America Engaged

Leonard Leo, President

Leonard Leo was “widely known as a confidant to Trump” and served as Trump’s Supreme Court Advisor during the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch.

Leo has been called “arguably the most powerful figure in the federal justice system” with his “network of interlocking nonprofits” that aggressively support conservative judges. 

• One of these nonprofits is the Federalist Society, which cultivates conservative judicial nominees in Leo’s fight to take over the courts.

• This shadow empire has allowed Leo to meet and “cultivate almost every important Republican lawyer in more than a generation.”

• Leo operates a series of nonprofits that can move money without public scrutiny, such as the 85 Fund, the BH Fund, and the Freedom and Opportunity Fund.

• Leo’s network executed successful advocacy campaigns to appoint and confirm John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court—as well as block Merrick Garland from the Court.
• During the nomination process for Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Leo assured a group of top Koch network donors that it was “just the beginning of an even bigger effort to load up the federal judiciary with conservative judges.”  

Leo has personal and professional ties to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is an original faculty member of the Federalist Society and a frequent speaker at the organization’s events. 

• Thomas has hired Leo’s PR firm CRC Advisors to promote his memoir and a documentary about Thomas.

• The Washington Post reports that Leo and Clarence Thomas have been close friends since meeting in the 1990s.

• Thomas is the godfather to one of Leo’s children, and has spent time vacationing at Leo’s New England home.

• During the George H.W. Bush administration, Leo delayed his start at the Federalist Society to help get Thomas confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Jonathan Bunch, Secretary

Jonathan Bunch is a former senior vice president at the Federalist Society who has been described as Leonard Leo’s “right-hand man.” Bunch has been involved in several Leo-linked entities; and is currently the president of CRC Advisors, a public relations consulting firm Leo founded in 2020. CRC Advisors grew out of CRC Strategies, a consulting firm that played a key role in supporting Leo’s efforts to influence the Supreme Court and federal judiciary.

From 2007 to 2008, Jonathan Bunch was the executive director of “Better Courts for Missouri,” a nonprofit organization that aimed to fundamentally alter the state’s merit-based judicial nomination process. 

• Better Courts sought to replace Missouri’s selection method for state appeals courts judges — called the Missouri Plan — where the governor appointed a nominee from a list curated by special judicial nominating committees. JCN proposed an inherently partisan system that would give the governor power to nominate any individual to the commission, subject to Senate confirmation. The group also spearheaded a ballot measure to allow the governor to appoint a majority of the commission’s members.

• The Missouri Bar Association and the judiciary overwhelmingly supported keeping the state’s existing judicial selection system, contending that “the process diminishes the politics behind selections.”

• Critics of Bunch’s group called their proposal “a GOP power grab,” to give the governor more power as “the state is getting redder and redder.” The president of the Missouri Bar said Better Courts’ proposal would “make partisan politics the heart and soul” of selecting judges.

Better Courts’ strategy reflects the Leo network’s typical playbook at the state level. In Iowa, Judicial Crisis Network financed a 2018 campaign that advocated for giving partisan legislators the power to select members of the judicial nomination commission, “meaning politicians will choose every member.” 

• Iowa’s existing system — where half of the commissioners were selected by the governor and half were elected by licensed lawyers — was meant to “emphasize legal experience while keeping politics at arm’s length.”

• JCN claimed that “liberal trial lawyers have the power to pick our judges,” but the new selection method they promoted “immediately allow[ed] Republicans to pick more of the Iowans who will be selecting our judges.”

• This campaign led to a more conservative Iowa Supreme Court that struck down abortion rights and upheld a policy that allows police officers to charge drivers with crimes other than what they were stopped for, which was criticized as racially discriminatory.

Todd Graves, Director

Todd Graves is the brother of U.S. Representative Sam Graves, a former Missouri Assistant Attorney General and former U.S. District Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. 

Graves has served as chair of The 85 Fund since 2019. He was a director at America Engaged and is currently a director of the Freedom and Opportunity Fund — two 501(c)(4) organizations where Leonard Leo has served as an officer. Graves is a director at the Lucy Burns Institute, which publishes Ballotpedia, and has various ties to right-wing organizations. Graves is also:

• A partner at the law firm Graves Garrett and sits on the University of Missouri Board of Curators

• A member of the executive board of the Pony Express Council of the Boy Scouts of America and a founding board member of the Kansas City Missouri Police Foundation

• A contributor at the Federalist Society

• Graves was one of several U.S. attorneys fired by George W. Bush on a single day in December 2006
  

Involvement In Scott Walker John Doe Investigations

Beginning in 2010, Scott Walker and his campaign for governor became the subject of multiple John Doe investigations looking into potential political corruption. Under Wisconsin law, a John Doe investigation is a type of secret investigation, similar to a grand jury, that can look into political corruption. Todd Graves represented targets of these John Doe investigations, namely the Wisconsin Club for Growth and “unnamed petitioner No. 2.”  

• The first, which began in the spring of 2010, “focused on aides to Walker when he was Milwaukee County executive” and involved illegal political contributions. This investigation resulted in six being charged and convicted of various crimes, including “theft and misconduct in office.” Walker was not charged.

• The second investigation grew out of evidence gathered from emails and other seized documents in the first, and accused the Walker campaign of “illegally coordinat[ing] with Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative groups to raise money during the 2011 and 2012 recall campaigns.” In 2015, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the coordination was legal and halted the probe. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case. No charges were produced in this investigation.

In the aftermath of the investigations, the Wisconsin legislature limited the scope of future John Doe investigations, “restricting the length of time such probes can take to narrowing what allegations can be investigated” and “exempting political corruption charges.”

• In 2011, groups affiliated with the 85 Fund, the Judicial Crisis Network, and Wellspring Committee funneled money to Wisconsin Club For Growth. Wisconsin Club For Growth was key to electing conservative Justice Patience Roggensack to a second ten-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2013, spending $400,000 to boost her campaign.

• The Wisconsin Supreme Court was a key ally to Republican Governor Scott Walker’s agenda, upholding key agenda items on collective bargaining and voter ID.

C. Boyden Gray, Director

C. Boyden Gray is an attorney, lobbyist, and heir to a tobacco fortune through his grandfather Bowman Gray Sr., the president and chairman of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Gray began serving as a director of America Engaged in 2017.

• C. Boyden Gray formerly worked in the White House for 12 years, first as counsel to the vice president during the Reagan administration and then as counsel to President George H.W. Bush. Gray later served as U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. under the George W. Bush administration.

• Gray founded the lobbying firm Boyden Gray & Associates. 

• In 2015, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School named an academic center after him: The C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. 

Gray has multiple connections to Charles and David Koch and their affiliated groups. Gray served as the co-chair and a board member for Citizens for a Sound Economy, an early Koch group focused on deregulation which would later split into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. As recently as 2013, he was a board member of FreedomWorks, where he exerted influence over the Tea Party Movement.

Gray was influential in the push for deregulation during the Reagan and Bush administrations. While working in the Reagan administration, Gray wrote the original Executive Order 12291 (later re-numbered as EO 12866), requiring all government agency rules and regulations to undergo a cost-benefit analysis and White House review. Some progressives have denounced cost-benefit analysis as a weapon used by “small government ideologues and corporate interests” to stymie regulatory safeguards. An analysis from the Center for American Progress found that cost-benefit analysis is effectively used as “an excuse for slowing regulation under progressive administrations—an excuse that is quickly discarded when it conflicts with their deregulatory goals.” The order Gray authored has been “affirmed in one way or another by every president since.”

Gray has also worked as a staunch advocate for deregulation for climate and tobacco industry-funded groups such as the Alliance for Reasonable Regulation. 

• While working for the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, Gray’s work focused on a range of regulatory matters, “with emphasis on environment, energy, antitrust, public health, and information technology.”

• Under the Reagan administration, Gray served as counsel to the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, which the Washington Post describes as intended to “scrutinize regulations that the administration and business wanted to change.”

• Gray also chaired the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice of the American Bar Association.

During the last year of the George W. Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appointed Gray as Special Envoy for European Union Affairs and Eurasian Energy at the Mission of the United States to the European Union. 

• While serving as Ambassador to the European Union, Gray lobbied against legislation that would have required manufacturers to gather health and safety data on industrial chemicals. Referring to the legislation called REACH (for “Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals”), Gray told the American Chamber of Commerce in Brussels, “We should not regulate if there is no harm to address and there is no benefit of safety to confer.“

• In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Gray concluded that European policymakers “never did a proper impact assessment to evaluate the risk-versus-benefit status of this legislation.” 

Gray’s concern for proper “risk-versus-benefit” analysis stems from his involvement with the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and the larger risk analysis field, which “is not broadly accepted as a science in itself.” As counsel in the George H.W. Bush administration, Gray worked on a presidential executive order aimed at “bringing more scientific rigor and political accountability to the process of health, safety, and environmental regulations.” Gray enlisted Harvard academic John D. Graham of the Harvard Group on Risk Management Reform to provide advice and counsel on the presidential order. While the political will for the order briefly subsided amidst the 1992 presidential campaign, momentum for deregulation remained and in 1994, Gray secured a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to fund the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

Gray also had an outsized influence in judicial nominations during both Bush administrations. During the George W. Bush administration, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) approached Gray to organize a team to lead upcoming judicial nomination fights. Gray subsequently assembled “the four horsemen,” which included himself, attorney Jay  Sekulow, former-Reagan attorney general Ed Meese, and then-Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo. In 2002, Gray founded the Committee for Justice (CFJ), ostensibly to help push George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. CFJ is still active today and regularly files amicus briefs supporting conservative causes in Supreme Court cases, such as Sackett v. EPA, which threatens to significantly limit the EPA’s regulatory powers over water pollution. That case is scheduled for argument on October 3, 2022.

Neil Corkery

Neil Corkery was responsible for the books and records at America Engaged as recently as 2018. He and his wife Ann Corkery are influential right-wing operatives closely involved in Leonard Leo’s network of nonprofits seeking to advance religious right-wing agendas. Salon reported that the Corkerys have used the network they built alongside Leonard Leo “to prop up conservative judicial nominees”

Right-Wing Religious Activism

• Watchdog group OpenSecrets hypothesized that the political influence of the Corkerys is tied to their deep roots in right-wing religious communities.

• In a 1990 interview, the Corkerys claimed to be members of Opus Dei, which has been accused of “having cult-like practices and promoting a right-wing agenda.” Opus Dei opposes same-sex marriage, divorce, abortion, and contraception.

• Ann Corkery served as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and the UN Commission on Women under President George W. Bush. She fought to institute a ban on human cloning at the UN.

• Neil Corkery served on the boards of at the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ advocacy group The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and at The Becket Fund, a legal giant which has opposed LGBTQ and abortion rights. Neil additionally held roles at conservative PAC ActRight Action, and the anti-marriage equality group The National Organization for Marriage.

• Ann Corkery was also a board member at The Becket Fund and The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Media Ties

• Neil and Ann Corkery were involved in efforts to promote conservative art. Ann worked with Friends of Abe, a group of Hollywood conservatives who aim to push back on the industry’s perceived liberal bias, and was an associate producer on a movie mocking Michael Moore. Neil is the former CEO of Wedgewood Circle, a group that aims to fund “redemptive cultural content.”

Connections to the Leonard Leo Network

• The Corkerys helped launch Leonard Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network. Leonard Leo and Neil Corkery conceived the Judicial Crisis Network at a dinner party attended by conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Leo and Corkery wanted to create an organization to help confirm conservative nominees in anticipation of Supreme Court vacancies that George W. Bush ultimately filled with Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

• Neil Corkery is the former president of Judicial Crisis Network’s sister organization the 85 Fund (FKA the Judicial Education Project) and Ann Corkery currently serves as its counsel. The 85 Fund operates within Leo’s network of conservative nonprofits that aims to influence the federal judiciary and American political system more broadly. In 2020, the group legally changed its name from the Judicial Education Project to the 85 Fund and almost immediately raised $20 million dollars, much of it from the powerful conservative “dark money” group, Donors Trust. In recent years, the 85 Fund has sent money to other conservative and right-wing groups, including groups that were tied to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

• Ann Corkery founded the Wellspring Committee in 2008. OpenSecrets said in 2019 that Wellspring and its operatives “reshaped the way the game is played” and “ushered in a new era of increasingly expensive judicial battles largely fueled by deep-pocketed donors whose identities remain secret.” The group continued to have an outsize influence in judicial battles after its dissolution in 2018 through the “countless dark money groups it helped sire and judges now on the bench thanks in part to its anonymous financiers’ generosity.” Neil Corkery also served in various leadership roles at Wellspring during its tenure.

• Neil Corkery reportedly served as an accountant at Liberty Central, a tea party group where Leo served as a board member. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas, who sought to overturn the 2020 election results, founded and led Liberty Central. The Thomases both count Leonard Leo as a friend.

• Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust identifies Neil Corkery as in charge of the organization’s books, according to their 2020 990. 

America Engaged Helped Fund an Advertising Blitz in Support of Gorsuch’s Nomination to the Supreme Court

In 2017, America Engaged made a grant totaling $950,000 to the NRA Institute of Legislative Affairs. That same year, the NRA announced a $1 million ad campaign in support of Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination. 

• In 2017, Judicial Crisis Network announced that it would spend $10 million supporting Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. JCN hired CRC Advisors as a contractor for media consulting work in 2017. Their online videos, television ads, pundit commentary, opinion essays, and other material supporting Gorsuch were viewed 1.2 billion times.

In 2017, America Engaged gave $50,000 to Americans for Limited Government, a conservative nonprofit chaired by New York real estate investor and libertarian donor Howard Rich. America Engaged also gave $700,000 to the Koch-group Freedom Partners, which “strongly supported Trump’s nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

In 2018, America Engaged gave $3 million to Freedom Partners and gave the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List $25,000.

In 2019, America Engaged only made one grant for $500,000 to the Seminar Network Chamber of Commerce, a Koch-founded group now known as Stand Together. 

America Engaged Paid CRC Advisors Over $1.5 Million Between 2017 And 2019

CRC Advisors, a public relations firm founded in 2020 by Leonard Leo and his longtime associate, Greg Mueller, evolved out of Mueller’s existing conservative communications firm CRC Strategies, which formerly assumed the names CRC Public Relations and Creative Response Concepts. Virtually all of Leo’s nonprofit groups, including America Engaged, have paid CRC for public relations work over the years.

America Engaged Contracting Payments To Creative Response Concepts

Holtzman Vogel 

America Engaged’s legal services contractor was Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, a boutique law firm that represents “some of the nation’s largest super PACs and their related nonprofits” on the conservative side, including American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity, the Honest Elections Project, and the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, among others. Holtzman Vogel also represented the BH Fund. According to McClatchy, Holtzman Vogel “specializ[es] in creative legal maneuvers that allow donors to fund conservative causes to remain anonymous.”

• With the influx of money in politics following the 2010 Citizens United decision, Holtzman Vogel “became one of the premiere legal shops to help the PACs distribute their largesse.”

• Holtzman Vogel employs many longtime Republican operatives. Founder, partner, and namesake of the firm Jill Holtzman Vogel is a Republican state Senator in Virginia currently serving her fourth term. Vogel has been described as a “dark-money superlawyer” by the Washington Post. 

Marble Freedom Trust, BH Fund, Freedom And Opportunity Fund, And The Rule Of Law Trust

In 2022, it was revealed that Marble Freedom Trust, a newly identified organization helmed by Leonard Leo, received a $1.6 billion dollar donation from Chicago manufacturing magnate Barre Seid.  In the tax filing that revealed the donation, America Engaged, BH Fund, and the Rule of Law Trust were identified as “related entities” to Marble Freedom Trust. 

In the 2017 and 2018 tax filings for America Engaged, the organization listed the Freedom and Opportunity Fund as a related entity.