Rarely do private companies find themselves punished for using #shell #companies to move capital and avoid taxes.

The fine accountants at Ernst & Young cooked up a complicated scheme in 2008 for a restructuring of #Koch #Industries via shell entities in Luxembourg,
a notorious tax haven, with the reasonable expectation that the ruse would never be revealed.

But then someone leaked a raft of private documents from #Mossack #Fonseca, a law firm in Panama that specializes in the creation of shell companies.

The info dump became known as the #Panama #Papers, and among its many revelations was Koch Industries’ bid to reinvent parts of the company, on paper,
as tax-avoidant Luxembourg shell companies.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, the essence of the Koch Industries deal was to
“reorder the ownership of many subsidiaries and centralize them under Luxembourg companies that are all served by internal corporate finance companies,
akin to a company’s own bank.”

Maybe that’s where the Koch siblings got the idea to get behind #DonorsTrust
—a sort of house bank for the array of political entities and think tanks they fund.

Of course, as with all of the organizations funded by Koch, they’re not in it alone.

#Betsy and #Dick #DeVos helped fund DonorsTrust, according to Mother Jones.

And then there are the many Koch-network “pass-through” groups, such as "Freedom Partners"
and the "Center to Protect Patient Rights",
which function much the way that shell companies do in the world of private capital:
-- they add layers of obfuscation over the provenance of the dollars flowing from one right-wing organization or institution to the next.

For instance, there’s the #Wellspring #Committee,
a pass-through funded in part via the Koch network, whose director, Ann Corkery, also sat for six years on the board of the #Becket #Fund for #Religious #Liberty,
a pro-bono law firm, according to tax filings.

With its portfolio of so-called religious freedom cases,
the Becket Fund gained notice as the firm representing the principals of the #Hobby #Lobby company in
a 2014 Supreme Court challenge to a mandate in the Affordable Care Act
for employer-based health insurance to cover,
without a co-pay, the costs of prescription #contraception.

One type of private company is the “#closely #held” variety, which may occasionally trade stock publicly, but has only a few shareholders.

The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Hobby Lobby (number 106 on the 2016 Forbes list of the nation’s top private companies) specifically cited its “closely held” status as a qualification for its exemption from the ACA contraceptive mandate.

Much to the consternation of his Federalist Society colleagues,
#Leonard #Leo had also begun
cannibalizing the organization’s own deep-pocketed donors to help finance some of his more personal initiatives
— and those of his friends.

In 2010, he co-founded along with Ginni Thomas an organization called "Liberty Central";

Thomas was the wife of his good friend Justice Clarence Thomas and they used a $500,000 donation from Dallas real estate billionaire #Harlan #Crow,
also a donor to the Federalist Society.

The group billed itself as “America’s Public Square,” promising to preserve freedom and reaffirm the core principles of the Founding Fathers.

The following year, he joined the board of "Chicago Freedom Trust", which had been set up by manufacturing billionaire #Barre #Seid as a pass-through
to anonymously channel funds to initiatives he wished to support
and to take advantage of the recent #Citizens #United ruling shielding big donors from disclosure.

Leo met Seid through #Eugene #Meyer, president of the Federalist Society, who envisioned the wealthy manufacturing tycoon as a potential donor to the law society.

Instead, Leo cultivated him as a funder of his own dark-money network.

The move brought Leo into contact with other central figures of the conservative dark-money world
— like #Whitney #Ball and #Adam #Meyerson,
the main actors behind #DonorsTrust, who were responsible for anonymously funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to various conservative grassroot groups,
including some linked to the far right.

He also used his influence there to divert funds to Opus Dei, with the pass-through soon becoming a regular donor to the Oakcrest School.

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits.

Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005,

hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion.

As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the "Wellspring Committee" and the "Judicial Crisis Network".

Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death,
as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums.

In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia
and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy.

It was just the start.

Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes.

Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble
hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts
— on abortion,
on affirmative action,
and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

Much to the consternation of his Federalist Society colleagues,
#Leonard #Leo had also begun
cannibalizing the organization’s own deep-pocketed donors to help finance some of his more personal initiatives
— and those of his friends.

In 2010, he co-founded along with Ginni Thomas an organization called "Liberty Central";

Thomas was the wife of his good friend Justice Clarence Thomas and they used a $500,000 donation from Dallas real estate billionaire #Harlan #Crow,
also a donor to the Federalist Society.

The group billed itself as “America’s Public Square,” promising to preserve freedom and reaffirm the core principles of the Founding Fathers.

The following year, he joined the board of "Chicago Freedom Trust", which had been set up by manufacturing billionaire #Barre #Seid as a pass-through
to anonymously channel funds to initiatives he wished to support
and to take advantage of the recent #Citizens #United ruling shielding big donors from disclosure.

Leo met Seid through #Eugene #Meyer, president of the Federalist Society, who envisioned the wealthy manufacturing tycoon as a potential donor to the law society.

Instead, Leo cultivated him as a funder of his own dark-money network.

The move brought Leo into contact with other central figures of the conservative dark-money world
— like #Whitney #Ball and #Adam #Meyerson,
the main actors behind #DonorsTrust, who were responsible for anonymously funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to various conservative grassroot groups,
including some linked to the far right.

He also used his influence there to divert funds to Opus Dei, with the pass-through soon becoming a regular donor to the Oakcrest School.

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits.

Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005,

hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion.

As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the "Wellspring Committee" and the "Judicial Crisis Network".

Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death,
as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums.

In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia
and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy.

It was just the start.

Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes.

Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble
hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts
— on abortion,
on affirmative action,
and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

But in 2022, after the Cornell deal soured, new law school donations appeared on DonorsTrust’s filings.

These anonymous gifts went to schools without the hefty endowments of Cornell, Yale, Stanford, or NYU, or the conservative cachet of George Mason.

And like the earmark for Leo’s new center at Texas A&M, these new donations also had explicit instructions for how the cash must be used, instructions which seem to align closely with Leo’s priorities.

One such school on #DonorsTrust’s filing in 2022 was Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

In November 2022, after Texas A&M soft-launched his
" Center on the Structural Constitution"
Leo took the stage at Catholic University’s law school alongside Patrick #Kelly, “Supreme Knight” of the Knights of Columbus, the all-male Catholic fraternal order.

The occasion: to celebrate a new endowed professorship and the launch of a new research center,

both focused on the intersection of the U.S. Constitution and the Catholic intellectual tradition.

It was a rare public recognition of Leo’s fundraising prowess at the intersection of faith and the law.

A devout Catholic, Leo is a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Catholic knighthood, and recipient of the top honor from Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center.

At Catholic University’s celebration, Leo said its law school was
“becoming very impactful in the field of legal education.”

At first, money for the new center
— the Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition
— came in without any mention of Leo.

In April 2021, Catholic University announcedit had received $4.25 million from an “anonymous trust” for a three-year program,
with the possibility of expanding “into a larger constitutional law center” after that, based on a joint assessment by the “supporting donor” and the school.

A year later, in May 2022, the school announced the creation of a new professorship to lead the new project.

Leo, in partnership with the Knights of Columbus, had “directed a gift” to endow the “Knights of Columbus Professor of Law and the Catholic Tradition,”

which was awarded to Kevin #Walsh, a former Scalia clerk.

The total funding for Walsh’s professorship and the center came to $8.25 million, according to the announcement.

At the November 2022 event, the Knights of Columbus were credited with chipping in $1 million toward the professorship,
while an “anonymous donor” contributed $3 million that was “overseen” by Leo.

DonorsTrust’s year-end tax filings for 2022 show a $4.1 million contribution to Catholic University of America,
earmarked “for the Knights of Columbus Professor of Law.”

Catholic University and the Knights of Columbus did not respond to questions from The Intercept.

Since it launched, Catholic University’s new research center has hosted talks by two Supreme Court justices:
Samuel #Alito and Amy Coney #Barrett,
two of six practicing Catholics currently on the high court.

Alito serves as the project’s honorary chair, and it has also attracted powerful conservative appellate judges as “visiting jurists.”

“Catholic tradition is not an add-on, not something extra,” said Walsh at the November 2022 event.

“It is the matrix within which we are to take hold of all reality, including the realities of law and justice.”

https://theintercept.com/2024/05/29/leonard-leo-donor-law-schools/