Leonard Leo

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Leonard Anthony Leo was born in November 1965 and attended Cornell University from 1983 to 1989, earning both a bachelor’s degree and a law degree. In 1989 he founded the university’s student chapter of the Federalist Society, and in 1991 he joined the organization’s Washington, D.C. staff. Over more than 25 years he rose to executive vice president and then co-chairman of the board, sharing the post with Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi. In January 2020 he took a leave to start CRC Advisors, a for-profit conservative consulting firm, while remaining central to the network’s judicial-selection work.

Leo advised on Republican Supreme Court nominations across three decades, beginning with assistance to Clarence Thomas during his 1991 confirmation hearings. He organized outside coalitions backing John Roberts (2005) and Samuel Alito (2006) under George W. Bush — who also appointed Leo to three terms as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom — and advised on the selection and confirmation of all three of Donald Trump’s nominees: Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018), and Amy Coney Barrett (2020). His most consequential move was personally curating the list of potential nominees that Trump released in May 2016 after Justice Scalia’s death; all three Trump appointees came from that list. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote in 2017 that Leo was “responsible, to a considerable extent, for one third of the justices on the Supreme Court.”

Leo’s Catholic faith is central to his public identity. He sits on the board of Opus Dei and has served on the board of the Catholic Information Center, the Opus Dei-affiliated institution on K Street in Washington, alongside former Attorney General Bill Barr; in October 2022 that center gave him its John Paul II New Evangelization Award. He is also a knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Through CRC Advisors, the Marble Freedom Trust, the Concord Fund (formerly the Judicial Crisis Network, which he helped launch in 2004), and the Teneo Network, Leo directs a network of interconnected nonprofits and for-profits. In 2022 ProPublica reported that Chicago electronics magnate Barre Seid had given $1.6 billion to the Marble Freedom Trust by transferring ownership of his company, Tripp Lite, which the trust then sold — the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history. In a September 2024 Financial Times interview, Leo said the trust would devote roughly $1 billion to “crush liberal dominance” in news and entertainment. In 2023 the Washington Post reported that in 2012 Leo had directed consulting fees to Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, instructing pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit he advised with the note “No mention of Ginni, of course.” Leo and donor Harlan Crow were later subpoenaed in a Senate Judiciary Committee Supreme Court ethics probe. In May 2025 Trump publicly broke with Leo, calling him a “bad person” and a “sleazebag,” and the White House said the Federalist Society would no longer be used for judicial nominations.

Sources

1. “We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority” — Andrea Bernstein and Andy Kroll, ProPublica — https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority
2. “How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts” (Barre Seid, $1.6 billion) — ProPublica, August 22, 2022 — https://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-leonard-leo-barre-seid
3. “Leonard Leo | Federalist Society, Conservatism, Judges, Fundraising, & Catholicism” — Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonard-Leo
4. “Leonard A. Leo” — Federalist Society contributor profile — https://fedsoc.org/contributors/leonard-leo
5. “Leonard Leo directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ’no mention of Ginni’” — Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, Washington Post, May 4, 2023 — https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/05/04/leonard-leo-clarence-ginni-thomas-conway/
6. “Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo wants to ‘crush liberal dominance’” — NPR, November 24, 2024 — https://www.npr.org/2024/11/24/nx-s1-5199049/federalist-society-conservative-supreme-court