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.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.