The conservative dirt keeps uncovering more and more corruption. The Washington Post reports Leonard Leo, a key figure in the Republican effort to pack courts with far-right activist judges, directed funds to Kellyanne Conway’s polling group in 2012 with instructions to pass the money along to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice and model for future fictional corrupt judges Clarence Thomas.
Co-chair of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Leo has an outsized role in which judges get nominated for which posts. According to documents reviewed by the Post, Leo instructed Conway to bill a non-profit organization he ran for funds that would then be paid to Ginni Thomas to hide the source of the funds, specifically requesting “No mention of Ginni, of course” in communications to Conway, the one-time communications director in the Trump White House. Conway’s firm billed Leo’s Judicial Education Project for $25,000 that day; the invoice did not mention Ginni Thomas.
Setting aside the obvious ethical issues with this, using a non-profit to launder funds could lead to criminal or civil charges. (See: Trump Foundation.) The day hasn’t been a good one for the Thomas household: earlier Thursday, reports found Thomas’s sugar daddy, Harlon Crow, paid for the boarding school education of Thomas’s grandnephew/adoptive son while hiding the payments by making them directly to the school from his company, potentially to avoid tax issues–a crime for which the Trump Org’s CFO spent months in jail after his conviction.