“I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country” —Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to Tom Logan, November 12, 1816)
Leonard Leo, the man who managed the pipeline that put six far-right justices onto the U.S. Supreme Court, now heads a corporation with a campaign war chest of 1.6-billion-dollars—or as Charlie Pierce puts it, “One-point-six BILLION motherfcking dollars.” (For comparison, that’s nearly five times the largest check ever written by fabled venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz—$350 million to Adam Neumann’s new housing venture, Flow.)
One-point-six BILLION motherfcking dollars is now available to Leonard Leo to use in pushing his radical agenda on abortion rights, voting rights, and climate policies. The money came from a 90-year-old, industrialist named Barre Seid (pronounced Barry Sighed), who made the donation through a sly stock move that allowed him to avoid paying any of the up to $400 million in taxes on the gains he made selling his electronics company (Tripp Lite).
Seid had built his fortune on top of the growth of the personal-computer by making surge protectors. Just before selling his company to Dublin-based Eaton in 2021, he donated all of his shares to Leo’s new Marble Freedom Trust, allowing the proceeds to go directly—and tax-free—to the Dark Lord of Dark Money.
We’re in an era where it’s not only impossible to limit donations to political influence campaigns, it’s also relatively easy to hide them. While it came to light only this week, the stealthy process of moving the one-point-six BILLION motherfcking dollars into Leo’s foundation started two years ago. The transfer managed to remain completely out of view until it was disclosed last Monday in an article by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher in New York Times.
The ongoing flood of undisclosed donations to political causes is rooted in the Citizens United v. FEC decision of 2010 which opened the floodgates to untraceable contributions and corporate expenditures to influence elections. The majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy blithely dismissed the corrupting influence of unlimited corporate expenditures:
This Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.
The dissent, by Justice John Paul Stephens, was prophetic in anticipating the now common complaint that politicians are unresponsive to the public because they are entirely beholden to corporate interests. He wrote:
There are threats of corruption that are far more destructive to a democratic society than the odd bribe…. When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy….A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing. The predictable result is cynicism and disenchantment: an increased perception that large spenders “‘call the tune’” and a reduced “‘willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance.’…While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
By the way, Justice Stephens retired shortly after he stumbled delivering his dissent orally. He had suffered a small stroke. "I took that as a warning sign that maybe I've been around longer than I should." He was 90-years-old at the time.
When Jane Mayer published Dark Money in 2016, the billionaires she profiled, the Koch Brothers, although they had many unseen tentacles influencing politics on national and local levels, were, nonetheless, public figures. By contrast, Barre Seid has remained almost invisible, leaving only faintest records in the public sphere.
There’s evidence that he was the anonymous donor behind renaming George Mason’s law school for Antonin Scalia. And this 2012 diary on Daily Kos sees Barre’s hand in anonymous donations to the Heartland Institute, a climate-denialist think-tank.
By contrast with the reclusive Seid, Leonard Leo, does not work in the shadows. He’s open about what he’s up to. His ability to network and fundraise has made him singularly successful in managing influence campaigns to fill the federal judiciary with activist, right-wing judges. Five years ago, after the SCOTUS nomination and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, The New Yorker ran this profile of Leo by Jeffrey Toobin.
At the time, Leo had been responsible for getting only one-third of the Supreme Court nominated and confirmed. But by the end of the Trump administration, he had placed a majority of the Justices on the Court.
If there’s any justice in the world, Leo’s crowning achievement—overturning Roe v. Wade—will prove to be the single strongest motivating factor in helping the Democrats keep control of the House, expand their Senate majority, and make inroads into Republican control of state houses. If that happens, maybe Congress will be in a position to install a dark-money surge-protector to keep money out of politics.
Stay tuned.
For further reading:
Richard L. Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate describe the looping and interlocking spheres of influence that Leonard Leo has engaged to advance his agenda. They show why, “it’s Leonard Leo’s world and we all just live in it.”
Andrew Perez, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, in ProPublica and The Lever take a deep dive into what little we the record has on Seid and his relationship to Leo. They even manage to link to what they say is the only online photo of Seid—a grainy photo of him at age 14, visiting the University of Chicato with some classmates.