. Leo said. “There will be an opportunity for a transformation of the federal bench.”

A Small Network

Even before Mr. Trump walked into the East Room of the White House on Jan. 31 to name Judge Gorsuch as his first Supreme Court nominee, the public relations campaign to confirm him had started.

“Neil Gorsuch’s talent and skill would make for a great #SupremeCourt Justice,” said a post sent out on Twitter by the Judicial Crisis Network on the afternoon before the announcement.

By that point, television and radio advertisements about Judge Gorsuch were already on their way to stations across the country. The campaign focused on five states picked for a very explicit reason: Each had a Democratic senator up for re-election next year, and all the states had voted to elect Trump.

Outdoorsman Video by Judicial Crisis Network

This more public part of the push — Mr. Leo has never been particularly comfortable in the spotlight — has been handled by Ms. Severino, 40, a Harvard Law School graduate who served as a clerk to Justice Thomas and is a frequent speaker at Federalist events. Ms. Severino said the group’s efforts to secure Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation reflected the consensus of American voters, who picked Mr. Trump in part because of the Supreme Court choices he said he would make.

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Television ads supporting Judge Gorsuch aired in states that voted for Mr. Trump and have Democratic senators up for re-election next year. Credit Judicial Crisis Network

But an examination of the Judicial Crisis Network’s operations and financial records suggests that the group, in fact, has an incredibly narrow base. In 2015, the last year that tax records were available, the Judicial Crisis Network’s entire budget of $5.7 million appears to have come from a single donor, an organization called the Wellspring Committee, based in Manassas, Va., that describes its mission as advancing “limited government and free markets.” Judicial Crisis and a sister organization, the Judicial Education Project, reported in tax returns that they had a total of only two employees and no volunteers, and instead largely relied on outside consultants, like CRC Public Relations, a Virginia firm that also lists the Federalist Society and other conservative groups as clients.

Ms. Severino, asked whether her group was simply a shell to secretly move money on behalf of others, said the Judicial Crisis Network should not be judged based on the size of its staff.

“We are not trying to be a large membership organization,” Ms. Severino said in a written statement, sent by CRC, which asked that the remarks be attributed to her. “There are others who excel at that type of work, and we are happy to support them as allies.”

It is clear that there are close personal ties among the leaders of the push to confirm Judge Gorsuch. Ann and Neil Corkery help run a network of nonprofit organizations like Catholic Voices USA, an organization that promotes the church’s views. They also help Mr. Leo in managing the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, tax records show.

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Mr. Trump has 124 judgeships to fill, including 19 vacancies on the federal appeals courts. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

There are even overlaps with the funding. Mr. Corkery is listed as treasurer of the Judicial Crisis Network. A separate Internal Revenue Service filing shows that Ms. Corkery is president of the Wellspring Committee. Tax records from the past two years also show that Mr. and Ms. Corkery were paid nearly $600,000 to help run 15 nonprofit groups, including the Judicial Crisis Network. They declined requests to discuss their overlapping roles in these organizations.

The impact of this intertwined network can also be seen in a number of state-level efforts to appoint more originalist judges.

Last year, the Judicial Crisis Network and a second organization it donated money to bought political advertisements in two Supreme Court races in Arkansas, which are decided directly by voters. The advertising by the groups, which spent far more than the candidates themselves, attracted widespread attention to what has normally been a low-profile race.

The intervention was considered disturbing enough that the Republican-controlled state legislature held a special hearing last year where those targeted by the groups testified.

“I suppose some with misplaced or contorted egos might be flattered these shadowy groups would spend over a half-million dollars directed to keep one off the court,“ said Clark W. Mason, a Little Rock, Ark., lawyer who was one of the candidates for the Supreme Court. “But I am outraged. They are attempting to shift the scale of justice.”

The legislature this year failed to pass a law that would require a group like Judicial Crisis to disclose the source of its funding if it wants to play a similar role in future elections in the state.

Judicial Crisis has also donated more than $2 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association — making it the single largest contributor in the 2016 election cycle, as it sought to elect top state law enforcement officers who could bring conservative-inspired cases to state or federal courts with judges the group also helped put into place.

Mark Holden, general counsel of Koch Industries, a donor to the Federalist Society, said in an interview that the efforts of these conservative legal activists were necessary to overcome a bias favoring judges who put their agendas before the law.

“It’s very important that we have the right people in place, people who will follow our laws, judges who will follow our laws as they have been written and not as they wish they were written,” Mr. Holden said.

One point all the parties agree on: Mr. Trump must not repeat the mistake that Mr. Bush made in moving slowly to fill the many vacancies in the federal court system.

Mr. Leo is ready to play his part.

“Those nominations to the lower federal courts are a high priority to the president and for senior administration staff,” Mr. Leo said in an interview last month that was broadcast on C-Span. He said the number of vacancies was historic. “It is something that is very much on the president’s mind.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-conservatives.html

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/tag/ann-corkery/

koch conf?

...most prominent guest was Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but his table also boasted a mix of high-powered conservatives, including some deep-pocketed donors. Among the elite were Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo, fundraiser and lawyer Ann Corkery, and California real estate magnate Robin Arkley II. “The big prize was to sit next to Scalia,” quipped one attendee at the soiree, adding that Arkley was one such lucky winner.

As it happened, the bash coincided with the birth of a new judicial advocacy outfit that Corkery was instrumental in launching, and Arkley in funding, according to conservative sources familiar with the events. The Judicial Confirmation Network (JCN), set up as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group that doesn’t disclose its donors, would prove to be a crucial player in drumming up support for Bush Supreme Court nominees John Roberts Jr. and Samuel Alito Jr. — eventual allies for Scalia on the Court’s right flank.

In the years since, JCN’s modus operandi and battlegrounds have shifted — particularly since Barack Obama won the White House, which prompted the group to sound the alarm and change its name to the Judicial Crisis Network. In the ensuing years, not only has it fought to block Obama’s nominees to the high court, but it has spent millions to sway state judicial elections and attorneys general races, helping to uphold state laws backed by conservatives, nurture like-minded talent in the states, and advance pro-business, limited-government legal agendas aligned with its donors’ leanings.

To expand its influence in state elections, JCN has emerged as a pipeline for secret money to other, better-known dark money groups like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and the American Future Fund which, in turn, have spent big bucks in state Supreme Court and AG races.

JCN heightened its focus on AG races last year when it pumped $1 million in secret money into the Republican Attorneys General Association, making it the third-biggest contributor to RAGA and helping the GOP pick up three new slots so that it now controls the majority of state AG posts.

JCN’s pivotal part in the surge of spending on court elections has received scant attention. But in 2012, it dished out more than $2 million in court races in Michigan alone — half of that in a single down-ticket state circuit contest, SCHUTTE according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. And over the last two years, the organization contributed a minimum of about $2 million to groups that were involved in 2014 state judicial elections and efforts to influence how judges are chosen. Recipients of JCN checks included the many-tentacled Republican State Leadership Committee, which for the first time invested in court races around the country, spending more on them than any other outside group.

More broadly, in the last election cycle TV ad spending in state Supreme Court elections jumped to at least $13.8 million, according to a preliminary tally by the nonprofit Justice at Stake Campaign. Outside groups, both conservative and liberal, accounted for an estimated $4.9 million of that, or more than 35 percent — a greater share than ever before.

The sharp rise in judicial election spending by JCN and other groups on both sides of the political aisle troubles some judicial candidates who have been targeted. “To the extent that judicial campaigns start looking like other campaigns, there’s a risk that judges will be perceived as having a political agenda,” Sam Ervin IV, a North Carolina Supreme Court justice, told The Daily Beast. Ervin, who was elected in 2014 and is the grandson of the celebrated senator who led Congress’s investigation of the Watergate scandal, lost an earlier race in 2012 after a spending blitz by several outside groups totaling almost $2.6 million, much of it dark money including $75,000 from JCN. “The public is better served, in an environment where judges are elected, if they know the source of the funding for those campaigns,” Ervin, a Democrat, added.

To fill its own coffers, JCN has increasingly relied on funding — to the tune of nearly $4 million, according to IRS documents — from another non-disclosing group, the Wellspring Committee, that’s run by Corkery and was founded seven years ago with the help of conservative donors in the network led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Corkery’s entree to that rarefied network came via JCN supporter Arkley, an early attendee of their famed retreats. And Ann Corkery and her husband, Neil — who is JCN’s treasurer — are central figures in a cluster of other nonprofits, IRS filings show.

A fast rise

JCN’s early niche entailed working in tandem with a well-organized conservative coalition — in which Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive vice president, was a key player — to ensure that Roberts and Alito won Senate confirmation. To that end, JCN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2005 and January 2006 on radio and online ads, as well as on grassroots efforts, to shape public opinion. One example: The group ran a radio ad blitz in late 2005 in Arkansas, where the two Democratic senators’ votes were considered in play, using Christmas themes and an appeal from a black minister.

Well-connected consultants helped JCN get things up and running. One was Gary Marx,a rising social conservative star who Corkery recruited to became the group’s executive director, according to a well-placed source.

Another was New York lawyer Wendy Long, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas. She left the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and signed on as counsel to JCN, becoming the organization’s face on cable news and buttressing its legal bona fides.

But mostly, JCN’s early rise was attributable to Corkery’s ability to rope in a few big donors. “Ann is very good at cultivating relationships and capitalizing on them,” a conservative source observed.

Robin Arkley, the president and CEO of Security National Corp. who had tapped Corkery to be his political liaison and senior advisor, became a key underwriter of JCN’s operations, to the tune of the high six or low seven figures, sources say. The pair went to some of the early fundraising and policy retreats held by the Kochs — events that now draw a glittering cast of wealthy allies and conservative stars to raise millions for the brothers’ network of politically active groups. Arkley was also a financial backer of the Federalist Society. “Arkley helped put Ann in play” as a liaison to funding for advocacy groups on the right, said one conservative.

Corkery had a breakthrough year in 2008. Koch operatives gave her the reins to their fledgling Wellspring Committee, a dark money conduit that began pumping funds to other dark money Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity. At the same time, Corkery served as a finance vice chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Though Corkery’s most direct Koch ties frayed after the ’08 elections and Arkley’s wallet took a hit in the financial crisis, according to sources and reports, Corkery mined other big donors she’d been courting for Wellspring, such as John Templeton Jr., a Pennsylvania philanthropist, and New York hedge fund mogul Paul Singer,conservative sources said.

Conservative and business groups had been pouring money into state court elections through the early 2000s in order to produce a friendlier legal climate — one that curbed tort liability for corporations,for example. Smart marketing and intellectual heft provided by Leo’s Federalist Society helped them notch significant gains. From 2000 to 2009, business and conservative groups spent more than twice as much on state court elections as plaintiffs’ lawyers, unions, and liberal groups — $26.3 million to $11.9 million, according to Justice at Stake.

Wellspring, followed quickly by JCN, became big players in directly and indirectly funding state Supreme Court races. In 2008, for example, Wellspring funneled $200,000 to a group that produced the negative attack ads that helped a conservative eke out a victory over a sitting Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin, tipping control of the bench to the right. In 2009, Wellspring grants went to groups trying to change judicial selection methods in Missouri and Tennessee.

In 2010, Wellspring began sending money directly to JCN, giving it and a related organization, the Judicial Education Project, $400,000; an additional $306,000 came in 2011, then $1.5 million in 2012 and $1.4 million the next year. Big grants also went to other organizations playing in judicial politics — including $400,000 in 2011 for Wisconsin Club for Growth,a major actor in that state’s shift to a conservative Supreme Court majority.

Wisconsin Club for Growth was also aided by JCN to the tune of more than half-a-million dollars from mid-2012 to mid-2013 as JCN began to function as a dark money conduit like Wellspring. The Wisconsin group spent close to $400,000 to help win a second 10-year term for Justice Patience Roggensack.

Conservative control of the Wisconsin court, enabled in no small part by the big pots of dark money dumped into the state, has proved vital to the rejection of challenges to two signature conservative policies championed by GOP Gov. Scott Walker: his initiatives tocurb public sector unions and to require voter IDs. (The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned away a challenge to the voter ID law, so it will stand.)

And an investigation into whether Walker illegally coordinated efforts with several groups — including Wisconsin Club for Growth — in the run-up to his 2012 recall vote now depends on a ruling by the state’s justices. The special prosecutor leading the probe has asked at least one — perhaps all four — of the court’s conservatives to recuse themselves because of support they have gotten from the groups. (Given recent history and the state’s weak judicial conduct rules, court observers say that seems unlikely.)

The lower court money bomb

cmd

The Wellspring Committee is a 501(c)(4) organization operating out of Manassas, Virginia that serves as a fund for conservative political nonprofit groups.^[1] Founded in 2008, the Wellspring Committee regularly contributes funding to nonprofits that create ads for Republican candidates and causes.^[1] However, because the Wellspring Committee does not fund the ads directly, its IRS tax filings maintain the Wellspring Committee is not engaged in "political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office."^[1]

Wellspring is a major funding source for the Judicial Crisis Network, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that uses undisclosed dark money "issue ads" to influence state and federal judicial appointments and elections, and which has spent heavily to oppose President Obama's appointment of a replacement for deceased U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.^[2] JCN was founded by Wellspring president Ann Corkery.^[3]

[hide]

Ties to the Koch Brothers

Koch Wiki
The Koch brothers -- David and Charles -- are the right-wing billionaire co-owners of Koch Industries. As two of the richest people in the world, they are key funders of the right-wing infrastructure, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). In SourceWatch, key articles on the Kochs include: Koch Brothers, Koch Industries, Americans for Prosperity, American Encore, and Freedom Partners.

Koch Wiki

The Koch brothers -- David and Charles -- are the right-wing billionaire co-owners of Koch Industries. As two of the richest people in the world, they are key funders of the right-wing infrastructure, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). In SourceWatch, key articles on the Kochs include: Koch Brothers, Koch Industries, Americans for Prosperity, American Encore, and Freedom Partners.

Wellspring was founded in 2008 "with the help of conservative donors in the network led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch," according to a report by the Center for Responsive Politics. Current president Ann Corkery, who took over Wellspring in 2008, has also worked for Robin Arkley's Security National Servicing Corporation, and the two reportedly attended early donor summits of the Koch brothers' political network.^[4] While Corkery's ties to the Kochs reportedly "frayed" after that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, she continued to raise funds from other Koch network donors, including Paul E. Singer and John Templeton, Jr..^[4]

Donors Not Disclosed

As a 501(c)(4) organization, the Wellspring Committee does not disclose its donors. The group's tax status allows it to be "part of a network of conservative tax-exempt groups that do little but transfer money, via grants, to other groups closer to the political front lines."^[1]

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wellspring is "little more than [a] UPS mailbox," and was created because:

"For donors especially concerned with protecting their anonymity, the bounce pass -- writing a check to a non-disclosing group that'll turn around and give the funds to another non-disclosing group -- can seem attractive. IRS rules prevent the public disclosure of donors to a group like, say, the Faith and Freedom Coalition -- which spent $216,441 on ads in the 2010 election, and $570,744 in 2012, FEC reports show. But why not layer in more protection? That way, if a group is ever forced to say where its money came from -- and there are lawsuits, pending legislation and an array of state attorneys general trying to make that happen -- it will only have to cite the name of other, similarly protected groups. Like Wellspring -- which, as it happens, has given $250,000 to Faith and Freedom.^[1]

Wellspring's "recipient groups spent about $60 million in the 2010 election cycle, and more than double during the 2012 cycle."^[1] A significant portion of that money has also been used to fund State Supreme Court campaigns throughout the U.S.^[1]

Finances

Contributors and Membership

As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, the Wellspring Committee is not required to disclose its donors. A small amount of its revenue has been traced back to identifiable donors; the American Democracy Alliance gave $150,000, Founding Principles PAC gave $1,026 and Rosebush Corp. gave $100,000.^[1][5]

Wellspring has become a major funding source for the Judicial Crisis Network, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that uses undisclosed dark money "issue ads" to influence state and federal judicial appointments and elections. JCN was launched by Wellspring president Ann Corkery, whose husband Neil Corkery serves as JCN's treasurer. Wellspring's secretary and treasurer, Michael Casey, is the son of a JCN board member.^[3]

Core Finances

Wellspring's budget doubled from 2013 to 2014. As detailed under Distribution of Grants and Other Financial Assistance, the bulk of its expenditures each year comprise contributions to the Judicial Crisis Network, which totaled $6.7 million in 2014.

2014^[6]

Total Revenue: $7,802,442
Total Expenses: $8,654,094
- Wellspring President Ann Corkery received $120,000 in compensation for a reported 10 hours of work per week.
Net Assets: $190,191

2013^[7]

Total Revenue: $3,576,053
Total Expenses: $3,038,102
Net Assets: $1,041,843

2012^[8]

Total Revenue: $2,351,661
Total Expenses: $2,409,257
Net Assets: $503,890

Distribution of Grants and Other Financial Assistance

2014

Grants issued:^[6]

Judicial Crisis Network: $6,655,000
Wedgwood Circle Institute: $5,000
American Dream Initiative: $250,000
Adam Smith Foundation: $25,000
Annual Fund: $49,000
Arizona Public Integrity Alliance: $15,000
Federalist Society: $235,000
1st Amendment Alliance Ed: $250,000
North Carolina Chamber of Commerce: $25,000
Rule of Law Project: $30,000
Catholic Association: $650,000

2013

Grants issued:^[7]

Judicial Crisis Network: $1,435,000
State Government Leadership Foundation: $100,000
American Future Fund: $125,000
AMC Annual Fund: $48,000
Catholic Association Inc.: $60,000
Common Sense VA PAC (listed as a 501(c)(4) in the tax filing): $719,193
- This PAC ran ads in Virginia's 2013 election, some against Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe and some for Republican Attorney General candidate Mark Obenshain.^[9] Based on the PAC's filings with the Virginia State Board of Elections, Wellspring's contributed 99.2 percent of the PAC's contributions over $100 in 2013.^[10]

2012

Grants issued:^[8]

American Conservative Union: $240,000
Breitbart Fund: $5,000
Catholic Association: $440,000
Catholic Association Foundation: $10,000
Judicial Crisis Network: $1,515,000
Swim America: $10,000

2008-2011

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the following organizations received assistance from the Wellspring Committee between the years 2008 and 2011:

American Action Network: $305,500
American Energy Alliance: $604,000
American Future Fund: $367,457
American Majority Action (American Majority): $1,020,125
Americans for Job Security: $2,951,922
Americans for Prosperity: $1,651,811
Citizens for the Republic: $360,000
Common Sense Issues Coalition (Common Sense Issues): $50,000
Concerned Women for American Legislative Committee (Concerned Women for America): $50,000
Faith & Freedom Coalition: $250,000
Judicial Crisis Network: $520,000
Judicial Education Project: $186,000
Let Freedom Ring: $25,000
Right to Life: $542,000
RightChange.com: $1,131,459
Susan B Anthony List: $753,278
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce: $200,000
Wisconsin Club for Growth: $400,000 (This grant was reported in 2011.)^[4]

Spending Tied to 2011-2012 Wisconsin Recall and "John Doe" Investigation into Alleged Illegal Campaign Coordination

Wellspring reported a $400,000 grant in 2011 to Wisconsin Club for Growth, which spent $9.1 million during Wisconsin's historic 2012 recall races for Governor, Lt. Governor and State Senate.^[11] That spending was at the center of a John Doe investigation; prosecutors in Wisconsin alleged that Friends of Scott Walker and dark money groups were part of a "criminal scheme" to coordinate activities during the state's 2011 and 2012 recall election, in violation of the state's campaign finance laws.^[12] The group's board of directors includes Eric O'Keefe, a right-wing political operative with deep ties to the Koch brothers.

Wisconsin Club for Growth sued in both state and federal court to stop the probe. In July 2015 the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, whose conservative majority was elected with millions in spending from the outside groups under investigation in the probe,^[13] ruled that Walker's campaign and conservative groups did not violate campaign finance laws.^[14] The ruling effectively rendered Wisconsin's disclosure rules and spending limits meaningless.^[15]

Personnel

Ann Corkery

Ann Corkery serves as president of the Wellspring Committee^[6] and is a partner at Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner LLP. Her official biography describes her as "an expert communication strategist" who "has leveraged her media expertise and sources to shape campaigns and influence outcomes."^[16]

Ann Corkery and her husband Neil are closely involved in a set of nonprofits that seek to advance right-wing judicial and social agendas, several of which receive funding from Wellspring.^[4]

As a fundraiser and recruiter, Corkery was "instrumental" in launching the Judicial Crisis Network in 2008, according to Open Secrets.^[4] At that time Corkery also worked for Robin Arkley's Security National Servicing Corporation, and the two reportedly attended early donor summits of the Koch brothers' political network.^[4]

"Arkley helped put Ann in play" as a liaison to funding for advocacy groups on the right, said one conservative.^[4]

In 2008 Corkery also served as vice chair for finance of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and took over the Kochs' Wellspring Committee.> While Corkery's ties to the Kochs reportedly "frayed" after that, she continued to raise funds from other Koch network donors, including Paul Singer and John Templeton.^[4]

In 2011, Corkery replaced the other two board members of Wellspring, John Klink and Stever Wagner, with her daughter Kathleen and Michael Casey, whose father was a board member of JCN alongside Neil Corkery.^[4]

Corkery had a history in Religious Right activism prior to her involvement with Wellspring and JCN. She has served on the board or acted as an officer for the Catholic League, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the National Organization for Marriage, and the Judicial Crisis Network.^[1] She and her husband Neil Corkery, are known for their "significant political contributors to Republican social conservative candidates" including former Senator Rick Santorum.^[17] In "2003, she was appointed by President Bush to be a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, where she fought for a ban on human cloning; he also made her a delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women."^[1]

Neil Corkery serves as treasurer of JCN, president of JCN's Judicial Education Project, and executive director of the Sudan Relief Fund, and is affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage, ActRight Action, the Catholic Association Foundation, and Catholic Voices.^[4]

Other Personnel

Kathleen Corkery, Director^[6]

Kathleen Corkery is Ann Corkery's daughter.^[3]

Michael Casey, Secretary and Treasurer^[6]

Previously known personnel:

John Klink, Director

Klink also served as Consultant for the Pontifical Council for the Family and President of the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC). He has also served on the executive boards for Unicef and the U.N.'s children's fund. In 2001, Klink was a member of the Republican National Committee's Catholic Task Force and an adviser to President George W. Bush. During that time Klink "advocated against the use of condoms and oral contraceptive pills."^[18][19]

Steve Wagner, Director, Secretary, and Treasurer. Wagner, who was replaced on the board in 2011, told the Center for Responsive Politics, "I never saw any financial records. I was treasurer in name only."^[4]

Articles and References

References

↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 ^1.5 ^1.6 ^1.7 ^1.8 ^1.9 Viveca Novak, Robert Maguire and Peter Overby,Wellspring's Flow: Dark Money Outfit Helped Fuel Groups on Political Front Lines, Opensecrets, November 5, 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Judicial Crisis Network, "JCN Launches 'Let the People Decide' Campaign," press release, February 18, 2016.
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:3.0 ^3.1 ^3.2 Viveca Novak, "Wellspring gives big boost to Judicial Crisis Network with $6.6 million grant," Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets, November 24, 2015.
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:4.00 ^4.01 ^4.02 ^4.03 ^4.04 ^4.05 ^4.06 ^4.07 ^4.08 ^4.09 ^4.10 Viveca Novak and Peter Stone, "The JCN Story: Building a Secretive GOP Machine]," Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets, March 23, 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Peter Overby, Viveca Novak, Robert Maguire Secret Persuasion: How Big Campaign Donors Stay Anonymous, NPR.org, November 6, 2013.
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:6.0 ^6.1 ^6.2 ^6.3 ^6.4 Wellspring Committee, "2014 IRS Form 990," organization tax filing, November 23, 2015.
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:7.0 ^7.1 Wellspring Committee, "2013 IRS Form 990," organization tax filing, December 12, 2014.
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:8.0 ^8.1 Wellspring Committee, "2012 IRS Form 990," organization tax filing, November 19, 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Anti-LGBT, Extremist “Common Sense Virginia” Runs $500k Worth of False Ads Attacking McAuliffe," Blue Virginia, October 22, 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Virginia State Board of Elections, "Campaign Finance Report: Common Sense Virginia (PAC-13-00516)," report accessed April 2016.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Recall Race for Governor Cost $81 Million, Posted: July 25, 2012/Updated: January 31, 2013
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Patrick Marley, Daniel Bice, Bill Glauber, John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of 'criminal scheme', Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 19, 2014.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Brendan Fischer, "After Koch-Tied Judge Is Reversed, Walker Probe Rests with Conflicted WI Supreme Court," Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch, September 25, 2014. Accessed September 30, 2014.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Patrick Marley and Mary Spicuzza, Wisconsin Supreme Court ends John Doe probe into Scott Walker's campaign, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 16, 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Brendan Fischer, "Five Things to Know About the Scott Walker John Doe Ruling," Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch, July 16, 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Stein Mitchell, "Ann Corkery," corporate website, accessed April 2016.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Human Rights Campaign Neil and Ann Corkery, Official Website, accessed November 6, 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Pacific Coast Business Times Staff $22M Bankruptcy Spotlights Montecito, Pacific Coast Business Times, September 14, 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ O'Meara, Ferguson, Whelan and Conway, John M. Klink, Consultant Biography, Official Website, accessed November 6, 2013.

Category:

Koch Connection

http://www.thepelicangrp.com/

O'Meara, Ferguson, Whelan andConway, $ mgr

https://www.nationofchange.org/2022/07/07/opus-dei-supreme-indecency-extreme-deceit/

the current Supreme Court majority that just denied women a legal right to abortion (Dobbs vs. Jackson) consists of religious fanatics whose careers have been fast-tracked (so that young Justices can serve for decades) by ultra-wealthy, like-minded lobbyists and political operatives. The nexus of this activity lies with a powerful arch-conservative organization within the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, that in the U.S. operates out of the Catholic Information Center in Washington D.C.

I am not targeting Catholics but rather the Church’s reactionary, fundamentalist wing. Many Catholic organizations are dedicated to upholding the rights and lives of minorities (and majorities, such as women), victims of pedophilic priests, gays, the poor, immigrants, etc. The fundamentalist wing of any religion has more in common with other creeds’ fundamentalisms than with many of its own co-religionists, whom they often regard as enemies. Catholic fundamentalism is obviously not the only “brand” influencing American politics, but it is the one with a dominant insidious influence on the judiciary.

Opus Dei and its partner organizations have poured tens of millions of dollars into promoting the careers and appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and the five Justices who overturned Roe: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett (Roberts, an arch-conservative, nonetheless dissented on the abortion case).

Opus Dei was founded in Spain by Escriva de Balaguer in 1928 and grew in power, wealth, and influence during the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco who, with significant military help from Nazi Germany, overthrew the legitimate Spanish government and ruled over a police state from 1939-1975. The group extended its power throughout Latin America, supporting Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile and other terrorizing dictatorships. It consistently opposes gay, sexual, and reproductive rights, and the Catholic liberation movements that champion the poor in Latin America. It has been involved in the Vatican’s banking scandals but still wields enormous influence over Vatican finances, as detailed by Robert Hutchison in his book, Their Kingdom Come. Opus Dei’s assets as of 2008 were $2.8 billion, but they have undoubtedly grown since. Popes John Paul II and Francisboth elevated Opus Dei officials to the highest Church offices. One of Opus Dei’s core principles, as articulated by its founder, is to engage in “the sphere of public life”, not because they are human or Catholic rights but because “they are God’s rights…May such ‘fanaticism’ for the Faith…become stronger every day.” Opus Dei is not simply a conservative religious group, it is openly dedicated to wielding political and financial power in nations throughout the world. And that often means promoting and aligning itself with the most violent, reactionary regimes and acting in the shadow realms of political influence.

Opus Dei members were prominent in Trump’s White House, including Attorney General William Barr and Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel. Opus Dei had access to Trump’s budgetdirector,Mick Mulvaney, along with other noted right-wing lobbyists (Heritage Foundation, Koch Industries), meetings the Trump administrationtried to keep secret. Member Larry Kudlow was Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. It may well be the most powerful political lobby in the world and yet its explicit political agenda is absolutely subservient to its extreme, authoritarian religious agenda.

A key fixer in this effort is Leonard Leo. Leo is on the board of directors of the Catholic Information Center (William Barr was a past director) and Executive Vice Presidentof the Federalist Society, a lobbying group that adheres to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution (more on this below). The two organizations are close political allies, as Leo’s dual role suggests. As Trump’s close advisor during his presidency, Leo was responsible for selecting and guiding the Supreme Court nominations of Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch and was instrumental in riddling the lower Federal courts with Trump appointees. Meanwhile, members of both Opus Dei and The Federalist Society include Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Chief Justice Roberts is a Federalist Society member and the Society’s members and supporters are prominent in many of nation’s top law schools and most powerful law firms, which allows it to have an untoward influence over judicial selections. When Clarence Thomas headlined a 2013 Federalist Society fundraiser, guests were seated in proximity to him according to the size of their donations. In effect, the Federalist Society and Opus Dei have become the Supreme Court of the land.

Much of Opus Dei’s influence was exerted via the Wellspring Committee, established and run by Opus Dei members Ann and Neil Corkery in 2008. The Koch brothers were instrumental in providing Wellspring with its first $10 million in seed money. According to Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Corkerys “have been the overseers of massive amounts of money that have gone into federal judicial races.” Wellspring closed down in 2018 but not before passing its mantle to the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN); in 2017 Wellspring transferred $14,814, 998.00, or 94% of its donations that year, to JCN. JCN was formerly directed by Leonard Leo and now by Carrie Severino, who served as Thomas’s law clerk. (Opus Dei’s Roger Severino, Carrie’s husband, was Director of Trump’s Office for Civil Rights). JCN is a 501(c)(4) organization so its donors can remain secret. JCN poured millions into supporting Bush and Trump’s Supreme Court nominees (Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett) and millions blockingObama’s Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

Given Opus Dei’s absolute anti-choice ideology, global power, and influence over the Supreme Court, it is clear the Court’s anti-choice decision was not driven by legal arguments over the right to privacy, strict or “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, or states rights. These were all just window dressing. The Supreme Court—and much of our judiciary—has been taken over by fanatics with a strictly theologicalagenda: to replace “separation of Church and State” with “the Church runs the state”. It is a narrow, fanatical religious ideology that decided the case.

The so-called “originalist” theory of interpreting the Constitution claims the Constitution only protects rights explicitly mentioned in the text. The Constitution itself rejects the “originalist” idea so central to conservative ideology. The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This clearly states that interpreting the Constitution is a living, evolving process, for how else can those “other[s]” rights be “retained by the people”? The Ninth is also a safety valve: “If we left out any important rights, sorry, our bad, it doesn’t mean those rights aren’t protected as well.” The Ninth has been used to uphold such diverse rights as teaching non-English languages, sending kids to private schools, protecting against forced sterilization, and the 1965 Griswold decision overturning bans on contraception, in which privacy was deemed a “penumbra” (also called “unenumerated”) right. The penumbra concept was then applied to abortion in 1973’s Roe decision.

Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, citing both the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments:“This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent.” The Court also recognized that “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary…is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Blackmun’s decision includes an overview of the dramatic shifts in cultural and legal attitudes towards abortion, though most views differentiated abortions in the first 12-16 weeks (before the baby is usually felt moving inside the womb) from those occurring later.

The “sanctity of the foetus”, that is, viewing abortion at any stage of pregnancy as equivalent to murder, is the linchpin of the anti-choice position and its driving emotional trigger. However, even the Catholic Church’s historical opposition to abortion had nothing to do with the sanctity of the foetus; it was aimed at the “sin” of sexual pleasure. Church policy varied over the centuries but the foetus’s life was either absent as an issue or secondary to sexual sin and other theological concerns. St. Thomas Aquinas asserted that in its earlier stages a foetus is in a “vegetal” and then “animal” state before achieving person-hood at some point, most likely at the end of the third month. It wasn’t until 1965 that the Church banned abortion on the basis of sanctity of life rather than sexual sin. However, the Bible passages used to justify this claim 1) do not really address abortion (the BIble is much more direct in advising that adulterers be stoned to death); 2) are drawn mostly from the Old Testament, a Jewish document, significant since the Jewish religion allows abortion; and 3) are in the Bible, which has no legal standing in the United States. Or didn’t.

The Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is only the beginning, as anti-abortion activists and GOP-led extremists mobilize to assault a wide range of rights. The anti-choice movement was never only about abortion. Abortion was used as the emotional catalyst for a broad attack on the values of tolerance and social commitment embodied in Federal guarantees backed by Constitutional authority. The well-being of Americans and our system of government is now in the hands of religious fanatics on a crusade against all those who do not believe in their degraded, medieval version of truth. They are welcome to their beliefs but are not welcome to impose those beliefs on the rest of us, nor to challenge the fundamental values of the United States, which holds the value of human beings above adherence to extreme and rigid political or religious ideologies.

===

ggl 7 22

LOVE OF GOD IS SHROUDED IN SECRECY OPUS DEI ...

https://www.sun-sentinel.com › news › fl-xpm-1990-05-2...

May 24, 1990 — Corkery, 30, has a law degree and a family. She stopped practicing law to raise her two young children. She was skeptical about Opus Dei before ...

Behind the dark-money web that put Barrett (and Kavanaugh ...

https://www.salon.com › ... › Jon Skolnik's Articles

Mar 30, 2021 — Meet Neil and Ann Corkery, a pair of veteran Republican operatives who have cultivated a robust network of conservative and Catholic-affiliated ...

Ann Corkery - EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki

https://en.everybodywiki.com › Ann_Corkery

Nov 28, 2021 — Ann Corkery is an American attorney and political activist. known as the founder of ... In the 1990s, Ann Corkery was a member of Opus Dei.

Career · ‎Connection to 501(c)4... · ‎The Wellspring Committee

Anne Loo on Twitter: "Here's a handy Opus Dei quick list. Add ...

https://twitter.com › loonyberg › status

This story is about OD Bill Barr and his cover-up regarding Inslaw/PROMIS theft by the DOJ. This story is huge. Epic. So is the info in the following tweet.

INSTITUTE INDEX: The secret money behind the push to ban ...

https://www.facingsouth.org › 2019/05 › institute-index...

May 23, 2019 — ... for anonymous contributions to conservative causes and is led by hard-line Opus Dei Catholic Ann Corkery and her husband, Neil Corkery, ...

Wellspring's Flow: Dark Money Outfit Helped Fuel Groups on ...

https://www.opensecrets.org › news › wellsprings-flow

Nov 5, 2013 — For people who guard their privacy closely, Ann and Neil Corkery are ... she was introduced to Opus Dei by Neil; he was a member but later ...

Ann Corkery - Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP

https://www.steinmitchell.com › professionals-Ann-Cor...

Ann Corkery works at the intersection of law, public policy, and communications in the for-profit and non-profit world. She has extensive experience in ...

Wellspring Committee - Add Relationship - LittleSis

https://littlesis.org › org › 266354-Wellspring_Committee

Ann Corkery arch-conservative; Wellspring Committee dirctor, Opus Dei member, former director of ultra-right Catholic League, Becket Fund board member.

Opus Dei: Supreme indecency, extreme deceit

https://www.nationofchange.org › 2022/07/07 › opus-d...

2 days ago — Much of Opus Dei's influence was exerted via the Wellspring Committee, established and run by Opus Dei members Ann and Neil Corkery in 2008.

Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) - InfluenceWatch

https://www.influencewatch.org › non-profit › judicial-...

It was run since its founding by Ann Corkery, one of the co-founders of JCN. ... She has been associated with Opus Dei, a controversial Catholic religious ..:{.

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corkery, ann neil

Donor at the Center of the Supreme Court Ethics Scandal Backs Scharf

Links to Trump’s Mysterious Inaugural Donor

Whitaker’s Watchdog

Contents

Ties to the Koch Brothers

Donors Not Disclosed

Finances

Contributors and Membership

Core Finances

Distribution of Grants and Other Financial Assistance

2014

2013

2012

2008-2011

Spending Tied to 2011-2012 Wisconsin Recall and "John Doe" Investigation into Alleged Illegal Campaign Coordination

Personnel

Ann Corkery

Other Personnel

Articles and References

References