When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was promoting a new release of his 2007 memoir last October, he made an interesting choice for his public relations firm, a company run by one of the most influential figures in conservative legal circles: Leonard Leo.
Leo, the former head of the Federalist Society and a top fundraiser for right-wing judiciary activist groups, wasn’t just in charge of Thomas’ memoir; Leo’s PR firm, CRC Advisors, was also tasked with promoting a Thomas documentary, and the firm was the registered agent for four Thomas-centric web domains.
The interesting part of this choice is not that Leo’s firm was incapable of handling the work—far from it. What makes Thomas’ decision notable is that Leo happens to have a vested interest in the Supreme Court, and his dark money network actively tries to influence rulings.
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The revelations of Leo and Thomas’ business relationship offers new evidence of ties between a sitting justice and a man widely considered the most powerful conservative judicial activist in the country. And while it might not be an instantly damning smoking gun, experts say the connection—where Thomas stands to gain financially—raises further questions about the arch-conservative justice’s deep and shady ties to a sprawling network of dark money organizations and right-wing activist groups, many of which have business before him.
The news also comes at a time of dwindling public faith in the Supreme Court’s impartiality. That faith hit an all-time low last September, the month before the audiobook’s press release.
Paul Collins, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court, called Thomas’ specific choice of Leo’s firm, of all available options, “strange” and “unnecessary.”
“It signals that this world of the Federalist Society is even smaller than we thought,” Collins told The Daily Beast.
That world was already thought to be miniscule, with Leo’s hand seemingly never far from the court’s affairs.
The foremost of a tight cadre of hyperconservative legal activists, Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings.
Leo is also the hub of a network of dark money groups which routinely, and anonymously, fund and join arguments before the Supreme Court—bankrolling what researchers have called an “amicus flotilla.”
His network has most recently taken the shape of a sprawling legal effort focused on influencing election administration, including misleading allegations of impropriety. The Federalist Society, the legal activist group synonymous with Leo, has been called “the single most influential advocacy organization in Washington.”
But Leo’s affiliations with the court are especially heightened when it comes to Justice Thomas.
Leo made Thomas the godfather of one of his children, and, according to The New York Times, has hosted the justice on vacation at his New England getaway. Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, was also the subject of a recent profile by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, titled, “Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to The Supreme Court?” It detailed the staggering extent and depth of connections between the justice’s wife and conservative groups.
Some of those organizations are tied with Leo, and, as Mayer reported, many have matters before the court. At least one of them has tapped CRC to handle its public relations.
Leo, whom Ginni Thomas considers a mentor, joined CRC Advisors in 2020, after stepping down from his position as vice president of the Federalist Society. (He still co-chairs the board.) Leo told Axios at the time that CRC planned to pump a “minimum of $10 million” into judicial advocacy issues ahead of the 2020 election.
Neither CRC Advisors nor the Supreme Court replied to a request for comment.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a progressive who has long called for clarity about dark money influence on the judiciary, said Leo’s group, in running public relations for Thomas, appears to be trying to clean up after its own damage.
“Leo and his CRC Advisors form the head of a many-legged dark-money operation designed to deliver on the priorities of right-wing donor interests,” Whitehouse told The Daily Beast. “That operation spent hundreds of millions of dollars—if not more—to capture the Supreme Court. Now, it’s trying to prop up its right-wing justices’ credibility in the face of growing public frustration with what Justice Sotomayor calls the ‘stench’ of partisanship emanating from the Court.”
CRC’s press announcement for the Thomas memoir—My Grandfather’s Son—promotes a new release in audiobook and Kindle formats. It also quotes two conservative activists, and informs media that they can contact a CRC Advisors official if they want to land an interview with either of them.
One of the officials, Mark Paoletta, worked on Justice Thomas’ nomination; the other, Carrie Severino, clerked for him and currently runs the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group linked to Leo which has poured millions into influencing judicial nominations.
CRC Advisors was also chosen to promote the critically panned Thomas documentary, Created Equal, which Variety called “a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas.”
(CNBC reported that the documentary’s producer—a Trump appointee—had tapped donations to his nonprofit to help fund his private production company.)
CRC has also registered several web domains related to Justice Thomas, including “clarencethomas.org,” “clarencethomas.us,” “justicethomas.us,” and “theanitahillcase.com,” a reference to the credible sexual harassment allegations that marked Thomas’ bitter nomination hearings in 1991.
The relationship carries the further context of Leo’s activism, fundraising, and connection to cases before the court. This extends not just to the Federalist Society, but to CRC itself, which within months of promoting the memoir published multiple press releases about attempts to influence Supreme Court cases, including a petition to knock down the vaccine mandate.
Collins, the UMASS professor, noted that, after the fraught nominations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the public has been particularly sensitive to ethical concerns.
“Many people, including the Chief Justice, are worried about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the eyes of the American public,” Collins said, referencing Chief Justice John Roberts’s annual report last year, where Roberts took the unusual step of admonishing federal judges for ethical breaches, writing that, “We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards.”
“The continued exposure of real or potential conflicts of interest could be problematic for the court, especially when we see ties like this between a justice and the Federalist Society, which plays such a large role in the legal world,” Collins said.
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University School of Law, said that while the connection between Leo, CRC, and Thomas bears reporting, it doesn’t hit an official ethical bar—partly, he said, because the bar is so much higher for Supreme Court justices than for any other federal judge.
“The ethics rules governing justices are much narrower than the rules governing other federal judges. So on the question of disqualification, in this case it’s too attenuated, as this case doesn’t suggest that those rules have been violated,” Gillers explained, noting that “Ginni Thomas is a class by itself; nothing comes close to the harm that does to our courts.”
On the issue of CRC, Gillers said, “There’s a difference between whether something is newsworthy, and whether it crosses a legal line. This instance is newsworthy, but it doesn’t cross a line.”
“Thomas of course has a right to hire a PR firm to sell his book and get attention to it. Now, it may appear to many people as unseemly, but that’s not a legal question,” Gillers said. “In my view, justices should not act in a way that casts suspicion on the court just because they can.”
Artemus Ward, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University who has written extensively on the politics of the Supreme Court, said that the matter could raise political problems for Thomas.
Ward pointed to a 1960s conservative campaign to force the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a liberal justice “got hounded out by conservatives because of some alleged ethical breaches regarding his finances, such as receiving speakers fees.”
“It was never fully clear just what the money was or whether he had crossed ethical lines, but conservatives held hearings to drum him out of office because they saw him as a liberal crony,” he said. “The question with Thomas is whether the endgame for Democrats is to hound him out of office before he’s ready to go.”
