- Interview by
- Ed Rampell
From 2007’s Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side to the just released The Dark Money Game, producer-director Alex Gibney has been tirelessly zooming in on the wrongs that need to righted. From Enron to Jack Abramoff, Henry Kissinger’s war crimes to WikiLeaks, Lance Armstrong’s doping to Scientology’s secrets, and Russian oligarchs to the imperial presidency and beyond, Gibney has relentlessly probed and illumined darkness with his camera lens.
The Dark Money Game, the filmmaker’s two-part, four-hour series for HBO and Max, focuses on the corrosive effects of Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court decision that equated speech with money and ushered in a tidal wave of campaign cash, undermining our democracy. Like nonfiction versions of film noir mysteries, Ohio Confidential and Wealth of the Wicked — the two parts of latest Gibney’s hard-hitting documentary — investigate and chronicle the corruption flowing from this subversion of the US electoral and legislative systems.
Alex Gibney
Leonard Leo is a very interesting figure. He was always a money-raiser. You can go back to his yearbook and see that, I believe, he was called the “moneybags [kid].” In any event, Leonard Leo turns out to be a master of raising money. He has two agendas: one is an extreme deregulatory agenda, which is the ideological agenda of the Federalist Society, even though it bills itself as a grand debating society. Actually it’s deeply conservative and interested in basically tearing down the regulatory state.
The other thing about Leonard Leo is he’s a deeply devout Catholic, but a deeply conservative Catholic. One of the things he does is to raise enormous amounts of money to promote the campaigns of justices who share both his deregulatory fervor and his religious inclinations, so that when they form a majority on the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade comes up for consideration, it’s overturned — you have the Dobbs decision. Leonard Leo plays a very powerful role as a dark-money aggregator, one who’s responsible for funding a lot of extremely right-wing causes and also trying to enforce his vision of Catholicism on the rest of the nation.