Marble Freedom Trust

Leonard Leo, Trustee and Chairman

Leonard Leo’s position of Trustee and Chairman places him at the helm of the Marble Freedom Trust. 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, America Engaged, 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 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, Successor Trustee

Jonathan Bunch is a former senior vice president at the Federalist Society who has been described as Leo’s “right-hand man,” and is listed as the “successor trustee” for the Marble Freedom Trust. 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. 

• The Rule of Law Trust, another Leo-linked group, paid Bunch $1.5 million in consulting fees in 2018 —- RLT’s largest single payment that year.

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 court 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 members of the commission. 

• 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, the 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 under the existing Missouri Plan “liberal trial lawyers” had 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.” 

• JCN’s 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.

Tyler Green, Administrative Trustee

Marble Freedom Trust’s listed address is a house in North Salt Lake City, Utah owned by Tyler Green, who is listed as an “administrative trustee” on Marble Freedom Trust’s tax filing. Green is a member of the Federalist Society and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is himself a Federalist Society member and close friend of Leonard Leo. Green was also a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber Of Commerce.

Green served as solicitor general in the Utah Attorney General’s office from 2015 to 2020.

• As solicitor general, Green defended Utah’s decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood in the state, triggering a legal battle that was eventually won by Planned Parenthood. 

• Green also filed a Supreme Court amicus brief supporting a case that argued Donald Trump could remove the head of the independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. According to NPR, this SCOTUS ruling allowed Trump to potentially fire the heads of other independent agencies, such as the Social Security Administration, based on political disagreements.

In 2020, Green became a partner at D.C. law firm Consovoy McCarthy. Consovoy McCarthy is perhaps best known for representing Donald Trump in his efforts to shield his financial records from congressional investigators and New York state prosecutors. Green has continued to fight legal battles on behalf of right-wing forces in Utah at Consovoy McCarthy. 

• Green was a member of the Utah attorney general’s legal team that sued to block a federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate. 

• Green is also a part of the team defending Utah’s abortion trigger law, which automatically banned abortions after 18 weeks once Roe v. Wade was overturned. The case is on hold as of August 2022. 

• According to Transparency Utah, the state attorney general’s office has paid Consovoy McCarthy $370,000 since 2020.

Green also represented a group of cockfighters in Puerto Rico who argued the federal government could not regulate the sport within the territory.

Neil Corkery

Marble Freedom Trust’s 990 identifies Neil Corkery as being in charge of the organization’s books. Neil 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 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 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 entertainment media. 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 of 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 the 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 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. As 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 was the principal officer at America Engaged in 2016. America Engaged is a non-profit within the Leo network formed by Leo with no public presence. In 2017, American Engaged gave $1 million to the National Rifle Association (NRA); that same year, the NRA announced a $1 million ad campaign supporting Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination. 

• 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 was involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, founded and led Liberty Central. The Thomases both count Leonard Leo as a friend. 

In the same timeframe as it received a $1.6 billion donation, Marble Freedom Trust donated over $200 million to organizations associated with Leonard Leo and paid over $1 million in legal fees.

Rule of Law Trust: $153,000,000

A single donation of $153 million to the Rule of Law Trust made up the bulk of the Marble Freedom Trust’s donations in this tax filing period. The Rule of Law Trust is a 501(c)(4) group founded in 2018. Its sole employee is Leonard Leo. RLT’s stated mission is to “advance conservative principles and causes through communications, research, strategy, and assistance to other organizations,” yet the group keeps its operations completely private. RLT does not have a website and “claimed it had no employees and no volunteers in its first year and listed what appears to be a virtual office in Virginia as its main address.”

Judicial Crisis Network (Concord Fund): $16,500,000

The Concord Fund (also known as the Judicial Crisis Network) received $16.5 million from the Marble Freedom Trust. The Judicial Crisis Network is the lynchpin of conservative activist Leonard Leo’s efforts to capture the court system and has led to the nomination of five Supreme Court justices. Judicial Crisis Network spent nearly $40 million on efforts to confirm Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and also played a significant role in getting George W. Bush’s nominees confirmed and opposing President Obama’s nominees.

Donors Trust: $41,100,000

Marble Freedom Trust gave $41 million to Donors Trust, which in past years has provided a majority of the funding for select Leo-linked groups. The Federalist Society is a frequent recipient of Donors Trust funds and other nonprofits linked to Leonard Leo like the 85 Fund. The 85 Fund received more than 99% of its funding in a single year from Donors Trust.

Donors Trust and its affiliate organization, Donors Capital Fund, are two of the most influential conservative organizations in contemporary American politics. In 2013, Mother Jones dubbed Donors Trust the “dark-money ATM of the right.” Donors Capital Fund is for major spenders — donors must spend at least $1,000,000 to give to the organization, while Donors Trust accepts donations of all sizes. Both organizations operate as “donor-advised funds,” which accept donations and recommendations for grants to be given, helping to separate the original donors’ identities from the destination of their funds.

Schwab Charitable Fund: $18,000,000

Marble Freedom Trust gave $18 million to the Schwab Charitable Fund, a donor-advised fund similar to Donors Trust that “steers money into conservative politics.”

Sullivan & Cromwell LLP: $940,000

Marble Freedom Trust paid $940,000 to the multinational law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Sullivan & Cromwell has represented numerous controversial clients over the years, from tobacco companies to the United Fruit Company, which the firm lobbied on behalf of to push the United States’ 1954 intervention in Guatemala.

Kirton McConkie: $140,602

Kirton McConkie, a law firm that describes itself as “Utah’s premier full-service law firm,” received $140,602 from Marble Freedom Trust. Kirton McConkie has represented the Mormon Church and staffed a sexual abuse “help line,” which was used “to help the church keep its secrets and to cover up abuse.” A leaked document from 2012 reveals that the firm has represented the church in numerous sexual abuse cases.

Holtzman Vogel: $101,556

Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky received $101,556 from Marble Freedom Trust. Holtzman Vogel is a boutique political 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, the BH Fund, the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, and American Engaged among others. 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 super lawyer” by The Washington Post.

During its 2021 financial year, Marble Freedom Trust contributed $182,700,000 to two organizations.

Judicial Crisis Network (Concord Fund): $28,900,000

Marble Freedom Trust granted $28.9 million to the Concord Fund in 2021.

Schwab Charitable Fund: $153,800,000

Marble Freedom Trust contributed $153,800,000 to the donor-advised Schwab Charitable Fund during its 2021 financial year. During that same period, the fund granted $141.5 million to the 85 Fund, a node in Leonard Leo’s network of dark money nonprofits. Part of that haul ended up flowing back to Leo: In 2021, the 85 Fund paid Leo’s firm CRC Advisors $21,715,382 for consulting, public affairs, and advertising, according to the group’s annual disclosure.

Baker & Hostetler: $1,038,927

In 2021, Marble Freedom Trust reported paying the law firm Baker Hostetler over $1 million in legal services. 

During its 2022 financial year, Marble Freedom Trust contributed $216,850,000 to three organizations.

Schwab Charitable Fund: $153,750,000

Marble Freedom Trust contributed $153,750,000 to the donor-advised Schwab Charitable Fund during its 2022 financial year. During that same period, the fund granted $141.25 million to the 85 Fund, a similar amount to the previous year and accounting for nearly all of the 85 Fund’s 2022 revenue.

Judicial Crisis Network (Concord Fund): $55,500,000

Marble Freedom Trust contributed $55,500,000 to the Concord Fund in 2022, bringing the trust’s total contributions to the group to $100,900,000.

Knights of Columbus Charitable Fund: $7,600,000

Marble Freedom Trust contributed $7,600,000 to the Knights of Columbus Charitable Fund in 2022. This was the first year this organization was a recipient of funds from Marble Freedom Trust.

Barre Seid

Barre Seid is a conservative mega-donor who has maintained a lower profile than other major conservative donors, but he has been quietly giving to right-wing causes for decades. ProPublica reports that between 1996 and 2018, he gave at least $775 million in charitable donations, mostly to conservative organizations. Most recently, he gave $1.6 billion to Marble Freedom Trust by transferring ownership of his company to the trust. Seid also has notable connections to both Leonard Leo and the Koch family.

• Seid allegedly donated $20 million to George Mason University in order to rename its law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Leonard Leo and Jonathan Bunch, a former Federalist Society vice president, managed Seid’s alleged donation via the nonprofit BH Fund. As of May 2022, Leo was the president of BH Fund and Bunch served as the organization’s treasurer. The Koch family also contributed millions to the renaming effort, which was criticized as an unprecedented expansion of the Federalist Society’s and Koch’s influence on the public university. 

• In 2009, Seid set up the nonprofit Chicago Freedom Trust (CFT), and Leo later joined as a trustee. CFT was incorporated in Salt Lake City, Utah – as was Marble Freedom Trust.

• Seid funded the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where Leo was a legal advisor. In 2014, following a failed Competitive Enterprise Institute SCOTUS case that aimed to overturn the ACA, Leo reached out to the influential right-wing funder, the Bradley Foundation. Bradley agreed to donate to Leo’s Judicial Education Project (JEP) to fund Supreme Court amicus briefs. Bradley’s grant to JEP cited the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s case. 

• The Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation gave Shimer College $650,000 as it moved its campus in 2006 “with the help of a big pledge from an anonymous donor.” At the same time, Shimer College’s board doubled in size and added members with right-wing political affiliations in an attempt to take over the board. The CFO/COO of Seid’s company, Trippe, joined the Shimer board in 2008, as did Fiber Bond President John Marienaua and Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast.

• Seid has also funded the conservative Hillsdale College and the State Policy Network.

• Seid has also contributed millions to other far-right efforts, including the conservative public policy think tank, the Heartland Institute, and the right-wing nonprofit, the Clarion Fund. In 2008, a multimillion-dollar donation to the Clarion Fund from Seid financed virtually the entire DVD distribution campaign for an Islamophobic film describing the threat posed by Iran.

RELATED ENTITIES: America Engaged, BH Fund, And The Rule Of Law Trust

In the Marble Freedom Trust’s 2020 tax filing revealing the donation, America Engaged, BH Fund, and the Rule of Law Trust were identified as “related entities.” The following year, America Engaged and the BH Fund were no longer identified as related entities. Corporate documents filed in Virginia show that Leo terminated these two groups in November 2022.