Leonard Leo in Byline Supplement
My latest report in Byline Supplement — a Q & A with Tom Carter on “Leonard Leo, the US Supreme Court, and the ‘Catholic’ Mafia”
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Byline Supplement supporters may have already read my Q&A from today with Tom Carter on Leonard Leo, which can currently be found on Byline’s front page:
Below is an excerpt from the report:
Leonard Leo, the US Supreme Court, and the Catholic 'Mafia': A Q&A with Tom Carter
Heidi Siegmund Cuda interviews Tom Carter about his decade-long efforts to warn the US about religious ultra-conservative Leonard Leo
A portrait by Russian painter Igor V Babailov of Margaret Leo hangs at the entrance of the Opus Dei Center in Washington DC.
As Jesus prays with his hands upon the young girl’s head, an inscription reads:
“Margaret Leo of McLean, pray for us”
The artist, who has painted portraits of Vladimir Putin, Patriarch Kirill, Rudy Giuliani, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, was given a knighthood in 2017 by the Order of St. Anne, named after the daughter of Peter the Great, and bestowed upon him by a disputed claimant of the headship to the House of Romanov.
The portrait of the smiling young girl, who suffered in her life due to spina bifida and died at 14, can also be found on cards handed out at the Opus Dei Center, encouraging guests to pray to her. A book titled The Littlest Suffering Souls encourages her canonization to sainthood.
Her father, a Washington DC lobbyist and lawyer named Leonard Leo, just may be powerful enough to make it happen.
“They pass out these cards at the Catholic center encouraging you to pray to Margaret Leo to get Jesus to do whatever you are praying for,” veteran reporter Tom Carter told Byline Supplement. “I pray Margaret gets Jesus here and tells her dad and Clarence Thomas to stop trying to destroy democracy, but she hasn't heard my prayer.”
Carter has been on a somewhat biblical sojourn of his own. A retired Washington DC reporter, Carter worked for Leonard Leo for three years at a non-profit organization and what he learned alarmed him so much, he wrote a personal reflection about the decade he spent trying to get the New York Times and other high-profile media outlets to sound the alarm bell on Leo.
Leo is operating with a $1.6 billion dollar war chest from a billionaire named Barre Seid, and is responsible for six of the religious ultra-conservatives on the Supreme Court. Leo’s network of nonprofits are under investigation by the Attorney General of the District of Columbia, and so far, he has defied subpoenas. A Federalist Society co-chair and Trump’s former judicial advisor, Leo’s tentacles appear everywhere in far-right circles, from the Council for National Policy, the Judicial Crisis Network, to the Heritage Foundation, credited with producing the democracy wrecking ball Project 2025 plan.
Q & A
HSC: As you have observed Leo’s machinations over the years, why did you become so alarmed that you wrote:
“Coming up on November 2024 and a possible Leonard Leo Christofascist takeover of the United States, as detailed in his 900-page Project 2025, it looks like 1930s Germany to me”.
TC: What it boils down to is the old story of the frog in the frying pan. When it's 65 degrees, it doesn't do anything — when you turn it up one degree at a time until eventually it is boiled, that's what's happening. That's what happened in Germany. A democracy elected Hitler. I mean, it was not like he came in and stormed the Capitol or something.
Leonard Leo got six Supreme Court judges installed. If you want to create a fascist society, you get the judges.
HSC: You pointed out the classic fascist blunder is those who help elect the leaders to do their bidding think they can control them.
TC: A lot of people who thought Hitler was a bad guy, they thought they could handle him. They turned out to be seriously, seriously wrong.
HSC: You wrote about one reporter in particular, who demurred coverage of Leo due to a family tie to the family, which prompted you to write an eviscerating analogy about cocktail parties in Nazi Germany. According to one April 4 correspondence with the reporter, rather than apologize you wrote:
“You… betrayed journalism, your readers and this country. This is sad for me. I don’t feel righteous…
“You… were covering for Nazis. Nice Nazis, but Nazis, nevertheless. I get it. You couldn’t betray your friendships. God bless. I stand by choices and my moral obligations. All anyone had to do was write a story. Instead, in six months, we might all be wishing we had some powerful Nazi friends.”
That’s pretty much a mic drop.
TC: It always goes back to this Nazi analogy. The US Army did polling in post-war occupied Germany from 1945 to 1950. And they found that about 35% — it varies a bit here and there, depending on the question being asked — but they found that after Germany had been bombed to oblivion, after the Nuremberg trials, when everything was exposed, 35%, approximately, of the German population still thought Hitler had done a good job, and the Jews got what they deserved.
HSC: That is chilling, but it would explain a lot of what we are documenting. Based on your studies of how Leo has remapped America in an ultra-conservative image, what do you think is going to happen in November?
TC: I’m gonna be a glass half empty guy, here. We either vote or look for a house in Portugal.
To read the full interview, please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement and help support a small, global team of investigative reporters. If you are unable to afford to do so at this time, please feel free to reach out to me directly at bettedangerous/gmail to request the report.
In addition, here is some of my previous recent reporting with Tom Carter, including RadPod’s interview and his op-ed in Bette’s pages:
For the record, I reached out to Leo for response in advance of the Byline Supplement report. I posed the following questions:
How does he respond to concerns that he played an outsized role in placing religious extremists on our nation’s highest court resulting in disastrous rulings for women, the environment, and whose far-right extremist members appear to serve a demagogue as opposed to the Constitution?
Is he proud of this legacy — what many refer to as Christofascism or does he have any regrets?
How involved was he in Project 2025?
Does he have concerns that by driving money toward Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas has clear conflicts of interests and by not recusing he is not fit for purpose?
Why does he think the NYT failed to cover his ascent to power?
Does he have regrets for accepting $1.6 billion from Barre Seid or is he pleased that he is enabled to drive a vision of America that reflects the few at the expense of the many?
What if anything would he do differently?
If he responds, I’ll let you know.
Thank you as always for your support of this work. When we defeat the latest wave of global fascism, it will be because of what people like us do.
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