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The Brian Lehrer Show

The Man Who Shaped SCOTUS

The Brian Lehrer Show

WNYC

Media, Public, Arts, News Commentary, Nyc, Daily News, York, Npr, Wnyc, News, Bryan, Radio, Politics, Lerer, New

4.61.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ilya Marritz, fellow at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, and Andrea Bernstein, author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), are co-reporters of the podcast We Don't Talk About Leonard from ProPublica and On The Media, which dives into the background of the man who has played a critical role in the conservative takeover of America's courts: Leonard Leo.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Brian Ler on WNYC, there's been some significant Trump on trial news in the last two days, notably

0:17.0

the gag order yesterday for Trump continuing to target an assistant to the judge in the

0:22.7

New York business fraud case.

0:25.0

The judge said Trump was putting the assistant at risk of physical violence and also yesterday

0:31.3

an architect of the election denial plot in Congress, as you probably heard, became speaker

0:37.5

of the House.

0:38.5

Meanwhile, it's probably no surprise to listeners of the show that the conservative legal movement

0:43.3

in the United States is stronger than it's ever been.

0:46.5

There is, of course, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court stacked up during Donald

0:50.9

Trump's tenure.

0:52.2

But one man has played a far more significant role in pushing the American judiciary to

0:57.1

the right, and he's done it far less publicly.

0:59.9

His name is Leonard Leo, and his reach extends far beyond the Supreme Court.

1:04.9

Decades ago, he knew he would have to go deeper than just those nine justices, and he decided

1:10.3

that jurists need to decide the right cases brought by the right lawyers, lawyers on the

1:17.4

right, and heard by the right lower court judges.

1:21.8

And all that would head up to a conservative Supreme Court, and then there's his activism

1:26.6

at the state court level.

1:28.4

So he's the subject of a new podcast called We Don't Talk About Leonard.

1:32.6

And who else could have uncovered such a fascinating covert political operation, but our former

1:37.2

WNYC colleagues, Ilya Maritz and Andrea Bernstein, known to you probably for their WNYC

1:43.8

podcast series, Trump Inc.

...

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