True North Research Graves
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RawStory
Secret donors paid millions to Clarence Thomas-linked law firm with Supreme Court cases
Alexandria Jacobson, Investigative Reporter
September 21, 2026
Secret donors paid millions to Clarence Thomas-linked law firm with Supreme Court cases
Clarence Thomas attends the swearing-in ceremony of Pam Bondi as attorney general at the White House. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Reuters
A conservative law firm with deep ties to Justice Clarence Thomas, President Donald Trump and a history of arguing more than a dozen cases on hot-button right-wing causes before the Supreme Court took in more than $33.5 million from nonprofit dark money networks, according to new watchdog research.
Consovoy McCarthy, a boutique conservative law firm started in 2014, brought in more than $29 million since 2015 from nonprofits associated with Leonard Leo, a co-chair of the Federalist Society, a Project 2025 contributor and architect of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, alone, according to tax filings analyzed by True North Research, a progressive investigative research firm.
Leo has a well-documented history of using his networks to funnel money to ultraconservative causes, from working to limit access to abortion medication to supporting anti-trans laws.
ALSO READ: Bombshell memo on horrific race massacre exposes complicit FBI: 'They lied like crazy'
Nonprofits do not need to disclose the identities of their donors, and when such groups support political causes without revealing the sources of their funding, it's considered “dark money.”
Consovoy McCarthy has “become a go-to for these far-right networks, especially networks tied to Leonard Leo ... who's seeking to impose his agenda on all Americans by weaponizing the court system,” said Alyssa Bowen, deputy director at True North Research.
“We've seen Consovoy McCarthy undertake a ton of cases furthering Leo's agenda as they're enriching themselves with Leo cash and cash from other far-right dark money operatives.”
Have a tip? I want to hear it.
I'm an investigative reporter covering politics and government accountability. If you have information the public should know — inside government, a campaign or anywhere power operates with too little scrutiny — I want to hear from you."
I protect sources and can communicate securely and confidentially.
Alexandria Jacobson
Investigative Reporter, Raw Story
alexandria@rawstory.com
Consovoy McCarthy took in money from nonprofits associated with other conservative activists like Edward Blum, who has brought at least eight cases to the Supreme Court, mostly about race-conscious college admissions and voting rights.
“You've got money funneled through a nonprofit organization, you don't really know if there's a wealthy mega donor or special interest helping bankroll the legal arguments that are appearing before a court,” said Michael Beckel, money in politics reform director at Issue One, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for reducing the influence of money in politics.
“You don't know if a wealthy donor or special interest is helping underwrite this type of legal advocacy when so much money flows through a nonprofit network.”
Consovoy McCarthy argued high-profile cases before the Supreme Court, including Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively ended affirmative action in 2023 and was spearheaded by Blum.
The biggest nonprofit contribution Consovoy McCarthy took in was more than $1.8 million from Students for Fair Admissions in 2018.
In total, the firm took in nearly $8.8 million from the nonprofit founded by Blum, according to tax filings.
“There's a lot of money behind the legal challenges to a lot of these high-profile cases that we see from voting rights law to affirmative action cases, other race-conscious policies,” Beckel said.
“These are very hot-button issues right now, and where there's heat, there's fire, and when you've got the ability to bring big guns into the courtroom, there's some donors who are more than willing to have their money help pay for that type of legal representation all across the ideological spectrum.”
The firm also represented Trump in his effort to conceal his tax returns.
Six of Consovoy McCarthy’s 11 partners clerked for Thomas. Another clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.
“When you've got many of your partners previously clerking for a specific Supreme Court justice, that can give you an edge in the courtroom. That can give you an edge in recruiting and landing new clients. It can give you an edge in landing major cases before the Supreme Court,” Beckel said.
“These are individuals who might have a particular insight into how Clarence Thomas approaches the decisions that he makes on the bench. If you've got lawyers with special insights into how a Supreme Court justice thinks, that can be very lucrative.”
Thomas McCarthy, co-founder of Consovoy McCarthy, Blum and Leo could not be immediately reached for comment for this story.
'Sad state of politics'
The 85 Fund, managed by Leo, is formerly known as the Judicial Education Project and is the oldest in his dark money network. It gave Consovoy McCarthy $5.65 million between 2016 and 2023.
America First Legal Foundation, co-founded by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and a recipient of funding from the Leo-connected donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, paid Consovoy McCarthy nearly $235,000 in 2022.
Do No Harm, a medical and policy advocacy nonprofit associated with Blum and funded by Leo's network, paid Consovoy McCarthy more than $1.4 million total in 2022 and 2024. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated Do No Harm as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group that promotes conversion therapy.
Consovoy McCarthy was paid more than $544,000 from the Project on Fair Representation, founded by Blum.
“There's a coordinated effort by a few billionaire-backed political operatives that are throwing … their weight behind legal cases that undermine policies that help people and benefit politicians or billionaires,” Bowen said.
Speech First, which says it works to protect free speech rights on college campuses and is associated with the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, paid the firm more than $7.3 million total between 2018 and 2024.
The U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, which works on “defending Trump-era deregulation in court,” paid Consovoy McCarthy nearly $200,000.
Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education, which advocates for removing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion from schools, paid Consovoy McCarthy $4 million total since 2021. Blum is a board member.
These nonprofits have been considered dark money networks with lack of transparency about their funders.
“Dark money has an incredible influence in the judicial system, as well as the political arena writ large,” Beckel said....
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Dangerous Supreme Court Precedents Expanding Presidential Power
4,143 views Apr 13, 2026
Lisa Graves is a legal activist and the author of a remarkable and terrifying book, “Without Precedent,” that documents the assault on democracy via the story of John Roberts. I spoke with her about how America has come to its current state, and what the future may hold. Learn more about “Without Precedent” here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/without-...
//
Apr 11, 2026
On the corruption of our politics — and the Supreme Court
bush v gore
CU
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by the way, after um after Thomas voted to effectively make George W. Bush the president, Jenny Thomas was given a
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promotion as the liaison from the Heritage Foundation to the White House and she became the highest paid non-board member of the Heritage
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Foundation. And so she was rewarded uh very well uh for um her work and uh at
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2 minutes, 54 seconds
the at the um basically the consequence of her husband's decision to vote to stop that recount. But so that was
....
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3 minutes, 17 seconds
and it is really a precursor of what to what's happened next, which is that um George W. Bush was reelected as an
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incumbent uh in or elected a new uh in 2004 and there were two vacancies
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that came up immediately. It was for Okconor seat and Renquist seat and Robert's uh John Roberts got the role of chief justice and Samo got the role of
3:39
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associate justice. And then to fast forward to your question about Citizens United, again, this is a five to four
3:47
3 minutes, 47 seconds
decision issued by the Roberts court where Clarence Thomas sat on that case, the fifth vote in essence on that case,
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even though a billionaire named Harlon Crowe had staked his wife Jenny Thomas with $500,000
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to launch a group to take advantage of the decision to come in Citizens United to allow these so-cal these C4 groups
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under the IRS code to spend unlimited money to influence elections. And Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from that case and even had the audacity
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to write a concurring opinion saying that disclosure of money being spent by these groups. So who who the sources are would chill
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speech meaning money like the money to his wife which he did not disclose. And so that decision unleashed a tsunami of
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cash into our elections where candidates are routinely outspent by the outside groups. And this has given a disproportionate an extraordinarily
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disproportionate power to billionaires in our society in America to secretly influence elections in order to get
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people into positions of power to advance their interests like the um like the t huge tax breaks that uh that
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5 minutes
Donald Trump signed into law at the behest of Charles Ko uh and his groups in the first term of of uh of President
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It's only if it comes through another uh nonprofit entity can you see just a glimpse of the sources of the funding.
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So whenever whenever I talk to reporters who are doing those calculations about how much money is being spent by billionaires, I always tell them that um
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their accounts are going to be uh extraordinarily um under the actual reality because we
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know that these outside groups, these C4 groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars cumulatively in the election cycle and the only people who know who's
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giving to them are the groups themselves and probably the candidates know who you know who's some of the candidates. know who's giving to those C4s.
9:05
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Wow. So, if we look at something, I mean, I'm thinking about, you know,
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Peter Teal uh basically bought uh a Senate for JD Vance and but and we I
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think it's a couple hundred million. I don't actually know the number, but the but the numbers we see may actually be only the tip of the iceberg.
9:23
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That's correct. Um there are a couple of you know there are rules in states and also at the federal level for certain types of independent expenditures or if
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you have what's known as a 527 group um which is under the IRS code that is allowed to spend um directly in elections. But even then what you see is
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a shell game. So, for example, um the uh the Republican State Leadership Committee RSLC has created a subgroup um
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uh to to target uh state supreme court races and it's the sole funer of the subgroup. So, when the subgroup
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discloses who funds it, it's it's disclosing its its uh partner organization. So, it doesn't disclose how much that money is from Leonard Leo
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or how much money that that money is from Charles Ko or Ko Industries or the oil companies. that goes into the bigger pool of funds. And so there are all
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these ways in which um I I believe that most of the money that's being spent in our elections in America is not disclosed. It's not disclosed under the
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campaign finance reports of the candidates of the party um of the super PACs because it's it's the C4 money that is most potent because it's the it's the
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vehicle that allows them to hide the true funders, the biggest funders of these operations.
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If we look at issues like uh energy and climate policy, it's there's obviously
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huge amounts of, you know, fossil fuel money flowing into elections, but there's also huge amounts of money into supporting
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uh pseudo research, think tanks, uh a kind of whole universe of um and it it just
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uh it just kind of um if if they're already supplying a very large part of campaign finance. Then add in all of...
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legal af 2024 cult
437,849 views Oct 17, 2024
Lisa Graves of Court Accountability Action and Michael Popok expose that the root of the current corruption and ethical scandals involving Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni go back as far as 2000, when Ginni Thomas then working for the Heritage Foundation was working on the GW Bush transition team if he won the presidency, as Clarence voted to, what else, have Bush win the presidency in Bush v. Gore. Court Accountability Actionhttps://www.courtaccountability.org/
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an ah 10 25
When then-President George W. Bush chose John Roberts to head the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the combination of justices was much different from what it is today.
The High Court leaned conservative and had some hardcore social conservatives (Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia). But conservative Ronald Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy had strong libertarian leanings, joining the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in some landmark gay rights rulings. And Donald Trump's first presidency was more than a decade away.
In 2025, Roberts oversees a hard-right 6-3 GOP-appointed supermajority, half of which was nominated by Trump. Lisa Graves, who heads the judicial watchdog group True North Research, believes that Roberts is doing little to discourage the MAGA agenda — a point she emphasized in an interview with Mother Jones' Pema Levy published in Q&A form on October 3.
Referencing 2022's Trump v. the United States, Graves told Levy that "the immunity decision signaled that Roberts has moved more into MAGA Land."
Graves continued, "He has really taken the driver's wheel in terms of embracing a MAGA agenda, and that's reflected in the January 6 trio of cases last year — and in particular, the unprecedented immunity decision, and is reflected in the rulings this year, these emergency rulings. He is embracing the White House’s position on immigration in a way that is not consistent with most of the business community that does not support these sort of aggressive attacks on immigration and our employment systems."
In Trump v. the United States, the High Court's GOP supermajority ruled that U.S. presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts but not for "unofficial" acts. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her scathing dissent, warned that the decision gives a dangerous amount of power to the federal government's executive branch.
"At his confirmation hearings," Graves recalled, "(Roberts) affirmed that no president is above the law, no one is above the law. And then, when it mattered most for him to stand for that principle, he not only abandoned it — he aggressively wrote this very expansive opinion, ignoring the language of the Constitution that says in two places, the job of the president is to faithfully execute the law. And nothing could be less faithful than breaking the law."
*Read the full Mother Jones interview at this link.
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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.
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apr 2023
https://truthout.org/articles/new-details-from-leonard-leos-trust-fund-expose-the-inner-workings-of-the-right/
newly obtained documents show that the billion-dollar trust fund given to Leonard Leo — the right-wing attorney and longtime leader the Federalist Society who orchestrated Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks — has dumped at least $411 million into fueling right-wing infrastructure in the U.S. since mid-2020.
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The latest IRS filing of the new nonprofit, Marble Freedom Trust — obtained by :(style="background-color:#f8f8f8ff"):}::{Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group — shows that Leo has spent at least $182 million during the Biden administration to fund right-wing groups from May 1, 2021, through April 30, 2022. 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.
Leo chose to have most of that, more than $153 million, wash through the Schwab Charitable Fund, a “donor-advised fund” that serves as a passthrough to help obscure the money trail between a funder and its beneficiaries. In recent years, since Leo secured control of $1.6 billion in the largest single gift of its kind from Chicago billionaire Barre Seid, Leo’s network of groups has relied heavily on donor-advised funds to move cash between entities in ways that can help keep the original donor secret from the public.
marble’s filing included only one other grantee: the Concord Fund (also known as the Judicial Crisis Network), to which it gave a $29 million gift. The Concord Fund then paid $12 million in fees to CRC Advisors, a for-profit PR firm that Leo has helped helm since 2020.
Kyle Herrig, the president of Accountable told Truthout that in his opinion “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. This kind of corruption is par for the course for Leo. It clearly pays to do his bidding."
before Accountable’s latest revelations, theCampaign 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.
Despite more than $1 billion in assets, Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust has no publicly known website, and its street address is actually a UPS drop box in Utah. Meanwhile, however, Marble disclosed spending nearly $250,000 on “office expenses.” Its disclosed phone number, with an area code for southeastern coast of Florida, has been held for years — well before Marble was created — by Leo’s longtime collaborator Neil Corkery, an anti-gay rights and anti-abortion operative central to Leo’s court capture network.
This latest filing also 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.
Marble’s filing shows that in its second year of operations Leo gave himself a raise from $350,000 to $400,000 a year for working part-time (25 hours a week) for the trust he controls. It also reported that he spends 10 hours a week on Rule of Law Trust, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit launched in 2018 with a gift of nearly $80 million from a donor kept secret from the public. Leo is the only trustee of that entity, and Corkery holds its books. Like Marble, it has no website and its address is a drop box location. Its listed phone goes to a law firm.
Marble’s latest filing shows that Leo’s billion-dollar trust also added a new employee to its operations: Alex Marshall as CIO, an acronym that typically stands for Chief Information Officer. His salary was listed at a whopping $764,000.
According to Accountable, until 2021 Marshall was likely working as a branch manager for the investment firm Oppenheimer & Co., a brokerage firm and investment bank, and was likely making hundreds of thousands less because Marshall’s broker record indicates he completed “entry-level” financial industry exams for principal and supervisory roles.
How did Alex Marshall get plugged into Leo’s operation?
As True North Research’s Lisa Graves first uncloaked, Alex Marshall is married to Maria Marshall, who currently works at Leo’s CRC Advisors and previously worked for the Federalist Society, the networking group created to get right-wing lawyers into powerful offices. Marshall’s title was “director of operations” in the “Office of the Federalist Society’s Executive [Vice President].” That was Leo’s office, where she handled his schedule, among other roles. She previously worked as U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter’s scheduler.
She left her day job to work with Leo, who also left his day job at the Federalist Society in 2020 to help lead the PR firm Creative Response Concepts, which rebranded as CRC Advisors, though he still helps lead and fund the Federalist Society as co-chair of its board.
While she was working for Leo at the Federalist Society, Leo’s Rule of Law Trust paid nearly $600,000 to YAS, LLC. That is the name of the Washington, DC-filed consulting firm created in 2015 and owned by Maria Marshall. Leo’s Rule of Law Trust paid YAS another $175,000 in 2020, after he left his employment but not his leadership role with the Federalist Society.
The Marshalls were also guests at the special table purchased by the major “anonymous” donor to the renaming ceremony of George Mason University’s law school in tribute to Antonin Scalia, an event cohosted by Leo.
Allison Pienta, a George Mason student who worked with UnKoch My Campus to obtain public records, revealed that the anonymous donor who gave $20 million to rebrand the law school and put Leo in a key role was none other than Barre Seid. (Charles Koch also gave $10 million to fund the law school.) There is no indication that Seid, a notoriously secretive billionaire, was there at the Scalia tribute dinner cohosted by Leo.
The Marshalls were at that special table alongsideJonathan Bunch, who was later named as a successor trustee at Marble, meaning he is Leo’s potential successor at the billion-dollar trust. Bunch, who is now listed as president of CRC Advisors, was paid more than $1.5 million for consulting by Leo’s Rule of Law Trust in 2018, when he was also working at the Federalist Society with Leo. Two years later, as Heidi Przybyla from Politico documented, Bunch and his wife closed on a $1.28 million home on the Chesapeake Bay, a second home a few hours south of their longtime home in a suburb of Washington, D.C.
As Accountable uncovered, since the launch of YAS, the Marshalls also purchased a second home near the beach in Avalon, New Jersey, the third most expensive zip code in the state. That research revealed that the Marshalls rent out the home, valued at $1.38 million home, for up to $7,700 a week depending on the season.
As Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg documented in the Washington Post, on the eve of the Senate vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination by Donald Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court,Leo bought a $3.3 million seaside mansion in Maine.
Just two months after that story broke, and less than a year after he closed on the mansion, Leo paid off the mortgage in full, for more than $2 million, while he was still working as the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, with a six-figure salary. As the Post revealed, a year earlier, after Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and as Leo was advising Trump on packing the Supreme Court as well as aiding the effort to get Trump’s nominees confirmed, Leo paid offhis 30-year mortgage 22 years ahead of schedule.
As Politicolater detailed, after officially joining CRC Advisors, Leo bought a second mansion in Maine, and has spent his growing wealth by purchasing four new cars, paying private school tuition for his children, and obtaining a wine buyer and locker at Morton’s Steakhouse. He has also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to religious groups and he has also spent money on electoral candidates himself. Additionally, Leo-tied nonprofits have directed millions of dollars to playing an increasing role targeting voters around elections.
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.
As Politico noted, “Campaign-style politics — and the generous paydays that go along with it — are now adjacent to the Supreme Court, the one U.S. institution that’s supposed to be immune to it.”
Leo’s ties to such efforts are not only recent. Last month, the Washington Post revealed that in2012 Leo had been instructing Kellyanne Conway, who ran the Polling Company, to bill the Judicial Education Project (now known as the 85 Fund and the Honest Elections Project) to pay Ginni Thomas up to $100,000.She is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.That is, Leo was secretly orchestrating the pay of the wife of a Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, from a secret funder. That funder’s identity remains hidden. That year, the Judicial Education Project also paid CRC $165,000. CRC later acquired the Polling Company in 2017, with the help of another Leo group, as Politico revealed late last year.
Leo’s income from his for-profit operations or any consulting, such as CRC Advisors, is not required to be publicly disclosed.
The new filing that Accountable.US obtained provides vital insights into how Leo is using the billion that Seid gave him and also provides new information about the shape of his efforts to remake our courts and our country to advance his view of the world.
“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,” Herrig told Truthout. “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.”
Note: Lisa Graves, True North’s executive director, contributed to this piece. A correction was made post-publication to correct a typo in a date (changing “May 1, 2020” to “May 1, 2021).
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https://truenorthresearch.substack.com/p/how-one-rich-dude-targeted-colleges
4 parts
charles Koch Set His Sights on Funding Who Teaches College StudentsandWhat They Teach
By Caroline Jones and Lisa Graves for True North Research and the BOLD ReThink
Quick Recap.America’s student debt crisis is the partial result of public policy preferences pushed decades ago by free market fundamentalists like Milton Friedman and Charles Koch, as described in ourfirst installment.
Oursecond installment demonstrated how Friedman and Koch advanced an anti-government agenda that has resulted in saddling generations of Americans with student loan debt.
Ourthird installment revealed how Koch’s first non-profit advocated for public universities to cost a lot more for students to attend, embraced student loans to cover higher costs due to slashing public subsidies, and urged corporate colleges.
This week, we detail how Koch sought to capture universities to train brigades of students and scholars in his free market fundamentalism. This includes his attack on the notorious “Powell Memo” for not going far enough to ensure that the corporate view of America is taught at universities and to secure a cadre of academics to attack government (that is, democratic) regulation of corporations.
Koch Attacked Government over Control of What Students Learn and Who Teaches Them — as He Sought that Power through His Wealth
Some of the pamphlets published or reprinted by Charles Koch’s Center for Independent Education (CIE) attack potential methods of “state control” over education made possible by public funding.
Tactics, such as teacher selection and dictating curriculum, are also methods that Koch and his dark money network have sought to implement as part of their efforts to capture education.
One example of the critique of “the state” came from Dr. Benjamin A. Rogge—amember of the Mont Pelerin Society alongwith Charles Koch, Koch’s lieutenant George Pearson, Milton Friedman, and F.A. Hayek. Rogge contributed a piece warning that“[t]o expect those who provide the subsidies to refrain from interfering with the operation of the schools is to make a demonstrably weak assumption." Friedman credited Rogge with organizing the lectures that became the foundation for Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, which attacks the idea of public universities and schools.
Echoing Rogge, Koch’s right-hand man George Pearson also warned against public funding of education asserting that “extensive interference into these critical areas of teacher and textbook selection is cause for deep concern.” For additional information on such attacks on the public interest, see Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, and check out the writings of In the Public Interest.
Charles Koch Wanted to Create a Cadre of Professors to Teach What He Wanted Taught
Elaborating on the tie between education funding and ideological outcomes, Koch himself said in 1974:
"[T]he development of talent is, or should be, the major point of all these efforts. By talent, I mean those rare, exceptionally capable scholars or communicators willing to dedicate their lives to the cause of individual liberty."
Koch urged business leaders to stop providing general support to universities without requiring the funding promote a corporate agenda of advancing “free market” ideology on campus:
"[W]e should cease financing our own destruction and follow the counsel of David Packard, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, by supporting only those programs, departments or schools that contribute in some way to our individual companies or to the general welfare of our free enterprise system."
In that 1974 speech, which researcher Connor Gibsonhelped uncover, Koch claimed that “business has consciously assisted the government in destroying the free market.”
This speech was given during the second term of GOP President Richard M. Nixon, a few months before he resigned in disgrace. The Libertarian Party had been launched in 1971 in response to Nixon’s price controls in a period of inflation. Koch-funded groups in the 1970s also denounced new protections for our environment that sought to constrain corporations.
Koch’s 1974 speech was part of a meeting he organized titled “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality” at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS was founded in 1961 by F.A. “Baldy” Harper to advance libertarian theories more radically than the Foundation for Economic Education by, for example, calling all taxes “theft,” despite the democratically approved constitutional amendment authorizing income taxes.
Charles Koch began supporting IHS in 1964, and took over IHS in 1973 after Harper died. Koch was a fan of Harper, who had written a piece called “Why Wages Rise” thatKoch said changed his life. In it, Harper claimed that wages rise due to worker productivity, not due to public policy changes like the national minimum wage or negotiations by labor unions.
Harper’s claim in that pamphlet, which Koch’s CIE later promoted, has been utterly debunked by the reality lived by American workers for years. Wages have indisputably stagnated despite massive increases in worker productivity. That productivity has netted massive payouts to executives and corporate shareholders, while workers’ benefits have been slashed and huge companies increasingly outsource work to contractors with no benefits at all. Despite such abject failure, Harper’s theories live on through Koch’s decades of infusion of cash to IHS as a vehicle for Koch to get right-wing theories about our economy and the role of our government mainstreamed.
At that meeting, Koch also asserted that:
“Anti-capitalist feelings in the United States are probably more virulent today than ever before. Yet the effort to stem this challenge to our traditional economic values have been ineffective. It is crucial that we understand what is happening, why the defensive efforts have floundered, and what approach, if any, would succeed.”
The Powell Memo.Koch also expressly criticized the“Powell Memo,” a blueprint for expanding corporate power in American democracy, which was written by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
This was before President Richard Nixon named Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. His confirmation was opposed by the NAACP due to Powell’s role in helping white parents get state funding for private education for their kids to avoid the racial integration ordered by Brown v. Board of Education. (For more details on this point, read Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s series of speeches about Powell, starting with this one. You can also read the documentation from John Conyers’ Senate testimony on behalf of the NAACP against Powell here.)
Powell used his perch on the nation’s highest court to engraft his personal views of corporate “rights” onto constitutional law. (Learn more about the memo here in Charlie Cray’s analysis for Greenpeace in 2011.)
Powell’s memo was secret at the time, until columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about it in September 1972, after Powell was confirmed to the Court. That memo is now infamous for urging new structures to advance corporate power over public policy and throughout American society. It specifically urged leveraging the money controlled by CEOs to reshape higher education, the courts, policymaking, and the media.
Using feverish rhetoric, Powell claimed socialism was spreading and that, in the middle of the Nixon administration, no one in America had less influence in Congress and on public policy than businessmen. That was not true then, and it is even less true now 50 years later.[nice grfx]
Koch and similarly-minded right-wing millionaires, like weapons merchantJohn M. Olin and the foundation in his name and Joseph Coors of the eponymous beer fortune, were allied in spending significant sums on the defense of the free enterprise system.
Powell’s memo urging CEOs to defend free enterprise also praised his fellow members of the Mt. Pelerin Society Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, along with the Institute for Humane Studies, for providing solutions to what he calls decades of anti-capitalism in the U.S.
Koch’s Own Blueprint for Creating Cadres at Universities to Advance His Worldview.Here are some additional excerpts from Koch’s speech about the Powell Memo and higher education. (You can read Charles Koch’s full speech on this at True North’s KochDocs.org. Also, check out this modern rejoinder to the Powell Memo.)
Koch asserted that the business community must first recognize a “fundamental error” of the Powell Memo, which Koch said was the assumption that most in the business community even supported their radical “free market” idea of capitalism and that “there currently exists a free market to be defended and preserved.”
He also made these dramatic assertions (emphasis added):
“First, we have allowed the free market to be blamed for fostering economic crises when, in fact, a free market did not even exist at the times the crisis occurred.”
“Second, we have supported the very institutions from which the attack on free markets emanates. Although much of our support has been involuntary through taxes, we have also contributed voluntarily to colleges and universities on the erroneous assumption that this assistance benefits business and the free enterprise system, even though these institutions encourage extreme hostility to American business.”
“Third, we have accepted the concept that the corporation has a broad social responsibility beyond its duty to its shareholders… Yet the businessman has come to believe that ‘he is defending free enterprise when he claims that he is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit, but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends. When the businessman does this, he is in fact preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.”
Koch also discused the mechanisms to get his worldview entrenched at universities, advocating “radical new efforts” (emphasis added):
“As I perceive the situation in which the pro-capitalist businessman finds himself today, there are basically four ways in which he can fight for free enterprise- through education, through the media, by legal challenges, and by political action…”
“[T]he educational route is both the most vital and the most neglected.”
“The important strategic consideration to keep in mind is that any program adopted should be highly leveraged so that we reach those whose influence on others produces a multiplier effect. That is why educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”
“We desperately need to develop additional talent capable of doing the research and writing that undergird the popularizing of capitalist ideas...While business has sometimes shown an interest in establishing appropriate chairs at universities, there is so little first-rate talent available that this effort has often resulted merely in a shift of one of the few free-market scholars from one university to another.”
”Many things can be done to develop this talent: financing fellowships for graduate students to work under teachers sympathetic to the free market; sponsoring conferences where scholars and students gather to discuss the market economy; arranging publication and distribution of scholarly books; and ensuring that able students can find attractive opportunities as teachers or research scholars. But business must make its funds available for such purposes and use its influence to provide openings. I believe that this long-term, educational approach is absolutely necessary to restore the free enterprise system.”…
“The development of a well financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us at the moment. And this task is not impractical. As the Powell Memorandum points out, ‘business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.’ But the system can be restored if business will re-examine itself and undertake radical new efforts to overcome the prevalent anti-capitalist mentality.”
Koch also issued a broad-based attack on progressive public policies, asserting:
The Libertarian Party Emerges and Advances Koch’s Agenda.Nearly a year after this speech, Koch began looking for ways to maximize funding of the new Libertarian Party and by 1976, Koch had become the biggest underwriter of that new political party. It amplified his attacks on funding our government to advance the common good. Indeed, the Libertarian Party took credit for helping to foment tax revolts in the late 1970s (like California’s Prop. 13 and protests in Illinois and elsewhere) that limited state tax revenue and helped put pressure on reducing public subsidies for public universities.
The Koch-funded Reason magazine and other entities he was bankrolling also helped advance that agenda. His brother, William, later claimed that Charles was using Koch Industries to subsidize his personal politics without the consent of the other major owners of the company, allegations Charles Koch denied. (Learn more about Koch Industries from the researchers at DeSmog Blog.)
However, some libertarians were so concerned with the amount of Charles Koch’s money dominating the movement’s outlets that it was they who dubbed his influence “the Kochtopus.” Democrats only started reckoning with Koch’s growing power three decades later and reprised that moniker, afterJane Mayer’s breakthrough article on the Koch brothers for the New Yorker in 2010.
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The Cato Institute also pushed for state budget limits and a federal balanced budget amendment. Koch launched Cato with George Pearson and the Libertarian Party’s Ed Crane in the mid-1970s as a rebrand of a foundation Koch created in his own name),
In essence, a growing array of Koch-funded groups started pushing to starve the state and federal governments in a variety of ways, which over many years have led to cuts how much the costs of public universities are subsidized by taxes. These diminished subsidies have helped fuel the rising spiral of student debt. That includes Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was launched in the early 1980s and which spawned FreedomWorks and Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, which has opposed student debt relief and more while also pushing for the tax cuts Trump signed in 2017).
David Koch Became One of the Most Influential Politicians to Never Win Office.Charles Koch also found a home-grown agent for his electoral agenda in his brother David, who agreed to fund the Libertarian Party’s bid for the White House in 1980 by running as Vice President. David spentmore than $2 million of David Koch’s own money. That spending was made possible due to a loophole in the Federal Election Campaign Act created by the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo,litigation that was subsidized in part by the Libertarian Party and its new big donor, Charles Koch.
The fact that the Libertarians would never win their campaign was not the point, nor was it the end of their message. Instead, the Koch-funded Libertarian Partyhelped amplify Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the role of government. The1980 Libertarian platform also built on anti-government sentimentfueled by the anti-tax revolts. The Koch-endorsed platform also pushed for the abolition of more several federal agencies along with the repeal of tax laws. The party’s platform also called for the privatization of all public schools. [pix]
Why Do These Kochian/LibertarianTheories Matter?At the beginning of the 1970s, withstate subsidies covering 65% of college costs in most states, higher education without massive debt was attainable for many low- to middle-income families in the U.S.
After pressures to limit public funding of higher education, federal student loans began togrow rapidly, with loan default ratesspiking in the 1980s. Even as college costs rose and family income stagnated, federal education subsidies didn’t fill the gap—in fact, the inflation adjusted value of the federal Pell grant for low income students actuallydecreased by 12% throughout the 1980s.
Today, after nearly 50 years of ideological and political maneuverings by Koch and his anti-government allies, public subsidies coverless than 30% of the costs of higher education, in general. Meanwhile, student loan debt in 2020reached $1.56 trillion.
The student loan debt crisis was not inevitable but it is a product of the kind of selfish public policy choices that have been pushed by Charles Koch in innumerable ways.
In next week’s final installment in this series, we will examine Charles Koch’s growing influence on campuses in the U.S. His agents have leveraged his donations to shape what is taught in universities and career paths for scholars aligned with Koch’s free market fundamentalism. Using many of the same tactics Koch’s lieutenant once warned against, Koch has seemingly exploited university funding gaps he and his allies helped create, and in their own words, now “the network is fully integrated.”
The Shot
This week as Afghanistan fell, one Member of Congress wastouting the Taliban. Really. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has been touted as a “Champion Woman” by the Koch-funded Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). IWF has also lauded Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter forspreading lies about vaccines. For more on Boebert’s claims regarding the January 6th insurrection,check out True North’s timeline here.
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For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly funded, initiated, and supported efforts to dismantle democracy in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.
Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”
The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.
READ MORE:How Koch Industries is fighting democracy both 'at home and abroad': journalist
Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively spent more than $1 billion on the 2020 election.
One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.
Soon after the election, Koch released Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”
The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.
READ MORE:Charles Koch must be held accountable for his climate disinformation campaign
But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.
Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.
The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.
Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.
READ MORE:'That's oligarchy': Bernie Sanders batters billionaires over election spending
Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.
MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”
Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.
READ MORE:Koch keeps doing business in Russia as top journalist says family fortune came from Hitler: report
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