Concord Fund (Judicial Education Project)

The Concord Fund, formerly known as the Judicial Education Project, is one of the most opaque nodes in Leonard Leo's sprawling network of conservative dark money organizations. The name change itself — executed quietly in 2020 — exemplifies the organization's strategy of obscuring connections through rebranding. Originally established to provide educational programming about the judiciary, the organization evolved into a major pass-through entity that channels tens of millions of dollars to other Leo-controlled groups, including the Judicial Crisis Network, the 85 Fund, and various state-level advocacy organizations. The Concord Fund's primary funding mechanism involves receiving large grants from donor-advised funds — particularly DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund — and from the Marble Freedom Trust, then redistributing those funds to operational entities in the Leo network. This creates an additional layer of anonymity: even if a donor's contribution to DonorsTrust were somehow traced, the subsequent grants from DonorsTrust to the Concord Fund to the Judicial Crisis Network would make it nearly impossible to connect the original donor to the ultimate expenditure. Tax filings obtained by OpenSecrets and ProPublica reveal that the Concord Fund has served as fiscal sponsor for multiple pop-up advocacy campaigns that appear, spend millions on a specific policy battle, and then dissolve without ever disclosing their funding sources. The organization has been linked to campaigns opposing voting rights legislation, supporting religious liberty legal challenges, and promoting originalist constitutional interpretation. Carrie Campbell Severino's husband, Roger Severino, who served as director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS under Trump, has connections to the same network. The Concord Fund also funds amicus brief campaigns, paying for legal briefs filed in key Supreme Court cases by supposedly independent organizations that are in fact funded by Leo's network. This practice — sometimes called 'amicus brief laundering' — gives the appearance of broad legal consensus supporting conservative legal positions when the briefs are actually coordinated and funded by a single source.