Project 2025 Roots Date Back Half a Century
More than 50 years ago, lawyer Lewis Powell penned a letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that the American business community must take political power and must use it aggressively and with determination - without embarrassment and without the reluctance." President Richard Nixon would go on to appoint Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks to David Sirota about his new investigative podcast series, Master Plan, that examines how corporate corruption took root in American politics.
[Theme music.]
Ryan Grim: I'm Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed. And, today, I'm excited to be joined by my friend, investigative journalist David Sirota, founder of The Lever, who's here to talk about his new podcast.
David, thanks so much for joining me.
David Sirota: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
RG: So, the podcast is called Master Plan. Let's play a little clip from it, then we're going to get into it.
David Sirota: When you wake up in the morning and see the recent headlines about the Supreme Court.
News Clip: A judicial decision sparking a political eruption.
David Sirota: I'm guessing you feel overwhelmed and bewildered.
News Clip: The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Well, it's terrifying. I don't know what's next.
David Sirota: And you hear about the court helping corporations trample your long standing rights.
News Clip: This is a sweeping decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the Chevron precedent.
News Clip: What this does is it ends 40 years of regulating big business.
David Sirota: You hear about the justices making it literally legal to bribe politicians.
News Clip: In a 6-3 opinion, the court ruled that gifts to public officials can only be considered illegal bribes if they're given before the official act.
Clip: Seems like every few months the Supreme Court makes it easier and easier to bribe government officials.
David Sirota: You even hear about the Supreme Court actually declaring Clearing that the President does not have to follow the law.
News Clip: It's the first time the Supreme Court has ruled that former presidents can be shielded from criminal charges -
Amy Goodman: In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.
David Sirota: As you're doom scrolling, do you ever stop and ask what the actual f-k is going on, and how in god's name did we get here?
RG: Well, David, I, I feel like I've been hearing from you about this podcast for quite some time now. How long has it been that you've been [that] you and your team have been putting this together?
DS: Well, we thought it was going to be, like, a six-month project. And then it became a year, a year-and-a-half-long project. And then, it became a full two-year project. We went really deep down the rabbit hole. It felt like every door we opened led us to six other doors in trying to uncover this story of how corruption was legalized in America.
I think it's a difficult story to tell, because I think it's kind of like the David Foster Wallace speech, the famous one about the fish, you know? There are two fish, one fish swims by and says, hey, how's the water today? And one of the other fish turns and says, what is water?
Right? I think we live in an era where corruption is so rampant, where money is so determinative of political outcomes and legislative outcomes, that we've become so accustomed to it and numb to it that it feels like, that's not corruption anymore. That's just how politics works. That just is politics.
The truth is, when you look at it, it didn't have to be the way it is. It has become that way because of a series of decisions and a series of actions that were taken that were the result of a very specific plan, executed by specific people, over a long period of time. And so, what our podcast series does is, it starts when that plan was hatched, and it goes through, each step of the way, to legalize the kind of money politics that we now are immersed in.
RG: And what's fascinating about the story that you really uncover and tell here is the way in which so much of this ended up being done under the guise of fighting corruption.
DS: Totally.
RG: So, talk about what it was like before these new laws legalizing corruption were in place. So, for the people who look around and see it as water, what was a world where corruption was illegal like?
DS: So, for most of the 20th century, there were very, very weak anticorruption laws, very, very weak campaign finance laws. To the point where - and this is kind of amazing - that the one law that existed on the books was interpreted when it applied to Congress, the anticorruption law, that it would not be enforced by the Department of Justice unless the leaders of the House and Senate first referred cases to the Department of Justice. That was a directive, by the way, under the Eisenhower administration, which was carried forward. In other words, the House and Senate would have to tell on itself in order for the Justice Department to even investigate corruption.
So, obviously, in this period of time, corruption scandals simmer. Petty corruption, graft, there were periodic scandals. One scandal, for instance, involved the Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, who had to effectively resign from the Supreme Court. To be clear, that scandal now seems minimal and quaint compared to the scandals of the current Supreme court.
RG: What was that one, just for fun?
DS: He had gotten a grant. He'd been paid to write a series of papers for somebody who had - I think it was a financier - who had ostensibly some business before the government. I think it was only about $20,000.
RG: And it was before he became a justice, right?
DS: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so, it hadn't come out, he did it. And so, he had to resign.
RG: It's remarkable.
DS: It is remarkable, compared to what happens today, and is legal.
Now, I think that's an important point that, while there were not strong laws being enforced in the '40s, '50s and '60s, into the '70s, there still was a cultural aversion to corruption, to the point where a guy on the Supreme Court who did something not particularly great, but not, like, horrible by modern day standards, was so shamed he had to resign.
So, there was a cultural aversion to corruption in a way that doesn't exist today.
RG: Yeah. And I think people underestimate the power of that cultural aversion.
DS: A hundred percent. Yes, totally. Like, there was shame in it. Like, it existed, but you didn't do what Donald Trump does, which is, you know, Donald Trump, a couple weeks ago, said to the oil industry, give me a billion dollars, and I'll give you policy, right? I mean, like, that was just not the way it was done back then.
But, obviously, all of this exploded in the Watergate scandal, which was, obviously, a huge political event, but a huge cultural event. It was on television. The country was focused on it. And the Watergate scandal, I think we remember it now as, obviously, an abuse of power, the break-in and the like. But, also, what was exposed during Watergate was that there was corruption underneath it; by that, I mean money that was given by people who wanted favors from the Nixon White House.
RG: Corporations wanted mergers, and were moving cash in bags, and, yeah.
DS: American Airlines, as a good example. American Airlines gave lots of money to the Nixon campaign committee, and the campaign committee used that slush fund to fund the Watergate break-in. And I should mention, those corporations and executives were prosecuted.
I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine major corporations being prosecuted, really, for anything, but certainly for corruption and campaign finance. And we talked to, in the series, in episode two, we talked to one of the Watergate prosecutors who talked about why they felt they needed to aggressively prosecute these corporations, to send a message that this is not acceptable.
And what came out of that was the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, which mandated disclosure, which set campaign donation limits, which tried to set some spending limits. It was the first time, really, that - after that period we just talked about, this sort of lawless period - that it seemed like Congress was getting tough.
But it's also worth mentioning, at the exact same time is when the business community - big business - was feeling like it was incredibly under attack. This is the era when Ralph Nader was a celebrity, winning all sorts of battles in Congress for consumer protection, regulation, and the like. And Nixon, though he had resigned in 1974, he left a ticking time bomb in Washington, in the form of a guy named Lewis Powell.
Lewis Powell In 1971 was the head of the American Bar Association. Top of the establishment, sort of a very well respected lawyer who was, frankly, traumatized by Ralph Nader, and he writes about this in what became known as the Powell Memo.
RG: Have you seen Mad Men?
DS: Mm-hmm.
RG: So, there's this great scene where somebody has a problem with Ralph Nader. Like, is there anything we can do about Ralph Nader? And these are the most powerful people in Manhattan. And the answer is, immediately, no.
DS: Exactly.
RG: There's nothing you can do about Ralph Nader.
Now, what I love about what you found about the Powell Memo, there's multiple levels of people's understanding as they go through life about the Powell Memo. You know, first, you know nothing about the Powell Memo. Then you learn about the Powell Memo, and you're absolutely shocked, and it seems like, how could this possibly be true? That, basically, this conspiracy was orchestrated in order to kind of take over our democracy.
Then you go further on, you learn, well, actually people are saying that this was just a little letter that a guy wrote to his neighbor, and it's been blown out of proportion, and you should actually go back to your original understanding of it, which was that it doesn't - Don't even think about it.
You're taking on that third layer here, which I love.
DS: Alright. So, Lewis Powell is the head of the American Bar Association. He's being radicalized by the politics of the moment. I don't think, I'm not sure anybody's ever reported on these. We found [that] he gave a series of speeches elucidating his process of radicalization, his speeches to business groups. He was clearly echoing a lot of the themes of people like Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater.
He sees Ralph Nader on the cover of Fortune magazine, or a huge article of Ralph Nader in Fortune magazine. And he gets real pissed off. And he calls up his friend - Eugene Syndor at the Chamber of Commerce - and decides to write this memo for how the Chamber of Commerce and the larger business community can fight back. And it's this incredible manifesto.
He casts the American business community as the, quote, forgotten man." It's a direct quote. Corporate America has no power. I mean, it's kind of shocking; I mean, yes, the reformers were winning, but the idea that Corporate America was as victimized as is portrayed in this memo is obviously absurd.
RG: They were only making a hundred times, or fifty times the average worker, rather than what they feel is their just due. Like, several thousand times.
DS: It's incredible. But, look, I guess that, if you're a corporation, and you're used to being able to just dump the chemical in the river, and then, suddenly, you have to only dump half of those chemicals in the river, you're not allowed to dump all of the chemicals in the river, you probably felt traumatized by the environmental regulations that were passing, as one example.
So, he writes this memo, and it's this whole strategy for what the business community has to do to fight back, and there's a particular focus on taking over the courts. And, specifically, on doing what Nader had been doing, which is creating, manufacturing, or seizing upon lawsuits that would secure specific rulings.
And he basically was saying, Ralph Nader owns the space of the so-called public interest lawsuit and public interest law firm. We can create a different version of public interest law and public interest lawsuits, essentially, from a business perspective. I mean, it's completely Orwellian, right? Because, obviously, their agenda is quite literally the private interest.
RG: [It's] antisocial.
DS: Yeah. It's the private interest. Exactly.
So, the focus on the judiciary, etc., etc. What we found is not just the memo, obviously. But there were a series of secret meetings, and the creation of a task force on the Powell Memo - that's what it was called in the Chamber of Commerce - comprised of executives at some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. And we're talking about General Electric, Ford, media companies, ABC, CBS, where they convene these meetings - and we have the documents from them - to review what they needed to do, and what they were doing.
Again, we're telling the story of the legalization of corruption. Let me give you a really good story about this, as it relates to this. So, in 1973, they convene a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce to review the task force on the Powell Memo, its task force, and what it's doing. It's in Disney World.
The chief lobbyist for U.S. Steel is running the task force, William White, who's very close to his friends, Jerry and Betty. And they bring Jerry and Betty down to Disney World; of course, I'm talking about Gerald Ford and Betty Ford. They bring them down to Disney World, and the meeting notes show that Gerald Ford keynotes the event, and the event has a focus on the Federal Election Campaign Act, which had passed in 1971 after an earlier pre-Watergate scandal, where Nixon was on tape talking about shaking down the dairy industry for cash. That's, by the way, a direct quote, shaking down" in exchange for milk price supports, to keep the price of milk high.
So, obviously, the Chamber of Commerce, this Powell Memo task force is concerned about such things. They fly Gerald Ford down to the meeting. They review how to navigate the early new campaign finance reforms. And we found a document from the Olin Corporation, a guy who was part of these task forces - Olin is a huge right-wing funder, I think it's a chemical or weapons fortune - and he says in the document, what they're trying to do Is get an amendment into the updates to the campaign finance reforms that would allow for the creation of corporate PACs, OK?
Now, fast forward just a few months from 1973, from that one meeting, as an example. Now, Gerald Ford is President of the United States, Watergate has unfolded. There's even more of a push to make the campaign finance laws stronger. Gerald Ford, who clearly didn't like the campaign finance reforms as a congressperson - there were a lot of Republicans who didn't like it - he's now president, and essentially forced to sign the bill, because Watergate has happened.
RG: Yeah, you can't veto that.
DS: You can't veto that. It passes, but guess what? Baked into the law were the loopholes that they had been plotting for. There was a small provision put into that final bill that allowed for the creation of corporate political action committees which, not surprisingly, exploded right after the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms.
And it's worth adding one more thing, is that the legal groups that were formed through these Powell Memo task force meetings - groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation and the like, and including the Chamber of Commerce - they were also pursuing what was then a radical notion in the court system. Which was, they wanted to enshrine the idea that money isn't corruption, money is speech.
And so, right after those campaign finance reforms were signed into law by Gerald Ford - with those loopholes, by the way - they filed a lawsuit in the federal courts to try to invalidate those laws, on the ground that you cannot limit money in politics, because money is speech. And we talk a lot about in this podcast about how the Master Plan really does have kind of a Master Plan cinematic universe." These people who keep popping up.
The notion that money is speech and not corruption was masterminded by - and the lawsuit was masterminded by - none other than John Bolton. Yes, the same John Bolton. And it was boosted by Robert Bork, who was still the Solicitor General of the United States. Who, in an incredible story - I mean, it's just kind of mind blowing, right? - he has to defend the law, because he's still the Solicitor General of the United States. Like, that's his job, so he officially has to defend the law, defend the Federal Election Commission. But this guy files two briefs.
He files one brief sort of barely defending the law, and then he files another brief, essentially on behalf of the Ford administration, siding with the people, with the John Boltons, who were trying to destroy it. And guess what? What the court produces is the enshrining of the doctrine that money is speech.
And, soon after that, Lewis Powell, who's now been installed on the Supreme Court - the guy who wrote the Powell Memo - he works behind the scenes at the Supreme Court to take a subsequent case a few years later to extend those free speech rights to spend in elections, to extend those rights to corporations.
RG: What's so important about what you guys have uncovered here is that it really puts to rest this new-ish idea that has been circulating, that, oh, actually, the Powell Memo, like I said, it's just a letter to a neighbor. Like, that's what the kind of talking point has become about the Powell Memo. And that if you actually invest this incredibly prescient document with any real meaning, then you're a conspiracy theorist.
DS: Yeah.
RG:What they're trying to say is that, the world we have today is just a natural function of the way that the market and history unfolded. And that, you, if you're looking for decisions made by particular people for particular reasons at a particular time, you're not going to find them.
In other words, this is water, because we're just living in a world that has water in it.
DS:It absolves the people and the movement that created this world of responsibility for creating this dystopia, by pretending that it was all just a force of nature.
I would agree that the Powell Memo is not the singular explanation.
RG: Yeah, absolutely. Right.
DS: But it was, certainly, A, if not the catalyzing document to prompt and unleash all of the organizing that happened subsequently. I mean, here's a specific example, right? To tie it right to today. This is very specific.
The Powell Memo was cited by Joseph Coors as the document that stirred him into political action. Joseph Coors, after reading the Powell Memo, decided to provide the seed funding for the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation carved out its niche in all of this organizing in the early 1970s into the early '80s. Carved out its niche as a focus on policy, specifically its mandate for leadership series, which is this giant document that they produce every election that is an agenda for conservative presidents to take and implement.
Now, if that sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking, oh, that sounds like Project 2025. Well, Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of the mandate for leadership series. Point being that you can draw a direct line from the Powell Memo to project 2025. That's a piece of what the Powell Memo inspired. And, clearly there was a lot of pent up energy for this.
I agree that the Powell Memo doesn't explain everything, but the idea that it was just some version, some 1970s version of a random Facebook post or a Reddit rant is absolutely ridiculous.
RG: What absolving people who created this of responsibility also does, is it kind of absolves the subjects of it - you and me and the rest of the public - from responsibility to overturn it. Because, if it's just an act of nature, well, I guess we've just got to weather the storm and wait till it's over, and then maybe we'll have a democracy again at some point.
But if it actually is the actions of a concerted group of people working toward their own interest, that means that a concerted group of people working in the opposite direction [to] the public interest can actually undo this stuff. That's the other point about it being unnatural.
DS: A hundred percent. And, by the way, you don't have to reach back all that far. I mean, you can reach back to Common Cause, John Gardner, the post-Watergate era of at least passing the Federal Election Campaign Act and the Amendments of 1974, that's one example. But another example that's worth mentioning is John McCain.
I think people have forgotten the John McCain of the '90s and early 2000s. The John McCain that I remember, because it was the time when I was right out of college. John McCain, after Buckley v. Vallejo, which we just talked about, you know, money is speech, John McCain after the loopholes where Corporate PACs explode. John McCain gets himself embroiled in what was called the Keating Five scandal in the late '80s.
And the Keating Five scandal sounds quaint by current standards, but the Keating Five scandal was, basically, five senators tried to pressure a federal banking regulator to rescind a proposed regulation that would have hit those five senators' major donor Charles Keating. This became a huge scandal. It's kind of funny.
RG: Hilariously quaint, right?
DS: Right. Because that's literally how politics now works. That's just how congressmen raise money now. It's just, oh, give me money, and I'll go pressure the regulator who's bothering you. Like,that's a standard- Anyway, McCain gets singed by this. Actually, both parties, their rising star heroes get singed. John McCain, war hero? John Glenn was also involved in this, right?
So, both parties' golden boys get super-singed by this. And McCain does something that you rarely see in a politician. Instead of resigning, or pretending it didn't happen, or just shutting up, McCain decides to apologize, and adopt the campaign finance reform cause with the zeal of a convert. And he goes on a crusade to try to pass campaign finance reform legislation that would require more disclosure, and would, specifically, most importantly, cut off the unregulated, unlimited amounts of corporate money that were flooding into both parties in the form of money called soft money, which was a sort of 1990s term for just money flowing into the parties, giant slush funds.
McCain pushes this with Russ Feingold, I think it's in the mid 90s. He can't get it passed through the Senate, decides to run for president in 1999, and he is in a primary against a human personification of money politics: George W. Bush, and George W. Bush's Rangers and Pioneers, the name for his big bundlers, his big donors, and Bush had all the money.
McCain, we have in this episode about him, we talked to his former chief of staff, who says, you know, we told him not to talk about money and politics, nobody cared. And McCain said, you're wrong, and went to New Hampshire and talked all about it. And it was a huge issue, people loved it. And McCain actually almost won that campaign. He didn't win that campaign, but he came really close.
And here's the thing: it was such an effective campaign, it was such an effective anticorruption crusade, that it compelled George W. Bush - like, Mr. Corruption - to endorse and say he would sign that McCain-Feingold law. And McCain ultimately use that presidential campaign to pass it through Congress, and get Bush to sign it, and Bush signed it. And then the Supreme court upheld it.
Now, I bring up all of this to say, it's a good lesson to remember that what John McCain was trying to fix was the water back then, right? It was, nobody can fix this, don't go talk about this, nobody will care, you can't get anything done. And he actually proved you can get things done.
Now, I know the other side of the story would be, well, he got things done. The Supreme court upheld it, and then, later, the Supreme court overturned it. Well, sure. But I think that speaks to the idea that you're never going to do one thing that fixes the corruption problem in America. There has to be kind of an ongoing vigilance to fighting this fight, and that hasn't existed for, I think, arguably, since John McCain.
I mean, you could argue [that] Bernie Sanders would bring up Citizens United, sure, and I think that, certainly, anti-corruption was part of Bernie's campaign. But he wasn't able to elevate it in a way that John McCain was.
RG: Right. And Citizens United has become a thing that is kind of a toss-off that people say, because the Supreme Court has six Republicans on it who all support Citizens United. And so, I think, dwelling on it probably for too long, for Democrats, probably just makes them realize their powerlessness there.
So, they've kind of shifted their focus toward public financing of campaigns, you know? John Sarbanes had his - The voting rights legislation never ended up passing the house. His piece of it, that had a six-to-one match for anything under $250 came reasonably close. It was not as if this was something that 20 Squad and Squad-adjacent members were supporting, it's something like 200-plus Democrats were cosponsoring this. So, they've kind of given up for the time being, it seems like, of crimping the corruption and, instead, saying well, let's just allow the public to match it
DS: But I would say this: I do think that Citizens United, I mean, yes a movement to overturn Citizens United constitutionally is a worthwhile and valid endeavor. It will take a long time. But I also think that public financing does speak to [how] there are ways to make things better even within the Citizens United paradigm, right?
Like, public financing - not just a matching system, but a true public financing system - I think could change the game in a big way, which would say, listen, there's a way for you to run for office where you don't have to rely on money that comes with the expectation of government favors. The fact that we haven't done this, you understand why. It's because the people who are voting on whether to do it are the masters of the current privately financed system. They don't want to change the system.
But the fact is, you mentioned the Sarbanes bill. I mean, public financing passed the U.S. Senate twice in the mid-70s. A version of some public financing passed Congress in the early 1990s by Democrats, and was vetoed by George H.W. Bush.
RG: And it was in law for the presidential races. I mean, it still is.
DS: And it was in law for the presidential races. It still is, technically, but they don't fund it, yeah.
So, the point is, this is not some crazy pie-in-the-sky insane idea that's never been reviewed before. And it's the same thing, by the way, with the most minimal thing that could be done, which is Sheldon Whitehouse's Disclose Act.
I mean, short of public financing elections where we say, hey, there's an avenue for you to run for office where you don't have to just rely on private donors. Short of that, there can at least be legislation - and some states are trying to pass this kind of legislation - which says, listen, people can spend money in elections, but they've got to disclose who they are. Like, this era of not just unlimited spending, but unlimited anonymous spending, is insane. That shouldn't be a controversial idea, even in the slightest. That is literally written into the Citizens United ruling that says the government has the constitutional right to require disclosure.
I mean, Justice Antonin Scalia said in a case subsequently after Citizens United, said, essentially, democracy relies on disclosure, on the idea that people, they can participate in politics, but they have to identify themselves when they participate in politics. Or, at minimum, when they participate at a level of hundreds of millions of dollars, they have to identify themselves. The fact that this hasn't passed is just completely insane.
My hope is that, when you look at the Congress right now, I mean, are there enough - are there any - Republicans who are willing to participate in reforming those laws? I mean, the Democrats on the Disclose Act, to their credit, I think all of them in the Senate, or at least most of them, have cosponsored Whitehouse's bill. Kamala Harris, for instance, she could be president, she cosponsored it. Josh Hawley has put a bill out, it's sort of a message bill, purporting to be opposed to Citizens United. He's a Republican. Maybe it's not a real bill but, like, I don't know. At least one Republican sees some sort of political opportunity or political upside to positioning themselves against the corrupt paradigm that we live in.
So, the question that I come out of, having done this series and reported all this is, look, we know it can be done. We know it was a master plan, we know decisions were made that can be reversed. The question is, what is it going to take to actually reverse them? Where is the next John McCain? Is it even possible to have another John McCain?
Because, Ryan, I think the thing that I end up with - and I don't want to be a doomer here, because I think a lot of states have done good things, and those are real, and there's a ballot measure in Maine this year - but one of the things that really bothered me most recently about all this is, in the 2020 campaign that I worked on for Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders, one of his surrogates, Zephyr Teachout, the law professor, anticorruption reformer. She published an op-ed in the 2020 election in The Guardian, saying Joe Biden basically is too close with his corporate donors. She made a sort of list, credit card industry donors. I mean, donors that Joe Biden had done a lot of favors for over his legislative career, and said that Joe Biden has a corruption problem. Which was an obvious statement. And Bernie Sanders felt compelled to come out and apologize for his surrogate, essentially, invoking the C word: corruption.
And then you saw, in my view, a similar thing happen a few months ago, when Congresswoman Katie Porter loses her run for the Senate. And she makes a comment that billionaires rigged the election with millions of dollars. Which, they did, right? I mean, crypto billionaires spent a ton of money in that Democratic primary to get the result they wanted, which was the defeat of Katie Porter. And, when Katie Porter said this, it touched off a firestorm of criticism. How dare Katie Porter say this?
Now, part of that was, I guess, people think rigged election, they think Trump, they think election-denying.
RG: Can't say rigged."
DS: Can't say rigged." But my takeaway is, wait a minute, wait a minute. Between Bernie apologizing and Katie Porter being vilified for saying millions of dollars rigs elections, we're moving into this discourse paradigm. We're calling out systemic institutionalized corruption that we've all gotten used to. Calling it out is the crime, not the corruption itself. Those who say this is wrong, or bad, or even that it exists, these are the problems. That those people should apologize, not the people corrupting the system.
RG: My favorite part, by the way, of the Sarbanes legislation, is that it pays for the public funding out of a pool of collected corporate fines for corporate corruption.
DS: Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. That's perfect.
RG: Which only seems fair.
So, the podcast is called Master Plan. Where can they find it, besides just searching Master Plan?"
DS: Yeah, you can go to masterplanpodcast.com, that's masterplanpodcast.com. When you go there, you can just click any of the buttons to add it to the app you're listening to. I really think people will like it.
I want to just underscore, there's a lot in there that I had no idea about. We found all sorts of documents that have never been seen, including my favorite - just to give you a little teaser - the vinyl record that we found that's never been found before, a vinyl record of Philip Morris and its executives throwing a sendoff party to the Supreme Court for Lewis Powell, a few months after Lewis Powell wrote the Powell Memo. A vinyl record of the party that was emceed by Walter Cronkite.
And here's one other teaser - this part kind of blows my mind - Lewis Powell writes his memo in 1971, three months later, he gets nominated to the Supreme Court. There's a Democratic senate, the Democratic senate had just rejected a couple of Nixon's other Supreme Court nominations. That's what had sort of opened this place for Powell's nomination. Powell, unbeknownst to everybody at the time, unbeknownst to me until we found the documents, Powell was a correspondent and, essentially, source for J. Edgar Hoover.
And guess what J. Edgar Hoover's FBI didn't turn over to the U.S. Senate when it voted on Lewis Powell's nomination? They somehow omitted any reference to the Powell Memo. Had there been a reference to that, had senators found that, a Democratic Senate in opposition to Richard Nixon, Lewis Powell might not have been on the Supreme Court. Lewis Powell might not have been on the Court to engineer, as he did, behind the scenes, that early ruling that created the legal foundation for Citizens United. I mean, it really is, like. a butterfly-flaps-its-wings kind of moment.
RG: Great work. Really excited to finish listening to this, enjoyed what I've listened to so far. And, also, everybody should be subscribing to The Lever if they're not already, you guys are doing incredible daily anti-corruption reporting over there as well. Thank you so much for joining me here.
DS: Thanks so much, Ryan. I really appreciate it
RG: Alright, that was David Sirota and that's our show. Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And I'm Ryan Grim, cofounder of Drop Site News.
If you haven't already, please subscribe to Deconstructed wherever you listen to podcasts. And please leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show. This program was brought to you in part by a grant from The Intercept.
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you soon.
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