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Nevilledog

(50,682 posts)
Fri Feb 26, 2021, 10:57 AM Feb 2021

Greg Olear: Leo the Cancer



Tweet text:
Greg Olear
@gregolear
"Leonard Leo plants op-eds in newspapers, & he buys ads, & he hires PR outfits to do campaigns, & he lobbies, & he does it in such a way that no one can see the radical Catholic Oz behind the curtain, with his gold fob & his decanter of Château Lafite."

Leo the Cancer
Leonard Leo, Opus Dei & the Radical Catholic Takeover of the Supreme Court
gregolear.substack.com


https://gregolear.substack.com/p/leo-the-cancer

WHAT LEONARD LEO wants you to know about Leonard Leo, first and foremost, is that he is a Knight of Malta. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is a lay Catholic order that claims descent from the Knights Hospitaller, founded in Jerusalem in 1099, at the end of the First Crusade. It’s an extremely selective group. Of the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, only 13,000 are Knights of Malta—although most of them don’t go around bragging about it.

Leo, I’m told, is very proud of this honor. First, because it demonstrates just how radically Catholic his radical Catholicism runs. And second, because it speaks to his importance. SMOM membership is the sort of status symbol that eluded him, growing up middle-class in the suburbs of New Jersey, where his high school classmates derisively nicknamed him “Moneybags.” 1His mother and step-father weren’t blue bloods. He wasn’t some wealthy boarding school kid. Poor guy had to make due with Cornell instead of Harvard or Yale. He was a nobody.

But look at him now! Leonard Leo, 56, has made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.

You wouldn’t know it to look at him. Leonard Leo is a short, foppish, pear-shaped man, in wire-rimmed glasses and pricy suits. Think a dandier George Constanza, or if The Penguin worked at Jones Day. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the 2017 New Yorker profile (that is now framed in Leo’s office):

Leo is at ease in the role of impresario. His grandfather was a vice-president of Brooks Brothers, and he instilled in young Leonard a taste for the bella figura. Leo wears tailored suits, often with contrasting waistcoats, and a double-length gold fob attached to a 1935 train conductor’s pocket watch. (“The most accurate watch in the United States until the fifties,” he said.) In lieu of office meetings, Leo prefers to chat over breakfast (just bacon, no eggs) at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House. As his friend Boyden Gray, the White House counsel under George H. W. Bush, puts it, “He knows the best restaurants in every major city in the world, and the best wines. He has a wide-ranging, inquiring mind, and he can and will talk about any subject under the sun.”

*snip*



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Greg Olear: Leo the Cancer (Original Post) Nevilledog Feb 2021 OP
The man who almost single-handedly wrecked the Supreme Court. hedda_foil Feb 2021 #1
this twitter thread is going big time tonight.... Grasswire2 May 2022 #2
Here Nevilledog May 2022 #3
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