Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo has long been invested in the election of Republican attorneys general, who are well-positioned to challenge regulations and bring precedent-setting cases before his friends on the high court. Leo and his dark money network have taken a keen interest in the GOP primary for attorney general in Missouri, pouring millions into the race to replace a conservative appointee with a lawyer who calls Leo a mentor.
Leo’s favored candidate, Will Scharf, has served as former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, including in the presidential immunity case at the Supreme Court. The court ruled that the former president is entitled to immunity from prosecution for official acts committed as president, complicating and further delaying his criminal cases — while giving the executive a powerful shield to do crimes.
As Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped him select three Supreme Court justices and build a 6-3 conservative supermajority. Scharf, meanwhile, has worked for Leo’s network, his consulting firm, and in the Trump Justice Department. He worked to help confirm two of the Trump-Leo justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The New York Times reported last fall that Trump and Leo, who received a historic $1.6 billion donation to supercharge his conservative dark money network, were on the outs. You wouldn’t suspect that watching the pro-Scharf advertising Leo is funding paint Trump as an unfairly targeted hero — and lionize Scharf for representing him.
“When prosecutors lie, when judges put politics over justice, when the whole legal system is gunning for you, you need one heck of an attorney,” says an ad for the group Leo is funding. “You need Missouri’s own Will Scharf. President Trump relies on Will Scharf as one of his lawyers to defend him from legal persecution and election interference. Will Scharf is taking on the entire legal and media establishment to defend President Trump.”
The ad says succinctly, “Will Scharf: Trump’s attorney.”
A second ad from Defend Missouri says that Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey “went easy on a violent career felon,” who went on to “shoot two cops.” The Missouri Fraternal Order of Police called on Defend Missouri — a state Super PAC affiliated with the Washington-based Club for Growth — to take down the ad.
Leo and his Concord Fund have donated $7.4 million to Defend Missouri and the Club for Growth Action’s Missouri federal committee, the organizations backing Scharf. The Club for Growth committee received $2.1 million from billionaire hedge fund chief Paul Singer, a significant donor to Leo’s network. Since July 25, Leo’s network has donated $2.5 million to Defend Missouri, while Singer chipped in another $500,000.
State attorneys general are a key focus for Leo and his network, because they are well-positioned to bring lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In 2022, the court’s conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated federal protections for abortion rights, in a case led by Mississippi’s Republican attorney general. Since 2014, Leo’s network has donated nearly $23 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association, according to a review of data compiled by ProPublica.
In Missouri, Leo and his network are boosting a lawyer who previously worked with him to paint the Supreme Court ruby red.
“Leonard Leo is a dear friend and mentor of mine, and I’m honored to have his support,” Scharf tells Rolling Stone. The candidate says he has known Leo — who co-chairs the Federalist Society, the national conservative lawyers network — since he was in law school.
If Scharf doesn’t win the AG race, he could have a solid plan B. Thanks to Scharf’s role in helping secure Trump a presidential immunity blanket at the Supreme Court, Scharf’s stock has shot up considerably among the MAGA political, legal, and policymaking elites in recent months. According to two sources familiar with the situation, a pair of Trump confidants — one an attorney, the other a media personality — have directly pitched the ex-president on the idea that Scharf would be a worthy choice for a senior Justice Department or White House role, if Trump wins in November.
Scharf was previously an aide to Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who resigned in 2018, and went to work for Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network — now known as the Concord Fund, the Leo group boosting his AG bid. He reportedly focused on judicial nominations and confirmations, including Kavanaugh’s to the Supreme Court.
According to his LinkedIn, Scharf worked for several months at Leo’s consulting firm, CRC Advisors, in 2020, before joining the Trump Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. In fall of 2020, Scharf worked as a nominations counsel, supporting Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation — which secured a 6-3 supermajority for conservatives.
After Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, won his Senate seat, Leo’s allies reportedly pressed Gov. Mike Parson to appoint Scharf. He chose Bailey instead — and Leo’s network soon started funding Defend Missouri, the pro-Scharf Super PAC.
Bailey has been an ultra-conservative, partisan attorney general in his own right. He’s made a show out of suing to investigate the liberal watchdog group Media Matters in response to its reporting on X, formerly known as Twitter. The organization managed to block a similar investigative effort by Texas; that decision has been appealed.
And while the pro-Scharf Super PAC is accusing Bailey of being soft on crime, he’s attempted to block prisoners from being let out of jail after they were found innocent and exonerated, and judges ordered their release.
“You will not find someone harder on crime than me,” Scharf told The New York Times. “That having been said, actual innocence claims should be taken very seriously.”
The first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center, on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.
People of all colors listen as Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican midterm convention.
Trump supporters at the Republican midterm convention.
A Canadian flag flies along the waterfront of Lake Ontario, on Aug. 27, 2026. Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images
It’s Been 25 Years Since 9/11. Did the Terrorists Win?
I once had a conversation with Barack Obama about the nature of terrorism. This was during his second term, and he’d been going on for a few minutes about how Islamic terrorism wasn’t actually an existential threat to Americans, but rather a chronic and manageable risk. I was all too familiar with this argument, having conducted the interview with John Kerry in 2004, in which he said terrorism could be reduced to the level of a “nuisance” — a quote that blew up on him during the final weeks of the campaign. I found Kerry’s answer problematic then, and I had the same reaction when Obama said it. I asked him pointedly: What would have to happen for him to decide that terrorism was, in fact, existential? How about a suitcase nuke on a subway car? Then would he concede that terrorists were more than criminal gangs?
Obama didn’t hesitate. Terrorism would only reach the level of an existential threat, he told me, if Americans responded by abandoning their own values and turning on one another. There was nothing a bunch of homicidal zealots could do to destroy the most powerful country on Earth, but we could certainly destroy ourselves if we abandoned our constitutional protections in a fit of panic.
At the time, this struck me as something you might expect to hear from a constitutional-law professor, but not necessarily from the president of the United States. There was an intellectual fatalism about Obama I sometimes found disconcerting — a sense that he saw himself as a twig in the river of history, and it was up to the rest of us to change the current. I doubt he would dispute that assessment. But I thought often of that conversation a few years later, as the country careened into the Trump era. And as we pause now to reflect on the 25 years that have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, I find myself thinking about it again.
Alternative histories are a tricky business, best left to novelists and sci-fi filmmakers. As a friend of mine in politics likes to say, mockingly, whenever such theories get floated: What if Hitler had won the Civil War? And yet, it’s hard not to see a direct line between the events of 2001 and where we are today — and to wonder how different the country might have looked had it never happened. On the eve of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George W. Bush’s young presidency seemed to be wobbling. Absent those attacks, he might well have been a one-term president, and he almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would Democrats become backed into defending the entrenched war in Afghanistan as the “good war” — a way of differentiating their own response to 9/11 from Bush’s without sounding reflexively pacifist.
Without the economic shock of 2001, it’s unlikely that desperate policymakers would have looked the other way while lenders, underwritten by the government, turned the housing market into a casino, leading to the second massive blow of the decade: the market collapse of 2008. All of these things, in quick succession, destroyed what remained of the public’s faith in its governing establishment, leading directly to Obama’s stunning takeover of the Democratic Party and, later, to the election of Donald Trump.
The Trump I met in the late 1990s, while he was flirting with an independent run for president, held himself out as a centrist reformer, in the mold of Ross Perot. By 2015, when he started running as a Republican, Trump had fully embraced a reactionary, white-nationalist movement — a response to Obama, yes, but also to Bush, whose instinct in the months after 9/11 had been to speak out forcefully in defense of Muslim Americans, and whose support for liberalized immigration infuriated much of his party’s base. Trump’s core appeal then, as it is now, was rooted firmly in the nativist, anti-globalist backlash that emerged in 2001. (According to Pew Research, roughly 42 percent of Americans believe Muslims are having a negative impact on the country.) The animating idea of Trump’s second term is that white, English-speaking Americans are the only authentic Americans. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that he will twist or shred any page of the Constitution to enact this vision, since he really makes no effort to conceal it.
Nor is America’s hard turn away from pluralism and liberal democracy happening in a vacuum — far from it. In the past decade, similarly reactionary, anti-immigrant movements have rocked Britain and taken over Italy, and they now seem poised to wrest power in France and Germany. Maybe some of this would have happened without 9/11; the hollowing-out forces of globalization and automation were already fueling plenty of economic fury here and in Europe by the turn of the century, and the revolution in social media wasn’t far off. But there’s little doubt that the “War on Terror,” which became the first real foreign policy framework since the end of the Cold War, focused all of that anxiety toward an identifiable enemy, fracturing societies that had been held together by a 50-year consensus around personal liberties. If Obama were being honest, he’d probably say he told me so, and he’d be right.
IN THE MONTHS after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq, it was hard to get much perspective, and genuine patriotism mixed — as it always does — with a series of mindless gestures and clichés. Flag pins became mandatory even for reporters, peace songs were effectively banned, Republicans brought “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” into the lexicon to protest French misgivings about war. It became rote for politicians to say that the terrorists hated our way of life and we would never let them win. (To this day, when my dog snarls at some terrified Shiba Inu for no reason, I ask her why she hates freedom.)
Twenty-five years on, though, with the benefit of distance and experience, we can ask some questions we couldn’t ask then. And one of them is what the violent extremists who sent those suicide planes into our buildings really hoped to achieve. Did Osama bin Laden think he could win a holy war with America? Did we ultimately frustrate his script for the downfall of the West, or did we simply play our part?
Terrorism is, by its nature, asymmetrical. Whether it’s the Viet Minh under the French, or the IRA in Britain, or Al Qaeda, there’s an inherent understanding that the terrorist can’t win a conventional war against an obviously superior military force. What the terrorist seeks is destabilization of the status quo. His desperate act is an igniter in search of fuses; the goal is to set off a chain reaction inside the fortress that can’t be controlled, to disrupt order with chaos and see what shakes out. The terrorist knows this will likely cause his own people suffering in the short run, but that’s part of the point. He believes the occupier to be a soulless monster, and by reducing it to its basest instincts, he hopes to bare its nature to the world.
We’re seeing this play out, in real time, in Israel. The leaders of Hamas, their military options exhausted and their political goals slipping away, could not have been under any illusion that they would drive out the Israeli occupiers by savagely killing and mutilating more than a thousand innocent people. They must have hoped that Israel would react with blind fury and cruelty, resorting to the instinct for all-out annihilation that its leaders had long managed to suppress. Nearly three years later, Israel has tumbled from legitimatized power to international pariah, its politics riven by disunity, its moral authority in shambles. Do we think Hamas really cares that more than 70,000 of its own people have died in the carnage? Its repugnant leaders almost certainly consider that a cost worth paying in the broader context of history. What they have achieved, in political terms, has exceeded their most feverish dreams.
The Israelis should have looked across the Atlantic and learned something from our own experience. America on Sept. 10, 2001, was an unchallenged superpower at peace — vexed by social and economic divisions, yes, but still stable enough to survive a disputed election with its political consensus intact. A quarter century later, we find ourselves fighting a third unsuccessful war in the Middle East, our society more divided and our politics more poisoned than any time since the 1800s, a foundation of laws imperiled after 250 years of durability, immigrants hunted down like animals by masked agents, violence and extremism on the rise from both right and left, truth and intellectualism in retreat. This is not solely the fallout from Sept. 11, 2001, but it is the result of a series of events that, were you able to hit a rewind button and live it all again in reverse, would lead you directly back to that day. If bin Laden meant for his attack to be the first in a series of similarly epic crimes, then he was soundly defeated — no small achievement for American soldiers and spies. But if his goal was to destabilize America and bring out the worst of our nature, then he may have pulled off the most successful terrorist attack in history.
Over and over we told ourselves, in that agonizing moment, that the terrorists would never win. A quarter century later, it’s getting hard to argue they didn’t.