Meet Leonard Leo – Trump’s most powerful weapon in his religious war on woke

With ties to the controversial Project 2025 and as a kingmaker of the Supreme Court, the faith-driven operator is the spider at the centre of the new conservative movement declaring war on liberal America. After their success with overturning abortion rights, they are now setting their sights on everything from gay marriage to access to contraception. Alex Hannaford reports

Leo is seen by many as being one of the architects behind the Trump 2.0 era (AP/AFP/Getty)

Two men in suits are sitting next to one another on a stage, laughing. The man on the left is instantly recognisable – it’s Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the US Supreme Court. The man on the right, however – short grey hair, round spectacles – isn’t as distinguishable at all. And yet, Thomas doesn’t hesitate when he refers to him as “the number three most powerful person in the world.”

It may have been a joke – partially, at least – but that man is Leonard Leo and is seen by many as being one of the architects behind the Trump 2.0 era. He has links to the controversial Project 2025 – drafted by dozens of Donald Trump’s former administration officials and other loyalists, nearly half of which have been the recipients of dark money contributions from groups tied to Leo.

He is also responsible for one-third of the justices on the Supreme Court and its lurch to the right. With the ear of incoming president Donald Trump, Leo himself has said he plans to “crush liberal dominance” in the US.

The decision to reverse Roe v Wade, which abolished the right to abortion in America, could be just the beginning.

He and the powerful groups he’s aligned with are now setting their sights on LGBT+ rights, ways to dismantle state schools (funnelling money instead to private Christian schools), and making access to contraception more difficult. One of their main targets is said to be Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling establishing marriage equality for gay couples.

Born in New York in 1965, at school, Leo was nicknamed the “Moneybags Kid”, so astute he was at raising cash for his high school prom. He studied government at Cornell University, and returned later to study law, before devoting his time to establishing a web of nonprofits and politically aligned organisations that have attracted huge donations from the mega rich. But his driving force has always been his faith.

As Andrew Seidel, who works for a nonprofit called Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said, “Leo is a deeply conservative Catholic, and deeply religious.”

According to an investigation by ProPublica last year, the seeds of Leo’s plan to stack the courts in order to overturn rulings like Roe v Wade were sewn decades ago.

Their report illustrates how he “began building a machine to do just that” – forging friendships with justices behind the scenes, holidaying with them, and placing allies in positions of influence across the federal government and judiciary. To pay for all this, according to ProPublica, “Leo became one of the most prolific fundraisers in American politics.”

Seidel, a lawyer and author of The American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom, describes Leo as the “spider at the centre of the web of the conservative legal movement”, and said that when he was writing his book on the Supreme Court, one particular quote stuck out for him. It was from one of Leo’s former employees who told him Leo “had figured out 20 years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war – abortion, gay rights, contraception. Conservatives didn't have a chance if public opinion prevailed, so they needed to stack the courts. And that is exactly what they did.”

Leo speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC in 2019 (The Washington Post/Getty)

Leo played a crucial role in shaping Trump's judicial nominations, which are seen as key to how he’ll be able to shape the law in America for generations. He crafted the list of potential justices Trump released during his 2016 presidential campaign, advising him on selecting Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett (who replaced the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) for the Supreme Court.

Long before that, he contributed to the confirmation of conservative justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.

“And the reason I think that is so striking is because it admits – it confesses – the anti-democratic goal; his entire objective,” says Siedel. “If they don't stack the court, the majority will rule. If they don’t stack the court, democracy will work. And so he went about orchestrating his hostile takeover.”

In his book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, British author Gareth Gore devotes a fair amount of space to Leonard Leo and his deep connections with the secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei.

“The recruitment of Leonard Leo would cement ties between Opus Dei and the US Supreme Court that had been developing for decades,” Gore writes. “[His] contribution to this reshaping of the Court would soon involve much more than providing a list of amenable conservative justices. Within weeks of [justice Antonin] Scalia’s death, he began to mobilise hundreds of millions of dollars to make his dream of reshaping the Court – and wider society – a reality.”

At a black tie event at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, which Gore describes as Opus Dei's most public-facing institution in America, Leo told the audience gathered there that the Catholic Church “faces vile and amoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots … [who] vandalised and burnt our churches after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, they show up at events like this one trying to frighten and muzzle us.”

With his wife Sally at the 2018 The International Debutante Ball (Patrick McMullan/Getty)

“Without irony,” Gore writes, “Leo suggested that the audience that night, some of whom had paid as much as $25,000 a table, were the oppressed minority.”

So, what next could be on the agenda for the man who apparently wants to reset America, as he would see it, onto a righteous path?

Leo left the Federalist Society, an American conservative and libertarian legal organisation, four years ago to start a new group, CRC Advisors, which in 2022 was awarded a $1.6bn donation from a wealthy Chicago businessman named Barre Seid – an amount The New York Times described as among the largest contributions ever made to a political nonprofit.

Gore writes: “Having orchestrated a conservative, Catholic takeover of the Supreme Court, Leo now set his sights on things much broader and outlined his ambitions for orchestrating a similar revolution in other sectors of society, such as education, the media, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

“Wokeism in the corporate environment, in the educational environment, one-sided journalism, entertainment that's really corrupting our youth,” he quotes Leo as saying.

Seidel tells The Independent that one of the things Leo has proven particularly good at is “creating this opaque network of organisations and charities to mask what he is trying to do. We do know that he, along with the Koch brothers, for instance, put a ton of money behind some of the groups that are behind Project 2025” – referring to the political initiative to promote right-wing policies in order to reshape the federal government after Trump assumes the presidency.

Abortion rights activists march in protest of Roe v Wade being overturned (AFP/Getty)

“I would still expect to see [Leo] have influence on judicial selections,” Seidel says. “But the reality is he already did that job. He already kind of completed that mission. And so now he has to do what he did with the federal courts with other areas of society.”

So what could that mean, exactly? According to Seidel, Leo and his ilk are now “coming after the culture”. For one, he says, there are lawyers on Leo’s side who argue that, despite it being amended over subsequent decades, an 1873 Act of Congress that made it a federal offence to distribute contraception through the mail or across state lines, could be interpreted to mean contraception is illegal.

“Gay marriage is definitely on the chopping block. There are at least five, probably six justices on the [Supreme] court right now that would vote to overturn that,” Seidel says, “and there’s a Christian Nationalist group called Liberty Counsel based in Florida, that has a case at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal right now arguing that the Obergefell decision is unconstitutional.”

Walt Borges, a professor of political science in Dallas, Texas, thinks Leo’s ambition is, ultimately, to be a kingmaker. “Most Americans don’t realise that Lewis Powell, who [president] Richard Nixon ultimately appointed to the US Supreme Court, wrote what we now call the Powell Memo, basically a political strategy to neutralise liberal concepts in court.”

Written in 1971, the Powell Memo was penned at a time when corporate America felt under siege by new social movements (think: Big Tobacco vs campaigners against the dangers of smoking.) “And it worked,” Borges says. “The Powell Memo was a blueprint for years. And so Leo’s blueprint will be dominant for years.”

The activist has his own vision for the Supreme Court (Getty/Accountable US)

Not for nothing, it seems, did The Nation magazine call the memo “the Project 2025 of the Nixon era”.

Seidel says it’s hard, when quantifying all that Leo has achieved and what he apparently plans to do, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist. “But,” he says, “sometimes there really are conspiracies to seize power. And that’s what we’re talking about.”

Earlier this week, The Independent reported on the right-wing think tank, the America First Policy Institute, that’s replacing the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 in terms of setting a course for Trump’s focus.

It said that the America First Policy Institute has promoted policies that involve implementing loyalists to executive branch positions, forcing local and state law enforcement agencies to comply with mass deportation, and taking a confrontational approach to relations with China.

According to the website Monitoring Influence, which tracks politically motivated organisations and those who fund them, in 2020, America First Works, which it calls the sister organisation of America First Policy Institute, gave nearly $5m specifically earmarked for Leonard Leo’s Honest Elections Project, “a group that works to advance more restrictive voting laws”.

Monitoring Influence said Honest Elections Project “spread misleading information in the leadup to the 2020 election and held a series of conferences in 2021 with state lawmakers and leading conservative advocacy groups to train them on implementing more restrictive voting legislation”.

Such organisations linked to the new right movement weave a tangled web, but as the ramifications of a second Trump term start to come into sharp focus that web is beginning to reveal itself. Characters like Leonard are at its heart...