For years, the Heritage Foundation wrote the policy, and Leonard Leo’s network paid for the litigation — two separate operations. A nonprofit called Right Vote has merged them. Its first major disclosed transfer, reported by the Center for Media and Democracy, sent $2 million to Republican attorneys general to carry Project 2025 policies into court.
What this story tracks
- The money. Right Vote took in $16.2 million in 2024, most of it from Leonard Leo’s Concord Fund and Rule of Law Trust. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, it routed $2 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association.
- The board. Right Vote’s six-person leadership pairs Heritage Action veterans Jessica Anderson, Garrett Bess, and John Backiel with Leo’s Concord Fund president, Gary Marx, and Catholic megadonor, Sean Fieler.
- The walkout. The bipartisan National Association of Attorneys General fractured in 2021 and 2022. Its 2021 president, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, had built his term around countering hate crimes and bias. By May 2022, five Republican attorneys general had resigned, citing what they called the group’s “leftward shift.”
- The legal arm. Alliance Defending Freedom drafted the Mississippi law that ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade, then served as co-counsel with the state attorney general’s team to defend it.
In late April 2021, at a Heritage Foundation donor retreat in Tucson, Jessica Anderson, Right Vote, Inc.’s president, stood before the audience in a black dress and outlined her organization’s work. Someone was recording her. She had just come from a meeting with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, three days before Kemp signed SB 202, the sweeping bill that would roll back voting access across his state. “I had one message for him,” she told the donors. “Do not wait to sign that bill. If you wait even an hour, you will look weak.” Georgia was not where the strategy began. “Iowa was the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly, and we did it quietly,” Anderson told the donors. “Honestly, nobody noticed.”
Anderson went on, on tape, to describe who actually wrote the legislation. “We’re working with these state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills. In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots from the bottom up type of vibe.” She told them Heritage Action would spend $24 million over two years in Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Then she closed the pitch. “We are going to take the fierce fire that is in every single one of our bellies to right the wrongs of November,” she said, “and move it into other states.”
The video would make its way to the watchdog group Documented, then to Mother Jones, where reporter Ari Berman and Documented’s Nick Surgey broke the story. A year later, Anderson started a super PAC and named it Sentinel Action Fund. On C-SPAN on October 26, 2022, she described it as a “third partner organization” Heritage Action had spun off to “engage directly in elections,” and twice called it a separate organization. The year after that, she walked out of Heritage Action altogether. Sentinel relaunched in 2023 as a separate entity. So did its 501(c)(4) sister, Right Vote. Anderson runs both.
Anderson’s operation had a silent partner. Behind it sat the largest dark-money fortune ever assembled on the American right, controlled by Leonard Leo, who had spent a decade building the legal machinery to defend laws like the ones Anderson was writing. For years, Heritage and Leo’s network worked the same goals from opposite ends — Heritage drafting policy and running grassroots campaigns, Leo funding the lawyers and influencing decisions on judges’ appointments. They had never shared an institution. Right Vote is the first one: a nonprofit that takes Leo’s money and hands it to a staff drawn from Heritage Action.
Two Million Dollars and a Paper Trail
The Center for Media and Democracy’s David Armiak, who has tracked the Concord Fund–RAGA money for years, broke the Right Vote transfer on May 8, 2026. RAGA’s first-quarter 2026 IRS filing lists Right Vote among the top donors of a $9.6 million quarter. Leo’s Concord Fund put more than $8 million into Right Vote in 2023. His Rule of Law Trust kicked in roughly $236,000 more. The organization took in $16.2 million in 2024, according to its most recent IRS Form 990.
Anderson built Right Vote and draws a $634,633 salary as president. Garrett Bess, the executive director, takes home $381,746. Bess ran Heritage Action’s state election-integrity push as a vice president before he came over.
The Cowboy from Heritage
Kevin Roberts grew up poor in Lafayette, Louisiana, earned a doctorate in history, and founded a Catholic school in his hometown before taking over Wyoming Catholic College, where he told the New York Times that openly gay students “would be contravening church teaching just by being here.” Brooke Rollins hired him at the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2016. The budget doubled. By the time Heritage picked him up in October 2021 at a salary that approached $1 million a year, Roberts had built a brand: the Louisiana academic who drove to Washington events in a Ford F-150 with “Don’t Tread on Me” plates, wore handcrafted Lucchese boots on stage, and railed against “global elites” in a cowboy hat.
Project 2025 came out of Roberts’ operation. So did Heritage Action’s Sentinel grassroots network. After the 2020 election, Heritage Action announced a $10 million election integrity campaign across eight states. The internal plan, obtained by Documented, put the real figure at $24 million over two years. Heritage Action’s outside lobbying spending went from zero in 2020 to $5.1 million in 2021. Its staff registered as lobbyists in at least 24 states.
Last October, Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s friendly podcast interview with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and called those who objected a “venomous coalition.” What followed was the worst institutional crisis in Heritage’s history. Roberts’s chief of staff resigned. Five members of Heritage’s own antisemitism task force walked. Princeton legal scholar Robert P. George quit the board after Roberts refused to retract. By February 2026, more than 60 staff, fellows, and trustees had left the building.
The Integralist Banker
In 2021, Chicago electronics manufacturer Barre Seid quietly transferred his entire $1.6 billion company to a new nonprofit Leonard Leo had just set up called the Marble Freedom Trust. The donation was the largest known contribution to a political nonprofit in American history. Overnight, Leo went from running a judicial-nominations shop to commanding a fortune most political parties would envy. In 2022 alone, he directed $216 million to far-right organizations.
Leo co-chairs the Federalist Society board, runs CRC Advisors, his political consulting and PR firm, and is a Knight of Malta. His politics are rooted in Catholic integralism, the view that civil law should answer to religious authority. Its policy targets line up almost exactly with the Protestant Christian nationalism that animates Heritage’s base.
Leo prefers to work in the dark. The summer crowd in Northeast Harbor refuses to oblige. In 2018, Leo bought a $3.3 million Tudor estate on Mount Desert Island. Neighbors have been protesting outside the house ever since, with signs reading “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” In December 2024, two Heritage senior fellows ran a defense of Leo on Heritage’s website. The neighbors doing the protesting, they wrote, were the kind of people who carry out ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Washington think tanks do not generally referee zoning fights on Mount Desert Island. Heritage had taken more than $50 million from Leo since 2021.
Two Empires, One Pew
The theology overlaps. Roberts attends mass and “formation” at the Opus Dei-run Catholic Information Center (CIC) on K Street, a connection documented in detail. Leo, a Knight of Malta, sits on the CIC board. Both men talk openly about restoring Christendom.
Leo built the machinery to match. He runs the Judicial Crisis Network through Opus Dei members Neil and Ann Corkery, and he has poured money into the same Project 2025 groups Roberts brought on board to the effort.
So does the bench. The Teneo Network, which Leo chairs and which describes itself as building “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence, sat on the advisory board of Project 2025, alongside some three dozen other Leo-funded groups. CRC Advisors handles messaging for Heritage and a long list of its allies. Russ Vought, a former Heritage Action vice president and one of Project 2025’s principal architects, runs Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. Anderson worked under Vought there in Trump’s first term.
The new piece is the checkbook. Right Vote’s six-member leadership, listed on its 2024 IRS Form 990, is a Heritage-Leo joint venture on paper. Anderson is president. Bess is the executive director. Treasurer John Backiel served as Heritage Action’s longtime CFO.
Then there are the directors. Gary Marx is president of Leo’s Concord Fund, the dark-money group that drove the Kavanaugh and Barrett confirmations. He sits on the boards of the 85 Fund and American Miracle, both Leo vehicles. He came up through the Christian right: Faith and Freedom Coalition under Ralph Reed, then Reed’s Century Strategies, then Regent University, the school Pat Robertson built.
Director Sean Fieler is a hedge fund manager and one of the most active Catholic donors in American politics. He chairs the American Principles Project, a leading anti-trans advocacy group. He has bankrolled the National Organization for Marriage, which fought same-sex marriage for years, and funded Mark Regnerus, the sociologist whose discredited 2012 study was used in marriage-equality litigation. Fieler also sits on the board of the Witherspoon Institute, the Princeton-adjacent Catholic think tank behind the Regnerus study. Two of Right Vote’s four non-staff seats belong to men who built careers fighting same-sex marriage.
The 990 also discloses that Right Vote flew officers first-class or by charter and reported conflict-of-interest transactions on Schedule L, the part of the 990 reserved for inside loans, grants, and business deals.
The Walkout
State attorneys general once met as one body, the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), bipartisan since 1907. In 2021, NAAG’s president was D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, a Democrat, and his presidential initiative centered on countering systemic racism, hate crimes, and bias. Republican AGs walked out of the room. Alabama’s Steve Marshall resigned first. By May 2022, Ken Paxton of Texas, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Austin Knudsen of Montana, and Mark Brnovich of Arizona had all followed him out, sending a letter complaining of the group’s “leftward shift” and “liberal bent.”
Two partisan groups took NAAG’s place: the Democratic Attorneys General Association and the Republican Attorneys General Association. They run separate budgets, file on opposite sides of nearly every major case, and rarely meet in a courtroom.
The Firm Behind the Bills
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is the American Christian legal powerhouse launched in 1994 by 35 Christian Right leaders. For three decades it has fought to end access to contraception and abortion, oppose same-sex relationships, strip rights from transgender people, and write the model bills that let businesses turn away LGBTQ+ customers in the name of “religious freedom.” Michael Farris, its former CEO, also helped Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton draft the 2020 election-overturn suit. The group operates with more than 4,800 allied attorneys and has appeared in 83 Supreme Court cases since its founding. In 2024 alone, 12 states enacted 25 separate bills ADF helped write. Its 501(c)(4) affiliate, ADF Action, handles the state legislative end.
ADF works the same way every time. It drafts a piece of model legislation and places it with a sympathetic state legislator. The state passes it. When the law gets challenged, a Republican attorney general defends it, often with ADF lawyers at the counsel table or filing amicus on the side. ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, married to Senator Josh Hawley, argued the 2024 medication-abortion case at the Supreme Court. Former House Speaker Mike Johnson is an ADF alum. Amy Coney Barrett gave paid lectures at ADF’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship for five years before her elevation to the bench.
The Return on Investment
The Concord Fund alone, by the Center for Media and Democracy’s accounting, has given RAGA more than $17.8 million since 2014. RAGA’s own 501(c)(4) arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, coordinates the official actions of Republican attorneys general and arranges access to those officials to corporate funders. It was also, as the watchdog group Documented first reported, behind the robocalls urging supporters to march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb opened an investigation into whether Leo’s nonprofits had violated tax laws, 12 Republican attorneys general challenged the probe’s legal basis. Schwalb was investigating their largest single funder.
The lawsuits those AGs bring track the Project 2025 agenda case by case — the same policy goals Heritage published as a governing blueprint, now pursued in court by the officials Right Vote helps fund. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed Texas v. Pennsylvania in December 2020, the Supreme Court case that sought to overturn the presidential election results in four swing states. The complaint was drafted with help from ADF’s Michael Farris. The court tossed it. Paxton resigned from NAAG 18 months later.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the 2022 case that overturned Roe v. Wade, the Mississippi law at issue was based on ADF’s model legislation. ADF lawyers then sat at counsel’s table with the Mississippi attorney general’s team to defend it. Three years later, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argued the case, with ADF backing him on the side. Tennessee taxpayers paid outside lawyer Adam Mortara $10,000 a month for two years to handle the litigation. Governor Bill Lee signed off on the contract.
Litigation is not the only payback. Republican AGs also sign letters backing administration actions that Democratic AGs are fighting in court. Georgia’s Chris Carr, then RAGA’s chairman, drafted the June 2025 letter praising Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Los Angeles for immigration sweeps as “the right response,” and 25 of his Republican colleagues signed on. The Caribbean boat strikes drew another 15 signatures in October, after the Pentagon began destroying vessels it accused of running drugs out of Venezuela. Democratic attorneys general, working in a 22-state coalition with the District of Columbia, filed 71 lawsuits against the administration in its first year. The two groups no longer share a courtroom.
Trump turned on Leo publicly in May 2025, when he called Leo a “sleazebag” and “bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America” on Truth Social. RAGA stopped accepting direct contributions from the Concord Fund in September 2025, the Center for Media and Democracy reported. The Concord Fund disappeared from RAGA’s donor list that quarter. Right Vote, which Concord pays for, appeared on it. By October, Right Vote was also passing $50,000 from Leo’s Rule of Law Trust to a Virginia political committee called American Miracle, which backs Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares. Marx, on the Right Vote board, also sits on the American Miracle board. He has known Miyares since their student days at James Madison University; the two now run a consulting firm together, Madison Strategies.
The Short Way
Anderson told the Washington Examiner in 2023 that she was tired of playing the long game. Right Vote is the short one. For years, Leo’s money reached Republican attorneys general only through indirect routes, via a chain of funds and intermediaries that took time to build and trace. Right Vote is the chain collapsed into a single link.
The operation Anderson described in that Tucson hotel room in 2021 was slow work. It moved one state legislature at a time, on a two-year budget, and its whole design was to go unnoticed. What she runs now is built for speed. Right Vote can move millions in a single quarter, and it sends them straight to the association whose attorneys general take Project 2025 into federal court. The $2 million that reached RAGA this spring was the first quarter of that machine running. There is no reason to think it was the last.
