President Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices and nominated 274 individuals to federal judgeships. Journalist David Enrich says many of those picks were influenced by lawyers from the firm of Jones Day.

Editor's note: Jones Day is an underwriter for NPR and has done work for NPR in the past.

While campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump famously cast himself as a Washington outsider, someone who would "drain the swamp" of special interests and cronyism. But New York Times journalist David Enrich notes that both Trump's candidacy and his administration were shaped, in no small part, by Jones Day, one of the most politically connected law firms in DC.

For much of Jones Day's history, it was a juggernaut in the field of corporate litigation, raking in billions a year in fees from tobacco, opioid, gun and oil companies, among many other giant corporations. But, as Enrich writes in his book, Servants of the Damned, the firm became particularly embroiled in politics during the Trump administration.

"They were more embedded in the Trump administration than any law firm I can think of in any past presidential administration," Enrich says. "Throughout the White House and the Justice Department, as well as other agencies, basically, everywhere you looked, you would find a once and future Jones Day lawyer."

Enrich points out that Don McGahn, a prominent Jones Day lawyer, left the firm to become Trump's White House counsel. McGahn assumed the responsibility of picking the judges Trump would nominate to the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

"One of the core kind of tenets of McGahn's judicial philosophy was this real antipathy toward what he calls derisively 'the administrative state,'" Enrich says. "And one of the biggest results of that is that it translates into judges who no longer give nearly as much deference to the rights and authority of federal agencies as had been the norm."

Enrich says lawyers from Jones Day cycled back and forth between the Trump administration and private practice, where they would go right back to representing corporate clients — in some cases with interests before the Trump administration.

"The notion that this outsider trying to shake things up would turn to a firm like Jones Day to staff his administration and help pick his judges and things like that, it is really antithetical to that," Enrich says. "When I think of the swamp and I think when Trump thinks of the swamp, there are few swampier things than that type of inside baseball lobbying."

Leonard Leo & Barre Seid (Creator of Marble Freedom Trust) “the little spiders that you find at the center of the dark money web.”

Millions of dollars in television advertisements blasting schools for teaching critical race theory and assailing corporations like BlackRock, Uber and American Airlines for catering to “woke politicians.”

A lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court to radically reshape how federal elections are conducted. Complaints against President Biden for violating election law and against school districts that allow information to be withheld from parents about children’s gender identities.

These initiatives were advanced in the past year or so by a handful of new or reconfigured conservative groups — each with their own leadership and mission.

Behind the scenes, though, these groups have something in common: They are part of an ambitious coalition developed in recent years by the conservative activist Leonard A. Leo, who until now has been best known for his role in pushing the appointments of conservative judges to the center of the Republican Party’s agenda.

Most of the initiatives were financially supported, or in some cases launched, by an opaque, sprawling network shaped by Mr. Leo and funded by wealthy patrons, usually through anonymous donations that critics call “dark money.”

An investigation by The New York Times of Mr. Leo’s activities reveals new details of how he has built that network, with relatively little public attention, into one of the best-funded and most sophisticated operations in American politics, giving him extraordinary influence as he pushes a broad array of hot-button conservative causes and seeks to counter what he sees as an increasing leftward tilt in society.

The network represents a dramatic expansion of tactics and focus for Mr. Leo, who spent nearly three decades working mostly behind the scenes to pull the judiciary to the right as an executive at the Federalist Society. His success in that effort, and expansion into other polarizing fights, is rapidly making him a leading target of criticism from the left.

His philosophy is defined by a belief that the federal government should play a smaller role in public life and religious values a larger one, and that institutions and individuals should be challenged for embracing what he sees as subversive liberal positions.

While his efforts to put conservatives on the courts found a powerful ally in President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Leo, an Ivy League-educated lawyer, has steered clear of the most virulent strains of Mr. Trump’s right-wing populism, as well as his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and he has navigated past most of the fissures in the Republican Party.

Among leading political figures, Mr. Leo is more aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who as Republican leader in the Senate has worked with him closely on judicial nominations and shares an animus for laws restricting the flow of money into politics.

Mr. Leo’s approach blends cutting-edge political financing techniques — some of which he says are copied from the left — with deep connections to the Republican establishment and a willingness to harness some of the culture-war issues animating the base.

Mr. Leo had begun quietly building the new operation in 2016, but its scope and intensity ramped up substantially when he stepped down in January 2020 from day-to-day leadership of the Federalist Society and shifted his attention to building the conservative advocacy and donor network full time.

The network is made up of a loosely affiliated and evolving set of nonprofit and for-profit entities, through which Mr. Leo helps raise huge sums of money from donors, steers the cash to groups promoting issues he supports and then shapes the resulting initiatives.

To help administer the enterprise, the network’s nonprofits, including the 85 Fund and Concord Fund, have paid millions of dollars in consulting fees to private firms in which he has a financial interest, like CRC Advisors and the BH Group, enriching Mr. Leo in the process.

The network’s nine core groups have spent nearly $504 million on policy and political fights, including grants to about 150 allied groups, between mid-2015 and last year, with roughly half of that spending since mid-2019, according to an analysis by The Times of dozens of tax filings. And his efforts have been turbocharged by an unusual $1.6 billion infusion from a Chicago electronics manufacturing magnate in late 2020 that was revealed by The Times this year, giving Mr. Leo the cash to match his ambitions going forward.

At a time when some of the most influential financial supporters of the Republican Party have shifted their focus or been diminished, Mr. Leo’s network is shaping the conservative movement with decisions about which causes, groups and politicians get funded.

His influence stems largely from the credibility he built with conservative donors and politicians during his decades-long crusade to put conservatives on the federal bench, most apparent in Supreme Court decisions this year that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and limited a crucial federal government tool to fight climate change.

His expanded effort focuses on a variety of causes, including restricting abortion rights in the states; ending affirmative action; defending religious groups accused of discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. people; opposing what he sees as liberal policies being espoused by corporations and schools; electing Republicans; and fighting Democratic efforts to slow climate change, increase the transparency of money in politics and expand voting access.

“The idea behind the network and the enterprise we built is to roll back liberal dominance in many important sectors of American life,” Mr. Leo said in an interview last month. “I had a couple of decades or more of experience rolling back liberal dominance in the legal culture, and I thought it was time to take the lessons learned from that and see whether there was a way to roll back liberal dominance in other areas of American cultural, policy and political life.”

Since 2016, the grant-making hubs in his network and the recipients of their money have paid more than $30 million to the firms owned at least partly by Mr. Leo, CRC Advisors and BH Group, according to the Times analysis. It shows that he also has been paid more than $2.7 million in personal salary and consulting fees during roughly that time period by nonprofit groups in the network and their grantees, including more than $2.2 million from the Federalist Society, where he remains co-chairman.

For those upset by the increasing flow of dark money into politics and rightward drift of the Supreme Court — critics include both his neighbors in an idyllic seaside Maine town and the president of the United States — Mr. Leo has become a boogeyman.

In calling for Senate passage of legislation to increase disclosure of dark money spending, Mr. Biden singled out Mr. Leo last month as the personification of “a serious problem facing our democracy” wherein money “flows in the shadows to influence our elections.”

Without naming Mr. Leo, the president referred to “a conservative activist who spent, as was his right, decades working to put enough conservative justices on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade” and who “now has access to $1.6 billion in dark money to do more damage and — from our perspective — and restrict more freedoms.”

The bill went down to defeat in a procedural vote in which every Republican voted with their leader, Mr. McConnell of Kentucky, who in a speech on the Senate floor accused Democrats of trying “to erode the First Amendment and make political speech more difficult.”

In an interview later, Mr. McConnell praised Mr. Leo’s “ability to attract significant resources to the right-of-center world.” He called Mr. Leo’s plans “quite ambitious,” adding: “That sounds like transforming society, which is not easy. But look, I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and his convictions.”

Mr. Leo’s network is helping shape the conservative movement with decisions about which causes, groups and politicians get funded.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

The ambition, tactics and impact of Mr. Leo’s network are illustrated by its campaign to punish some of the country’s biggest corporations for pushing environmental, social and governance causes, known as E.S.G., that generally align with a Democratic agenda.

The campaign has been pushed by two groups — Consumers’ Research and the State Financial Officers Foundation — that came to the issue relatively recently and have helped elevate it within the Republican Party. Both groups are clients of CRC Advisors, a firm with about 80 employees that Mr. Leo co-founded in January 2020, building on an earlier operation run by his allies for many years, that helps groups in the network raise money and execute their strategies.

Consumers’ Research dates back to the 1930s, when it focused on identifying and publicizing defective or unsafe consumer products. It had gone largely dormant by the early 2000s, but it was resuscitated a decade later as a Republican-aligned group working partly to topple federal environmental laws, using millions of dollars from donors with connections to Mr. Leo.

Among them, according to files obtained in a hack of a foundation and analyzed by the progressive researcher Lisa Graves, was Barre Seid, the Chicago electronics magnate. In late 2020, Mr. Seid donated his company to Marble Freedom Trust, one of the nonprofits controlled by Mr. Leo. The trust sold the company in March 2021, reaping more than $1.6 billion in proceeds.

About two months later, Consumers’ Research began an anti-E.S.G. campaign on which it says it has spent nearly $10 million — more than it had spent in the previous seven years combined.

The campaign was launched under the stewardship of Will Hild, a former Federalist Society official who is close to Mr. Leo and became executive director of Consumers’ Research in 2020. He would not say where the group’s sudden influx of cash came from. But a person involved in Mr. Leo’s network said it provided at least some of the money — funding that has not been previously reported.

Mr. Leo has no formal role with Consumers’ Research, but Mr. Hild, in an email, called him an “adviser to the organization.” Mr. Leo said “the woke capitalism battle is a very high priority for me, and I am very excited about what Consumers’ Research is doing.”

The group paid about $113,000 for public-relations consulting to CRC Advisors in 2020, before the start of the anti-E.S.G. campaign, according to a tax filing.

Consumers’ Research was listed this year as a top donor to the State Financial Officers Foundation, a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kan.

The foundation has helped coordinate efforts by Republican state treasurers to withdraw government pension funds from investment firms that focus on E.S.G. initiatives.

Mr. Hild has spoken at the foundation’s conferences about China and E.S.G., and this year, the foundation told allies that it had hired CRC Advisors, which worked with the treasurers’ offices to facilitate media coverage of the efforts to discourage E.S.G. investing, according to emails reviewed by The Times that were obtained through public records requests by the left-leaning investigative watchdog group Documented.

It is difficult to trace the support from Mr. Leo’s network and CRC for the anti-E.S.G. campaign. Filings that might shed light on it likely will not become public until next month or possibly next year. Even then, the flow of cash could be obscured since dark money is often routed through multiple entities.

CRC Advisors has corporate clients as well, though little is known about them, because there are fewer disclosure requirements. In one case, the firm seems to have unintentionally revealed a client — the oil giant Chevron — that could benefit from the campaign against environmental commitments by other corporations.

Bill Turenne, a spokesman for Chevron, said the company has “communications advisory relationships” with CRC and “a number of firms.”

A particular focus of the anti-E.S.G. campaign has been BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which has been at the forefront of an effort to push companies to respond to climate change by reducing carbon emissions.

Consumers’ Research has spent millions of dollars on advertising accusing BlackRock of “propping up Chinese Communist leaders,” having a hand in “soaring gas prices” by urging energy companies to divest from fossil fuels and contributing to “outrageous housing prices” by buying up single-family homes as rental properties.

In December, Consumers’ Research sent a letter to the governors of the 10 states with the largest pension fund investments in BlackRock, warning that the firm’s business in China, which has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum, is “putting American security at risk, along with billions of dollars from U.S. investors.

Three weeks later, one of the recipients of the letter, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a leading figure in conservative politics, ordered an audit of his state’s investments in Chinese assets. And in August, he and other state officials approved a resolution directing the state’s fund managers to invest to maximize returns, and not to take E.S.G. criteria into account.

In Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Utah and West Virginia, Republican officials have taken steps to pull hundreds of millions of dollars of state government investments from BlackRock, and officials in other states are considering actions against the company.

In Congress, Republicans are pledging hearings and investigations into BlackRock and other companies touting E.S.G. policies next year if they take control of one or both chambers in November.

“Consumers’ Research does great work, and I rely on them frequently,” said Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, referencing a number of targets of the group that he has criticized — including companies that pushed for emissions reductions and objected to a Republican election law in Georgia, as well as BlackRock and its investments in China.

BlackRock has formed internal working groups to determine how to respond. Its chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, held meetings this year with oil companies BlackRock has invested in, and has clarified that he sees reducing carbon emissions as a gradual process.

Brian Beades, a spokesman for BlackRock, called the campaign “politically driven misinformation,” pushing back on claims about the firm’s involvement in the housing market and climate change efforts. He added, “We are not going to allow dark money actors with a political agenda to stop us from doing the right thing for our clients.”

Other targets of Consumers’ Research have included Coca-Cola and Ticketmaster, which came under fire last year after they or their parent companies objected to a Republican election law in Georgia that placed limits on absentee and drop-box voting.

Mr. Cotton said he expected Republicans would seek to hold oversight hearings to determine whether corporate E.S.G. efforts were running afoul of antitrust laws.

“To the extent the Republican Party ever was more closely aligned with big business, those days are long since past,” he said.

The attacks on corporations are reminiscent of a memo written in the early 1970s for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He argued that to offset a leftward tilt in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences and from politicians,” the business community needed to fund conservative political institutions.

Now, though, influential conservatives believe the Chamber of Commerce and big business are no longer reliable backers of Republicans.

“When you start looking across America — at business, media, education and lots of the other major institutions — you see a pattern of liberal dominance,” Mr. Leo said. “And some of those institutions had a strong liberal presence at the time Powell wrote his memo, but the dominance was not as pervasive and not as widespread as it is today.”

Raised in an observant Catholic family in New Jersey, Mr. Leo found his calling while enrolled at Cornell University’s law school, where he formed a chapter of the Federalist Society in 1989. Its mission was to push back on what its founders saw as the leftward tilt of American law schools.

After a clerkship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a stint helping with the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he had gotten to know on the appeals court, Mr. Leo went to work for the Federalist Society full time in 1991.

Under Mr. Leo’s leadership, the group attracted funding from some of the biggest donors on the right.

Mr. Leo worked closely with President George W. Bush’s White House, including on efforts to confirm the Supreme Court nominees, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and John G. Roberts Jr., both of whom had ties to the Federalist Society. And Mr. Leo teamed up with Mr. McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, and other Senate Republicans, to oppose the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick B. Garland, who is now serving as attorney general, to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.

While Mr. Leo was working to keep the seat vacant, he was meeting behind closed doors with Mr. Trump, who was then closing in on the Republican presidential nomination. Two months later, Mr. Trump would release a list of Supreme Court candidates developed by Mr. Leo, a move that Mr. McConnell later said “reassured a lot of skeptical Republicans” about Mr. Trump.

But even as the 2016 election played out, Mr. Leo was starting to build political infrastructure to expand his influence regardless of who won the presidency, setting up three nonprofits to collect and disseminate funds from wealthy donors, as well as the for-profit consulting firm BH Group.

When Mr. Trump won the White House, Mr. Leo joined the transition team, BH Group donated $1 million to the inaugural committee and Mr. Leo advised on judicial nominees for an administration that would give conservatives a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court.

As Mr. Leo’s role in reshaping the Supreme Court built his credibility and profile among conservatives, something of a vacuum was developing on the big-money right. The industrialist Charles G. Koch, who once led the most influential major donor infrastructure network, expressed regret for years of backing Republicans, and his operation emphasized a bipartisan push for leniency in the criminal justice system.

Some of the party’s top donors — leery of helping Mr. Trump but also concerned about invoking his ire — were either recalibrating their giving or scaling back, and one of the party’s biggest donors, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate, died last year. The National Rifle Association has been weakened by legal problems.

In 2018, Mr. Leo started the Rule of Law Trust, a nonprofit funding hub. In short order, it received $80 million in untraceable cash.

Then, in January 2020, with Mr. Trump headed into a tough re-election campaign, Mr. Leo went public as the head of the new network, though details were scant. He stepped down as day-to-day leader of the Federalist Society and joined CRC Advisors as a partner and chairman.

Around the same time, two other groups that he had worked with on confirmation fights — the Judicial Education Project and a group that had been known as the Judicial Crisis Network — changed their names to the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund. The change seemed to reflect a broadening of their focus beyond the courts.

Mr. Leo does not have an official role in the 85 Fund or the Concord Fund, but since the beginning of 2016, they paid more than $7.4 million to the BH Group, and more than $41 million to CRC.

Some conservative operatives have grumbled about what they feel is an expectation that they have to hire CRC as a condition of getting money from Mr. Leo’s network, and say that in some cases he has boxed out other groups from raising money from donors with whom he is close — complaints that people in Mr. Leo’s network reject.

Some allies of Mr. Trump privately complain that Mr. Leo’s unwillingness to embrace the false claim that the election was stolen hindered their ability to sign top lawyers and firms to litigate the issue. They are closely watching Mr. Leo for signs that he or his network might align behind a Republican challenger to Mr. Trump in 2024.

Mr. Leo’s allies say he will support the party’s nominee, regardless of who it is.

Mr. Leo’s network has not been shy about taking on critics in Washington, like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who has repeatedly spotlighted him in speeches, including one last month in which he described Mr. Leo as “the little spider that you find at the center of the dark money web.”

But as Mr. Leo has become more prominent, the scrutiny also has hit closer to home. Over the summer, there were weekly demonstrations outside his mansion on the Maine coast where he and a limited liability company linked to him have purchased nearly $5 million worth of property in recent years, according to government records and interviews.

Mr. Leo has called the police on the protesters, and his hired security team has filmed participants. The guards have accompanied him when he walked his dog or ventured out. A young man who yelled obscenities at Mr. Leo while he was walking with his family in town was subsequently charged with disorderly conduct while participating in one such protest.

Early on a Monday morning last month, Mr. Leo was spotted along with one of the security guards outside his home where messages had been written in chalk on the street during the previous night’s protest, including “Dirty money lives here.”

Mr. Leo was bent at the waist, scrawling in chalk the names of women who the local newspaper had identified as participants in the protests. Mr. Leo told people that he was exercising his First Amendment rights.

One of the protesters, Bettina Richards, said she happened to jog past while Mr. Leo was writing the list of names, which included her own. Mr. Leo did not acknowledge her, she said, though the guard waved and wished her a good morning.

Ms. Richards, 57, said she was surprised that Mr. Leo had felt compelled to take up a piece of chalk.

“You have $1.6 billion to be throwing around — don’t you have bigger things to do with your day?” she said she wondered. “You can write my name all over the road. I’m not embarrassed to be objecting to your positions.”

Ken Vogel covers the confluence of money, politics and influence from Washington. He is also the author of “Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp — on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics.” More about Kenneth P. Vogel

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Leonard Leo: the secretive rightwinger using billions to reshape America

Marble Freedom Trust, advocacy group headed by Leo, has received vast $1.6bn donation to push conservative causes

As the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas prepared to take questions from members of the rightwing legal advocacy group the Federalist Society, a few years back, he turned to the moderator.

Thomas joked that the nondescript man in the blue suit and white shirt was the “No 3 most powerful person in the world”, and then fell about laughing. The target of the judge’s mirth, Leonard Leo, grinned and remarked: “God help us.”

Yet both men understood at that moment in 2018 just how influential Leo was, in ways that few Americans knew. Most had never even heard of Leo, even though he was at that time instrumental in maneuvering Donald Trump to reshape the court on which Thomas sits, and so deliver one of its most politically sensitive rulings of recent times by overturning the right to abortion.

Leo, a 56 year-old whose opposition to abortion is rooted in his Catholic faith, remains an obscure figure to much of the US public, even after revelations that he heads a political group that has received an astonishing $1.6bn donation to push conservative causes, including election manipulation ahead of this year’s midterm votes.

Earlier this month the New York Times revealed that the money, said to be one of the largest single contributions to a political pressure group, arrived in a circuitous route from a figure who is equally obscure to most Americans: Barre Seid.

Seid, who has spent tens of millions of dollars funding conservative and libertarian organizations, donated an entire company last year to a newly founded political advocacy group run by Leo, the Marble Freedom Trust. Marble sold the firm, the Chicago electronics manufacturer Tripp Lite, this year for $1.6bn, according to tax records.

The roundabout process has prompted speculation Seid was sidestepping tax on the sale to maximize the funding for Leo.

The Marble Freedom Trust has already distributed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, including $153m to the Rule of Law Trust to push the appointment of conservative judges. That still leaves more than $1bn to fund political causes close to Leo’s heart, including his interest in helping Republican officials manipulate elections ahead of the midterm vote and the next presidential ballot.

Leo defended the injection of a huge amount of “dark money” into the political process by claiming it merely levels the playing field against Democrats funded by liberal billionaires.

“It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other leftwing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals,” he said in a statement.

Leo’s close relationship with Thomas goes back to 1991 when he worked to gather evidence to support the judge during his confirmation hearing for the supreme court.

Leo went on to work for the Federalist Society, founded in 1982 to counter what conservatives claimed was liberal dominance of US courts and law schools. He rose to become the society’s co-chair and oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association, in part through the effectiveness of his fundraising to back conservative judicial nominees.

As the conservative lawyer Ed Whelan wrote six years ago in the National Review: “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a supreme court that will overturn Roe v Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”

In 2005, George W Bush nominated Harriet Miers, his deputy chief of staff, for a vacant seat on the supreme court. She was widely regarded as a weak candidate in any case, but when conservatives turned on her, and Miers withdrew, Leo saw to it that she was replaced by a figure far more acceptable to the right and opponents of abortion, Samuel Alito.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the most outspoken critics of dark money’s influence on politics, told the Guardian earlier this year that was a turning point.

“It was at that point that the grip of this little donor elite and Leo, its Federalist Society operative, really took hold. Justice Samuel Alito was the product of that and he has proven himself on the court as being a faithful workhorse for that dark money corporate rightwing crew,” he said.

Leo drew up a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees to help Trump, a man who had previously claimed to be pro-choice, woo conservative and evangelical voters by committing to nominate justices who were hostile to abortion rights.

After Trump’s victory, Leo took time away from the Federalist Society to work as an advisor to the president. All three of those eventually seated on the US’s highest court during Trump’s tenure and who voted to overturn Roe v Wade – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were named on the list Leo drew up during the campaign.

Now Leo has turned his attention to pushing conservative moves to manipulate elections in favour of Republicans through the Honest Elections Project, a recent addition to a web of interlinked groups funded with dark money, including from the libertarian Koch brothers.

Among other things, Leo is pushing a contentious legal theory that the US constitution gives state legislatures the power to decide how to run elections without intervention from the courts. The Honest Elections Project has made multiple legal submissions on the issue with the aim of removing the power of state courts to block gerrymandering and voter suppression measures to manipulate elections.

Earlier this year, Leo told the Washington Post that in using dark money for political ends he is not doing anything that has not been done before.

“Let’s remember that in this country, the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the American Revolution, the early labor movement, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s were all very much fueled by very wealthy people and oftentimes wealthy people who chose to be anonymous. I think that’s not a bad thing. I think that’s a good thing,” he said.

Interview highlights
On the outsized role Jones Day played in the Trump administration

Starting in 2015, the law firm represented his campaign, and they did so through the 2016 cycle and then again the 2020 campaign, that was work that basically started on Inauguration Day of 2017. And so they were front and center on both of his presidential campaigns, but they were not representing him personally. ...

The White House counsel, Don McGahn, was a very prominent Jones Day lawyer, and he surrounded himself in the White House with several senior Jones Day partners and associates who he brought with him. At the Justice Department, the solicitor general, Noel Francisco, was once and future Jones Day partner. And in the upper echelons of both in the civil division of the Justice Department you had some of the people right beneath the attorney general were from Jones Day. You had someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Commerce Department, on and on the list goes.

Shortly after Trump became president, Jones Day lawyers, both inside the administration and outside the administration, those still at the firm, started accomplishing things that they had long sought to accomplish but had not been able to do. And the clearest example of this to me is a series of lawsuits that Jones Day had brought on behalf of a bunch of Catholic organizations that were basically challenging an important provision of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. ... One of the first things that [the Trump] administration does with the help of Don McGahn, is they basically say they're going to end an Obama administration policy that sought to require employers to provide contraception coverage for their employees, which was part of Obamacare. And this was the subject of the lawsuit. So right on the face, it represented a big win for Jones Day and its clients.

The law firm isn't a monolith, and I think it's important to kind of say that at the outset. And this is a law firm that has something like 2,500 lawyers in dozens of countries all over the world. And like any large organization or large law firm, there are employees and lawyers at Jones Day that have, I think, a wide range of political views ranging from far left to far right. What sets Jones apart is the degree to which the leadership of the firm is fairly uniform in their conservative thinking. ...

Their agenda ... ranged from lots of deregulation and really getting the government out of the affairs of businesses to a very large extent, and then also an agenda of what I think the right people on the right would call "religious liberty." And I think people on the left and to a certain degree, people in the center would say much dramatically eroding the separation of church and state in a way that allows religion to play a much more prominent role in public and political life.

On how Don McGahn, former Jones Day lawyer, ended up picking SCOTUS nominees for Trump

Shortly after Trump was elected, Mitch McConnell gave some advice to Don McGahn. The advice was that instead of relying on a committee at the White House to debate and pick nominees for the Supreme Court and other federal courts, McConnell's advice was, "Look, you should get Trump's permission to just do this by yourself. You alone should have the power to pick the judges that Trump will nominate." McGahn liked the sound of that. He proposed it to Trump and Trump when he offered McGahn, the job of White House counsel, readily agreed to this. And so McGahn, very quickly, before Trump even was sworn in as president, all of a sudden was sitting on this enormous power that was really quite unusual historically. And he was the one who would be picking the people that Trump nominated to all sorts of federal courts.

He came right back, got a big promotion, got a bunch more money. And he was kind of the first in what would become a whole parade of people who went from the Trump administration back into the law firm. A lot of these were people who had started off of Jones Day, then went to the Trump administration and then returned. But there were also a lot of people who had not previously worked at Jones Day, had worked at maybe at other law firms. And with the return of McGahn, Jones Day became essentially a refuge for veterans of the Trump administration, who many of whom had really developed quite controversial backstories and had taken quite controversial and polarizing and legally dubious actions while in the Trump administration and therefore, I think, were pretty radioactive for many other big law firms. But Jones Day welcomed many of them with open arms.

It's now bringing cases through the Supreme Court and through the lower courts that were basically made possible by this deluge of very conservative federal judges that are now on the benches of many courts. So just in the Supreme Court's past term, which was obviously one of the most radical and farthest reaching the Supreme Court terms, certainly of my lifetime, and Jones Day played pivotal roles in some of these cases. And I think the biggest one was the case, the West Virginia versus EPA case that dramatically hemmed in the power of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. And that was brought on behalf of the Jones Day client, a big coal company.

Jones Day was the law firm that basically ended the eviction moratorium during the pandemic that the Biden administration had imposed. And Jones Day, just reading the tea leaves and talking to their lawyers now, it's quite clear that they are plotting a wide range of attacks on the power of the federal government to oversee private businesses and private companies in a way that goes back to Don McGahn and his colleagues' hatred of the so-called administrative state. And they are now in a position to be able to much more forcefully advocate those positions and be successful in their advocacy — thanks to all of the judges that Trump, at McGahn's direction and with McConnell's support, managed to get on to virtually every federal court in the country.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

Abbott’s lawyers at Jones Day negotiated secret settlements and used scorched earth tactics with families whose infants fell ill after consuming powdered formula.

David Enrich, the business investigations editor for The New York Times, is the author of the forthcoming book, “Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice,” from which this article is adapted.

Early on a Saturday morning in 2013, Mark Bennett, a federal judge, walked into his chambers in the courthouse in Sioux City, Iowa. He’d been out of town for a speaking engagement and was hoping to catch up on work. A surprise awaited him as he entered his office: Cardboard boxes were stacked everywhere. His immediate thought was that another judge might be moving in.

Another judge was not moving in. Judge Bennett was presiding over a case in which Abbott Laboratories, the sprawling health care company that dominated the market for infant formula, was being sued on behalf of a girl, Jeanine Kunkel, who five years earlier had suffered severe brain damage after consuming the company’s powdered formula. Jeanine couldn’t speak, sit up or even swallow, and the tragedy had nearly destroyed her family.

The boxes cluttering Judge Bennett’s chambers were filled in large part with evidence that Abbott’s lawyers wanted to be able to introduce at the upcoming trial.

After more than two decades on the federal bench, Judge Bennett had a pretty good guess as to what was going on. The accusations in the lawsuit posed a threat to Abbott, which had staked its reputation on being family-friendly and devoted to health and safety. Judge Bennett figured that to protect an important client, the company’s outside lawyers, from the international law firm Jones Day, were trying to snow their opponents with tens of thousands of pages of paperwork. Even if the materials were only tangentially related to this particular case, the plaintiffs’ lawyers would need to spend countless hours poring over the documents to see what they contained.

A couple of days later, at a meeting in his chambers, the judge laced into Abbott’s lawyers. Their conduct, he told me, was “the worst by a factor of 10” that he had seen in his 20 years as a judge.

Judge Bennett, who retired in 2019 and now teaches at Drake University’s law school, may not have liked it, but the lawyers were effective. Over the ensuing months, Abbott prevailed in court, the poisoning of a newborn baby went largely unnoticed and the company continued making and selling its powdered formula just as it had done before.

Nobody was prepared for what would happen nearly a decade later. In early 2022, after several infants fell ill and regulators found unsanitary conditions at an Abbott factory in Sturgis, Mich., the company voluntarily recalled its powdered formula and shut the plant. (No proof has emerged that the problems at the Sturgis factory caused the infant illnesses and deaths.)

The closing caused a severe shortage of the formula that most American infants are fed. Desperate parents struggled to feed their children. Angry lawmakers convened hearings. Government agencies opened investigations. The Biden administration organized an airlift to import formula from overseas. The crisis focused attention on shortcomings with food safety and industry oversight.

The scrutiny was new, but the phenomenon wasn’t. Over the years, newborns on rare occasions have fallen sick or died after being fed powdered formula. Until recently, however, the pattern largely lurked below the public and political radar. One big reason is that Abbott and its lawyers, at times deploying scorched earth legal tactics, have repeatedly beaten back attempts to hold the company liable.

Several lawyers who have worked on baby-formula cases said they were not aware of a plaintiff ever beating Abbott or its competitors at trial. “These are tough, tough cases,” said William Marler, a Seattle lawyer who has sued companies for spreading food-borne illnesses.

Much of this, of course, comes down to good lawyering. Jones Day — a 129-year-old law firm with roots in Cleveland and a powerful political practice in Washington — is a goliath in corporate litigation, having represented companies like R.J. Reynolds, Purdue Pharma, General Motors and Smith & Wesson.

Often Jones Day dukes it out with other giant law firms that are also representing enormous companies. When the opposing sides shower each other in paperwork, discovery requests, venue changes and objections, it usually resembles a fair fight. But as the Abbott cases illustrate, when the resources and tactics of Big Law are brought to bear against poor families and their overwhelmed lawyers, the results tend to be lopsided.

Jones Day lawyers told me the firm didn’t do anything unusual or untoward as it sought to fend off families like Jeanine’s. Kevyn Orr, the partner in charge of Jones Day’s U.S. offices, said the firm’s only goal “was to prove the truth that Abbott’s infant formula was not contaminated when it was opened.”

Daniel Reidy, who until his retirement as a Jones Day partner represented Abbott, disputed elements of Judge Bennett’s critique, noting, for example, that the boxes in his chambers also contained the plaintiff’s evidence. Mr. Reidy said the judge was “deeply and irrevocably prejudiced against ‘big firms.’”

There is little doubt, though, that Abbott’s victory streak was one of the forces that kept the connection between infant illness and the powdered formula from becoming a scandal sooner. “If there had been a large verdict, it would’ve gotten a lot of national publicity,” Judge Bennett said. When that didn’t happen, “what’s the focus for the public? Not much.”

I learned about Jones Day’s work for Abbott as I conducted research for my forthcoming book, “Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice.” (This article is largely based on my reporting for the book.)

In January, I asked an Abbott spokesman, Scott Stoffel, for comment. “Healthy infants and children are at the heart of what we do and ensuring the quality and safety of our products is a top priority,” he replied in an email on Jan. 25. “Our products undergo rigorous quality checks,” he went on, “to ensure that they meet both the nutritional and safety needs of infants and children.” In a follow-up email, Mr. Stoffel noted that the company was “very sympathetic to the families in these situations” but that juries had concluded Abbott was not to blame.

Barely three weeks later, Abbott agreed to begin recalling its powdered formula.

A few large companies control the $2.1 billion market for infant formula — none more so than Abbott, which before this year’s crisis accounted for nearly half of formula sales.

Unlike bottled formula, the powdered version is not sterile. (Its advantages include being less expensive than the ready-to-pour variety.) Academic and government studies have repeatedly found that powdered formula can be a breeding ground for a type of bacteria, Cronobacter sakazakii, that in babies can cause meningitis. Even when treated swiftly, the illness can lead to severe brain damage or death.

A study in 2012, by a longtime official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that it was “extremely unusual” for Cronobacter infections to occur in babies who were not fed powdered formula.

In another paper, published in 2020, other C.D.C. officials studied scores of cases of infant meningitis since 1961 and found that in the vast majority — 79 percent — the baby had recently consumed powdered formula.

But in any individual case, it can be hard to prove what caused an infection. The potentially deadly bacteria resides in dirt and water; studies have found it in kitchens. Because the bacteria can clump together in formula containers, it’s possible for a sample to test negative even if Cronobacter was in the powder that went into a baby’s bottle.

Nick Stein, a lawyer with a small practice in Indiana, recalled the first time he encountered a case involving contaminated formula. A woman walked into his office with her toddler, limp in her arms, and explained that the child had suffered brain damage after being fed formula. Mr. Stein negotiated a settlement. More cases followed, and they, too, resulted in settlements that required Mr. Stein and his clients to keep quiet.

In 2005, Mr. Stein received an email from Kimberly Sisk in rural Pisgah Forest, N.C. Her son, Slade, had suffered debilitating brain damage after consuming Abbott’s Similac powdered infant formula in 2004. Ms. Sisk, who lived in a mobile home and worked as a house cleaner, faced a lifetime of medical costs. In February 2007, Mr. Stein and a colleague, Stephen Meyer, sued Abbott in state court in North Carolina.

The ensuing seven-year battle would become a case study for how firms like Jones Day use their mastery of the legal system to grind down — and in some cases attack — plaintiffs who have limited money and time on their hands.

The first volley came in late 2007. Jones Day filed a motion seeking to remove Mr. Stein and Mr. Meyer from the case. The rationale was that, in an unrelated infant-formula case in Kentucky, Mr. Meyer had been in touch with an expert witness that Abbott had used in a different case. It turned out the expert had an ongoing relationship with Abbott. None of this had anything to do with Ms. Sisk’s case. But the trial judge concluded that the contact with the expert “constitutes the appearance of impropriety” and granted Abbott’s motion. An appeals court reversed the decision. Then, in 2010, the State Supreme Court upheld the initial ruling.

More than three years had passed since Ms. Sisk’s lawsuit was filed, and the case hadn’t progressed. Now she had no lawyers. Mr. Stoffel, the Abbott spokesman, denied that the company was trying to delay the legal proceedings, but Ms. Sisk was skeptical. “Time is on their side,” she said. “It behooves them to stretch it out.”

Mr. Stein, for his part, sounded a little awestruck by Jones Day’s hardball tactics. “It’s a different league than we all play in,” he told me. “It was brutal.”

Ms. Sisk hired another lawyer, Stephen Rathke, a former local prosecutor in Minnesota. He refiled the suit in state court. Abbott then removed the case to federal court, which essentially restarted the legal process.

A ‘Hush-Hush’ Offer

Abbott’s strongest defense was that the powdered formula that Ms. Sisk had in her possession when Slade got sick had tested negative for Cronobacter. At the same time, a test of her kitchen sink had turned up traces of the bacteria.

Ms. Sisk — who described herself as a neat freak who obsessively sanitized Slade’s bottles and used store-bought distilled water to mix with the powdered formula — said this was because she’d dumped her son’s unfinished milk down the drain. Jones Day argued that it was a sign that the Cronobacter that infected Slade came not from Abbott’s formula but from Ms. Sisk’s home. There is no way to know for sure who was right.

The case dragged on. At one point in 2012, when Jones Day objected to a routine filing made by Mr. Rathke, a federal magistrate judge slammed the firm for making “nonsensical” claims that are “a waste of judicial resources.”

The trial was scheduled to get underway in early 2014 — nearly a decade after Slade fell ill. In late 2013, Abbott offered to settle the case for $900,000, Ms. Sisk said. She and her lawyers regarded that as inadequate; by their math, she was staring at something like $3 million in expenses associated with Slade’s care. Plus, Ms. Sisk said, “they told me if I settled, I had to keep everything hush-hush.” That was a nonstarter.

After Ms. Sisk turned down the settlement, Abbott cranked up the heat. Shortly before the trial began, two Jones Day lawyers, June Ghezzi and Paula Quist, informed the court that they planned to introduce as evidence a restraining order that had been imposed against a member of the Sisk family in 2012 — about eight years after Slade got meningitis. The restraining order stemmed from an assault that involved neither Ms. Sisk nor Slade. Jones Day argued it was relevant because it caused stress that may have contributed to a seizure Slade had.

Mr. Rathke, Ms. Sisk’s lawyer, wrote in a court filing that this was “nothing more than an attempt to smear this family” and that “Abbott and its attorneys should be ashamed.” Jones Day ended up not mentioning the restraining order at trial.

The firm didn’t need it to win. Jones Day managed to sow doubt about the source of the bacteria. After a weeklong trial, the jury concluded that Abbott was not liable.

Immediately afterward, Jones Day sought a court order sealing some trial testimony and evidence on the grounds that they contained confidential information about Abbott’s testing and food safety protocols and “its sanitation, housekeeping and hygiene.” It wasn’t an unheard-of request, but when the judge granted it, details about Abbott’s factory in Sturgis, Mich. — the one that was shut down earlier this year — vanished from public view. (Late last month, Abbott announced that it would resume making Similac infant formula in Sturgis and that the product would begin shipping in about six weeks.)

As he worked on the Sisk lawsuit, Mr. Rathke was also battling Abbott in a similar case in Iowa. This one involved Jeanine Kunkel, and it would highlight how corporate litigators can flatten outmatched opponents — and potentially cross ethical lines in the process.

Years earlier, when Jeanine and her twin brother were 12 days old, she’d been diagnosed with meningitis after being fed Abbott’s powdered formula, which her parents had received in a Similac-branded gift bag from St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center in Sioux City.

Jeanine’s parents, Troy Kunkel and Megan Surber, told me that her twin did not drink the formula and did not fall ill.

Mr. Kunkel and Ms. Surber didn’t have much money. They lived in a small house, which Troy had spruced up with carpet and other materials he procured through his job as a construction worker. Their marriage was buckling under the pressure of caring for their brain-damaged child.

Ms. Surber’s mother had seen a TV ad for Mr. Stein and urged her daughter to call him. Mr. Stein, who had lost his appetite for fighting Abbott and Jones Day, referred the Kunkels to Mr. Rathke. In 2011, Mr. Rathke sued Abbott, seeking $16 million in compensatory damages to cover a lifetime of caring for Jeanine.

The case was assigned to Judge Bennett, who soon became troubled by what he saw from Jones Day. First there was the mountain of evidence in his chambers. Then he began flipping through the transcripts of depositions that Mr. Rathke and Ms. Ghezzi, the Jones Day partner, had taken of witnesses. “I was shocked by what I read,” the judge told me.

Time after time, as Mr. Rathke questioned Abbott employees, Ms. Ghezzi had interrupted with objections that seemed intended to steer the witnesses’ testimony. That was potentially a violation of the federal rules of civil procedure, which require objections to be “stated concisely in a nonargumentative and nonsuggestive manner” and warn that “an excessive number of unnecessary objections may itself constitute sanctionable conduct.”

In August 2012, for example, Mr. Rathke deposed two Abbott employees, a research scientist specializing in neonatal nutrition and a quality-assurance manager at Abbott’s Arizona factory. Over the course of about seven hours, Ms. Ghezzi lodged objections 115 times — an average of once every three or four minutes. And that didn’t count what Judge Bennett said in a subsequent court filing were hundreds of other interruptions by Ms. Ghezzi. The overall volume, he wrote, was “astounding.”

To determine the safety of its powdered baby formula, Abbott draws small samples from large batches of the product at its factories. At one point, Mr. Rathke asked a witness whether she thought there was any correlation between what was found in those samples and the finished product that was shipped to customers. It was, as Judge Bennett later put it, a “completely reasonable” question.

“That would be speculation,” the witness echoed. Mr. Rathke rephrased. Ms. Ghezzi interrupted again: “Object to the form of the question. It’s a hypothetical; lacks facts.”

“Yeah, those are hypotheticals,” the witness parroted. Mr. Rathke rephrased the question one more time.

Over and over, this tag-team routine played out. During a break in one deposition, Mr. Rathke’s co-counsel, a Sioux City lawyer named Tim Bottaro, took Mr. Rathke aside. Ms. Ghezzi was dominating what was supposed to be the plaintiff’s deposition. “Why don’t you just let June do the deposition?” Mr. Bottaro recalled saying. “You’re getting steamrolled!”
The depositions were important. Before the trial, Abbott sought a summary judgment ruling based in part on them. Portions would be read aloud to jurors during the trial. There was no telling what the witnesses might have said if Ms. Ghezzi hadn’t objected every few minutes, and Judge Bennett said he found it “inconceivable” that her interruptions had not influenced their testimony.
At trial, Mr. Rathke and his expert witnesses argued that the sole logical explanation of how Jeanine got sick was that the bacteria was in the powdered formula. That was the only thing Jeanine had consumed, and it was a common carrier of Cronobacter.
Jones Day’s strategy, as is the norm in product liability cases, was to raise doubts and cast blame elsewhere. An expert witness testified that Jeanine’s symptoms showed up so soon after she consumed the formula that she must have already been infected at the time of the feeding. The lawyers noted that the formula that the government tested didn’t contain Cronobacter. Maybe visitors had brought the bacteria into the house? Perhaps it was on the bottle that Megan had used or in the water that she had mixed with the powder. Really, it could have come from anywhere.
The jury deliberated for seven hours before delivering its verdict: Abbott was not liable.
Mr. Rathke called Jeanine’s parents. “I hate to tell you this, but we lost,” he said.

Judge Bennett was not stunned by the verdict — he’d been impressed by the Jones Day team’s lawyering during the trial — but he told me it was the wrong outcome. “If it had been a bench trial, I would have ruled for the plaintiffs in all likelihood,” he said. (Mr. Stoffel, the Abbott spokesman, said that if the judge felt that way, he could have entered a verdict in the plaintiff’s favor or granted a new trial.)

After its recall of formula this year, Abbott has been sued at least 30 times in federal courts around the country. Lawyers representing plaintiffs in those cases said the amount of evidence that has recently entered the public domain — including a lawsuit that the Justice Department filed against Abbott and a whistle-blower complaint submitted to the F.D.A. by a former employee — makes them optimistic that they will fare better against Abbott than their predecessors did.

Abbott, though, already appears to be laying the groundwork for a robust defense, repeatedly stating that there is no proven link between its formula and the infants who recently fell sick or died. (Mr. Stoffel said Jones Day is not representing Abbott on any of the recently filed lawsuits.)

For the Kunkel family, all of this has been an infuriating reminder of their legal ordeal — and how Abbott managed to avoid public attention to their child nearly dying after consuming powdered formula.

“They didn’t want nobody to know” about the risks, Mr. Kunkel told me in August. “How many more families have been hurt since then?”