Firms run by Leonard Leo have been paid more than $102 million from conservative nonprofits in the six years from 2016 to 2022, according to an analysis of tax documents by CREW. The data shows that the source of the vast majority of the payments since 2016, totaling $90 million, are from nonprofits tied to Leo, with an additional $12 million coming from other groups who may have felt pressure to pay up to Leo in order to stay in his dark money network’s good graces. 

Prior to becoming synonymous with the right-wing effort to remake the American judiciary and then American society more broadly, Leo appears to have lived a relatively modest life as the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. However, after forming the BH Group in 2016—a firm whose only known clients were groups tied to Leo—he began living a more lavish lifestyle, conspicuously timed with when the BH Group started bringing in millions from his own groups. Those payments ultimately totaled nearly $13.5 million before the firm was apparently mothballed in 2020. It was never clear what the BH Group did: It didn’t have a website or permanent offices, nor any identifiable employees beyond Leo himself. 

Some of those BH Group payments may have been channeled elsewhere. As CREW wrote in 2020, a note in Rule of Law Trust’s first 990 says that the $4.3 million paid to the BH Group was a reimbursement for “independent contractor expenses incurred on behalf of Rule of Law Trust.” As CREW noted then, this raises more questions than it answers. “In other words,” we wrote at the time, “it appears that a firm partly owned by the sole trustee of RLT paid all of RLT’s expenses, including $1.8 million in consulting payments to two former Federalist Society associates who now work at a consulting firm founded by the trustee, and then RLT reimbursed that firm for the expenses.”  

As the money began to flow, Leo’s life appeared to change. In the final weeks of 2016, the BH Group gave $1 million to the inaugural committee for the incoming president, and the following year, Leo and his wife were named Stewards of Saint Peter by the Papal Foundation after pledging at least $1 million to aid world Vatican programs. In 2018, Leo and his wife paid off the 30-year mortgage on a $710,000 house his family bought in 2010, while also buying an 11-bedroom summer house in Maine for $3.3 million, paying off the 20-year mortgage just one year later, according to a complaint filed by Campaign for Accountability. He also reportedly purchased a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse and hired the chief steward at the then-Trump International Hotel to be his personal wine buyer.

Then, in 2020, Leo took over a firm formed in the late 1980s called CRC Advisors, formerly Creative Response Concepts. Leo’s groups had already been ramping up payments to CRC for years, but now that Leo was chairman of the company and the head of a growing dark money network, the money started flowing to CRC in a way it never had before. According to CREW’s analysis of tax documents, CRC’s combined income in the 2010s was more than $46.6 million. In the less than four years for which data is available since Leo took over CRC, by contrast, the firm has brought in nearly double that—more than $89 million—the vast majority of which, more than $76 million, has come from groups tied directly to Leo. 

Payments from other conservative groups also appear to have grown in the wake of Leo’s takeover. CREW’s analysis found just under $12 million in payments in the tax years from 2020 to 2022 from conservative groups that aren’t operationally linked with Leo. In the three previous tax years, CREW was only able to identify about $5.4 million in such payments. Some conservative operatives complained to the New York Times in 2022 that there was a sense in conservative circles that in order to get money from Leo’s network, the groups had to hire CRC. Leo’s network rejected the claims. 

It’s important to note that it is illegal for nonprofit groups to serve as a conduit for personal enrichment, and Leo has repeatedly denied accusations of profiteering. Last year, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb reportedly opened an investigation into Leo for the massive windfall he appears to be receiving from his dark money groups, but Leo has refused to cooperate, and his allies in Congress have tried to give him cover. When asked by reporters, Leo has declined to detail what service he is providing in exchange for the millions of dollars his firm is bringing in from his nonprofits and other allied groups. 

Further convoluting the murky relationship between Leo’s for-profit business and his nonprofit work is the amount of time he appears to be devoting to his nonprofit work. Presumably, serving as chair of a firm raking in tens of millions of dollars is a full-time job, but tax documents filed by groups tied to Leo show that he’s spending more than 50 hours a week devoted to the work of at least 14 other organizations, several of which pay Leo’s private firm. For example, in the groups’ 2022 fiscal years, the most recent year for which full data is available, Leo reported devoting 25 hours a week to his work as a trustee of the Marble Freedom Trust—for which he’s paid a $400,000 salary—and another 6 hours to the work of a related organization. The only related organization reported on the filing is the Leo-linked Rule of Law Trust. Over that same general period—not all groups have the same fiscal year, and therefore don’t always directly overlap—tax documents filed by 12 other organizations report that he devoted more than 20 hours a week to their missions as well, all while serving as the chairman of a firm that was paid at least $33.6 million—more than $27 million of which came from two groups tied to Leo, The 85 Fund and The Concord Fund. 

The American nonprofit system was not meant to serve as a get-rich-quick scheme for operatives to pour money into their own coffers. Despite that, it appears that Leo has found a way to divert tens of millions of dollars to his own companies over the course of just a few years without much, if any, accountability.

Leonard Leo photos screenshotted from CSPAN; Supreme Court photo by U.S. Department of State (IIP Bureau) under Creative Commons License

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