How Leonard Leo’s project to reshape US judiciary got its start in Wisconsin

The conservative strategist and dark money organizer has worked to place ideologically sympathetic judges at state level and all the way up to the US supreme court

In July 2015, Wisconsin's supreme court shielded Governor Scott Walker, then a rising Republican star with aspirations to the presidency, from a criminal investigation.

The court's conservative majority halted the investigation into what prosecutors suspected were campaign finance violations. One of the deciding votes was cast by Justice David Prosser, a conservative who had won re-election a few years earlier in a heavily contested race.