I sometimes worry that the pyramid style of conventional journalism, which emphasizes the new at the expense of the already understood, fits poorly with stories that develop over a long period of time.
Politico’s Supreme Court about Justice Gorsuch reporting might be a good example. Politico’s report, on its face, shows that Gorsuch benefited from a lucrative land deal shortly after he took his seat on the Supreme Court—and shortly before he bought his house—and disclosed very little about it, including that the head of a major DC law firm supplied the money. Even in bare bones form, it’s a really great story.
But in that form, the story has set everyone up to have very formalistic arguments about the requirements of disclosure forms and the intricacies of reporting income distributions from a special purpose limited liability company whose special purpose has come to an end. Those are topics that only a transactional lawyer could love.
But lurking behind it all, and apparent in the very last paragraph of Politico’s report, is a richer story of a Republican-appointed Justice who has never had to account for his close ties to a reclusive billionaire patron. It’s a story that may need to be told from the perspective of memory, because so much of it is old news.
Back in December 2005, the conservative magazine National Review published a friendly, jocular interview its longtime online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez had conducted with a former writer for the magazine, Micheal Flaherty.
Flaherty had made good in the early 2000s. He had cofounded a movie production label with Cary Granat, the former president and Chief Operating Officer of Miramax’s Dimension label, and they had quickly been acquired by a deep-pocketed sponsor. The label secured the rights to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, and co-produced The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Disney. The former Boston public school teacher and Christian political writer had, in other words, parachuted into Hollywood with a sack of cash. It was, to put it mildly, not a typical career path.
Lopez interviewed Flaherty in the days before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe opened. (It would be a blockbuster hit.) Towards the end of the brief talk, she jokingly brought up the patron behind Flaherty’s burgeoning film career:
LOPEZ: There's been a lot of attention on Philip Anschutz, your Mr. Moneybags. Tell me the truth. He's really Karl Rove, isn't he? You can reveal it here.
FLAHERTY: Never before has more attention been paid to somebody who could not be less interested in publicity. Hopefully some day a smart journalism professor will look over all of the ink that has been spilled in profiling Phil to show how lazy journalists have become. He never gives interviews, so for the past 20 years people keep recycyling [sic] and rehashing all of the same anecdotes and publishing it even though they have nothing new to say. It is easy to see what people find interesting in him though. He has amazing vision and he can see around corners.
I can’t really account for why this little piece of conservative media fluff—and particularly its stray description of the billionaire oil and railroad tycoon Philip Anschutz from an ideological ally—has stayed with me for all these years, but it tickled something at the back of my mind when I read Politico’s report on Justice Neil Gorsuch’s land deal this morning.
The name of Flaherty and Granat’s production house was Walden Media. In the first two years of its existence—and apparently before it made any movies—it was folded into Anschutz’s sports and media empire for an extraordinary $100 million reported investment. In line with Anschutz’s vision, Walden has pursued a moral mission with its films, and it had returned with a mixed track record at the box office, with “more misses than hits,” as the L.A. Times put it.
For whatever reason, I remembered the name: Walden Media.
And it struck me that when Neil Gorsuch and his two partners in the 40 acre mountain property in Colorado, who also happen to be tied into Anschutz’s business, went to form the limited liability company that would hold the property in October 2005—one month, as it happened, before The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe’s premiere—they named it The Walden Group LLC.
It is no revelation, of course, that Justice Gorsuch has deep ties to Anschutz and his enterprises. As a DC-based lawyer, Gorsuch used to represent Anschutz and his companies. Gorsuch has reportedly been a frequent guest at Anschutz’s dove-hunting retreats at his ranch, “Eagle’s Nest,” on the South Platte River. And Anschutz reportedly lobbied the Bush administration to secure Gorsuch’s first judicial appointment in 2006. The New York Times wrote a sprawling report on those ties in 2017 before Gorsuch was confirmed, and it noted that The Walden Group exemplified them in a number of ways.
Cannon Harvey, one of the co-investors in The Walden Group, is an executive in Anschutz’s venture capital business and was once a Gorsuch client. And Kevin Conwick, the other co-investor in The Walden Group, was a deals lawyer at Bryan Cave who had Anschutz’s sports and media arm as a prominent client.
Anschutz’s connections to the real estate deal may well end there. It may be that the choice of The Walden Group as a name was merely a laconic tribute the three men chose to honor the man whose patronage had helped them to buy a fishing retreat just as his Walden brand was about to make a splash in Hollywood. We may find out that the deal to sell the Colorado property to the DC-based head of Greenberg Traurig within days of Gorsuch’s confirmation to the high court, however shady it looks, was largely coincidental. We may even learn that with enough hair-splitting the way Gorsuch reported the income resulting from the sale on his disclosure forms fits within the four corners of the applicable rules.
But the choice of the name and the web of well-known connections—material and symbolic—that bind another conservative Justice to another secretive billionaire combine to tell a story that can’t be whittled down to nothing. Our Supreme Court, and particularly its Republican-appointed majority, is saturated with the influence of the inapproachably wealthy. The Justices are far more familiar with the country’s tiny coterie of billionaires, and several may well consider themselves in a billionaire’s debt.