A decade of failing to persuade the New York Times to pay attention to Leonard Leo
By Tom Carter
Robert Draper, award winning NYT reporter, was my Capitol Hill neighbor. He’d walk his dog Bill, a friendly black mutt, past my house almost daily. I’m usually outside doing yard work and Draper often stopped to talk, before Bill moved on to another bush or hydrant.
One day spring day in 2012, Draper was wearing a “Daily Show” baseball cap. “Where did you get that,” I asked. He said it was swag from a recent Jon Stewart appearance.
I was impressed. “Daily Show? Really? Who the fvck are you?”
DC journalism royalty, as it turns out. Originally from Texas, Draper had written a history of Rolling Stone magazine, a book on the Bush years and more recently, “Do Not Ask What We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives.” It was that book he was on “The Daily Show” promoting.
I had retired a few months earlier and had my own connections to conservative DC. I spent 25 years as a print reporter on the foreign desk of the Washington Times (1983–2008), a year as media director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and then three years as a federal government pr flack (2009–2012) for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
Heading up USCIRF was a pudgy little lobbyist for the Federalist Society — a GOP political appointee and my de facto boss: Leonard Leo.
USCIRF is a small US government agency created to monitor international religious freedom. In May 2009, just after I arrived, Leo’s first act as USCIRF chairman was to fire a brilliant young staffer — because she was Muslim. Staff were outraged that a US government agency monitoring religious freedom would sack a government employee for her religion. One staffer quit in protest. Others signed a letter supporting her.
Well known today as Trump’s “court whisper” and for placing five extreme right Catholics on the Supreme Court, Leo was unknown in 2009 DC. After firing the Muslim employee, Leo endured a wave of negative stories in the Washington Post and other outlets, in short for being an anti-Muslim bigot.
Over the next year, Leo’s name started appearing in other stories. First in Talking Points Memo for being a founding director in Ginni Thomas’ new Tea Party org, Liberty Central. Then Mother Jones accused Leo, USCIRF and Liberty Central of playing a leading role in the anti Muslim Ground Zero Mosque protests.
I had a good Rolodex and began pitching investigative reporters to “look” at Leo. I stressed these ten points:
1 — Leo is more than “just another” DC lobbyist
2 — In addition to the Federalist Society, Leo has a private network of front groups and extreme right Catholic militants running anti Obama disinformation and stacking the courts
3 — Judicial Crisis Network — Carrie Severino
4 — Heritage Foundation — John Malcolm, Roger Severino
5 — CRC pr — Creative Response Concepts — Greg Mueller
6 — Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central
7 — Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
8 — Former Bush point man on Supreme Court, responsible for picking and placing Roberts and Alito and later, under Trump, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.
9 — Close personal friends w Justices Scalia, Justice Thomas and their families.
10 — Nothing obviously illegal, but a vast and insanely powerful underground DC network that no reporter had ever detailed.
Silly me, I thought it was a good story. Starting in 2010, I pitched more than 40 prominent, award-winning mainstream journalists, including seven from the New York Times.
Every pitch was an updated version of the same thing.
“I suggest a story on [Leonard Leo’s] far right Catholic lobby in DC, a Catholic version of Evangelical Hill folks meeting at C Street. Actually, a better analogy might be to compare them to the hardball lobbying success and efforts of the NRA — but even the NRA doesn’t own the Supreme Court,” I wrote in an email to Draper in 2014.
In 2018, Jay Michaelson, of the Daily Beast, wrote the first comprehensive story on Leo. Six years later it remains the best place to start. Greg Olear did a terrific follow in his PREVAIL substack in 2021.
All the mainstream media passed.
At the New York Times, I first approached Pulitzer Prize winning Supreme Court columnist Linda Greenhouse in 2012 in an email. About the same time, I broached the topic of Leo with Draper in one of our sidewalk meetings.
Greenhouse has been very supportive over the years, in effect confirming most everything I suspected, adding a few details from her years in DC. She didn’t offer to write anything, but she did pass on information to NYT daily reporters, in hopes they might write something.
Draper, on the other hand, demurred. Not really his area. Not his kind of story. Oh, and by the way, I’m off to Italy for the holidays with some Hill staffers and friends from the Heritage Foundation, he told me.
With that, I backed off Draper. Our sidewalk discussions were mostly about Italy, ZZ Top and Mexico, where I was building a house.
But I did not give up hope. Draper was perfectly placed at the NYT magazine, an elegant writer who had the best contacts in DC. In 2014, I sent Draper a long email detailing why an important, big shot NYT reporter needed to look at Leo.
He responded.
“RE: Leo et al., Kirsten [Powers, Draper’s fiancée] knows him personally, and we’re close to a certain GOP donor who is very tied into the reshaping of the courts. It’s a very good story, but this is one of the small handful of very good stories out there that’s a little too close to home for me to feel comfortable doing.”
In other words. “Leo et al” are friends and while this was a “very good story,” I can’t out my friends.
Draper moved. Hillary lost the election. Trump began appointing Leo judges. Dobbs was announced. Meanwhile, other bits connecting Draper to Leo emerged.
Kirsten Powers, Draper’s fiancée, now wife, is another high profile DC reporter (CNN, Fox, USA Today). She went through a highly publicized conversion to Catholicism in 2015, with help from extreme right spiritual guides Eric Metaxas and Ann Corkery — Leonard Leo’s dark money handler.
Metaxas, a well known Christian academic, was the Becket Fund’s 2011 Canterbury award winner, best known today for his unhinged defenses of Trump. A 2020 election denier, Metaxas has called anti-Trump voters “almost demonic.” Metaxas opposed the Covid vaccine and vocally supports various anti American Russians.
Corkery, like Leo, is an extreme far right Catholic, and once on the board of the Becket Fund, where Leo is a board member. Open members of Opus Dei, Corkery and husband Neil ran Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network dark-money laundering operation, first opposing Obama court nominees and then supporting, with millions, Leo nominees — first Roberts and Alito, then Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — during the Trump years.
Reports tabulate that Leo spent $580 million in dark money in purchasing five Supreme Court confirmations.
“Ann Corkery is my fiancee’s godmother,” Draper said in an email dated 3/22/2017
In another, dated 10/23/2018, Draper refers to Neil Corkery, who according to some reports has left Opus Dei, as a “homophobe par excellence.”
In a 5/5/23 email Draper states that “[The New York] Times has been looking into the Corkerys. But it would have to be something unambiguously criminal to stick.”
Soon after, I got phone calls and exchanged emails with NYT investigative reporters Jo Becker and Abbie VanSickle, four Pulitzers between them, looking into Leo. Despite speaking with them both for several hours, to my knowledge, nothing has ever been printed.
In 2017, retired in a beach enclave in Mexico, I contacted NYT, again. This time, investigative reporter Eric Lipton, who has three Pulitzers. We had an hour-long call via Skype, but again, nothing came of it.
I have no documents, no smoking gun. Also, reporters get very squeamish when you mention religion. That is one way Leo stays behind the curtain. Reporters are afraid of being called bigots. It’s ok to write reams about Evangelical Christian Nationalists, like Mike Johnson, but Catholics are off limits, a newsroom taboo. Look at the harassment the Spotlight team in Boston endured covering pedophile priests, or more recently, the coordinated abuse heaped on Heidi Przybyla at Politico for her reporting on Leo.
Bill Donahue’s extreme-right Catholic League, where Ann Corkery was also a board member, has an extensive apparatus and a tried and true formula for intimidating and silencing reporters. But occasionally, reporters say the quiet part out loud.
“There is a serious Catholic sort of mafia” said Carl Hulse (July 30, 2019) NYT DC bureau chief during a promotional talk for his book “Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court” on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
The backlash was immediate. Donahue’s Catholic League demanded that Hulse be “removed” from his job.
The rightwing media went after Hulse for his anti-Catholic bias, not unlike the scolding given Sen. Diane Feinstein during the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings, in which Feinstein quipped “the dogma lives loudly within you,” referencing Barrett’s time as a “handmaiden” of the far right Catholic People of Praise.
Hulse maintains that what he said was “tongue in cheek” in an 8/1/2019 email to me. Regardless, Leo’s so-called “Catholic mafia” is an open secret inside the beltway, but there is a kind of newsroom omertà. Unlike the Evangelical right, which get tons of ink, stories about the Catholic right are all but taboo, rarely spoken about, even less written about — except in the progressive Catholic press when Pope Francis denounces the US Catholic right.
“There is a Catholic cabal” and a “real Catholic underground that is influencing this probably in an outsized way,” Hulse told Maureen Dowd, his book talk partner. Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize winning NYT columnist, described it as a “deep state.”
In a NYT column titled “Too much church, not enough state,” written after the Alito draft to rescind Roe was leaked (May 14, 2022) Dowd addressed the theological makeup of the current court — five of nine Supreme Court Justices are extreme far right Catholics. A sixth, Gorsuch, was raised anti-environment Catholic, but currently attends an Anglican/Episcopal church.
Hulse and I exchanged more than a dozen emails after his comments were published, but we never met nor had more than a cursory discussion re Leo.
Last summer, a former NYT editor told me that Hulse had been taken to the woodshed by NYT higher ups for his Catholic mafia comment.
The New York Times is accused of being biased all the time. The last thing it needs is the DC bureau chief being honest and open about DC’s Catholic mafia.
Why didn’t anyone think Leo and his network was a story?
You’d have to ask the reporters. Somebody please ask them.
The tacit hold on Leo stories ended August 22, 2022 when ProPublica broke the story that billionaire Barre Seid had given Leo $1.6 billion, no strings attached.
Placing five Supreme Court justices wasn’t worthy of a Leo deep dive, but $1.6 billion? Suddenly, every investigative team in the country was interested.
Coincidentally, in the hours before ProPublica broke the story, the NYT rushed out its own Barre Seid money “scoop,” with Leo quotes, in a quick, brief version of the ProPublica story.
According to numerous sources, ProPublica had been working on the $1.6 billion story for weeks, but after ProPublica sent Leo questions regarding the donation, Leo shopped the $1.6 billion story to the NYT’s Ken Vogel, expecting and getting better treatment. Vogel is known in DC and journalism circles for writing a widely debunked hit job on Biden and Ukraine in 2019. That might explain why Team Leo approached Vogel. Whatever the reason, Leo got kid glove treatment from Vogel and the NYT.
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.
Imagine you are a NYT reporter in 1935 Berlin and you meet and begin dating a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan woman. Turns out your new girlfriend is the daughter, or neice or goddaughter of a high ranking Nazi. You are welcomed into Berlin’s Nazi social circuit. Access. Check. Sources. Check. Amour. Check. You get invited into Nazi homes and cocktail parties. Do you tell your editor back home, I can’t write about this, my girlfriend would not approve? I’m friendly with these people. They love God. They love Germany. They are actually very nice, except for what they have planned for the Jews.
Ms. Powers, Draper’s wife, has been public about staying silent and protecting racist, homophobic and bigoted sources.
“People do not have a ‘right’ to stay anonymous so they can spew their racist, misogynist, homophobic garbage,” she wrote on Twitter, July 6, 2017. In another tweet she said she’d publish the person’s name and picture.
Except, if they are close, personal friends of NYT reporters, maybe?
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