Totally unfit for elected office, his staff knows it, his campaign knows it, yet they all keep trying to get him elected. This is the country we have now, this is the republican party. Hugs
Herschel Walker’s campaign said he had never tried to hide his children. He did—to his own campaign even.
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter
EXCLUSIVE
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
When Herschel Walker’s campaign aides approached him this winter to discuss whispers that Walker had a secret child, the Georgia GOP’s Senate candidate told his campaign the rumors were false.
Walker’s aides already knew he was lying.
They had expected him to lie, and had obtained documents in advance of that conversation verifying that Walker did indeed have another child, The Daily Beast has learned. They handed the documents to him, and after some more back and forth, Walker finally admitted it was true. His aides asked if there were any other children they needed to know about. Walker insisted this was it.
When the Daily Beast learned about the existence of that 10-year-old child in June and went to the campaign for comment, campaign manager Scott Paradise prepared a statement. But first, he went to Walker with a question: Be honest—are there any other kids?
No, Walker said.
Paradise then put out a statement insisting that Walker—who at that point had only publicly acknowledged one child, his adult son, Christian—was “proud of his children.”
“To suggest that Herschel is ‘hiding’ the child because he hasn’t used him in his political campaign is offensive and absurd,” Paradise said in a statement.
The very next day, The Daily Beast reached out again, asking about yet another undisclosed child, a 13-year-old. The campaign approached Walker and asked again. This time, he acknowledged the teen was his.
The campaign verified that the 13-year-old was Walker’s son, and that he had yet another child—a daughter from his college days about 40 years ago.
This account of Walker lying to his own campaign about his children comes from a closely connected adviser and was verified by communications that the source turned over to The Daily Beast. We are not quoting from the messages out of concern that they could potentially expose the source’s identity.
The communications reveal a campaign and a candidate in chaos.
Emails and texts show advisers discussing how they don’t trust Walker—both to tell the truth to them and to handle campaign events properly—and harboring concerns that he isn’t mentally fit for the job.
He spouts falsehoods “like he’s breathing,” this adviser said—so much so that his own campaign stopped believing him long ago.
“He’s lied so much that we don’t know what’s true,” the person said, adding that aides have “zero” trust in the candidate. Three people interviewed for this article independently called him a “pathological liar.”
The Walker campaign declined comment.
Walker has, in fact, racked up a staggering record of falsehoods. He has claimed he was a trained FBI agent and worked for law enforcement, neither of which is true. He has told a preposterous series of lies about his academic record—forcing his campaign to delete claims from his official bio. He has grossly overstated his businesssuccess. He has falsely taken credit for founding a veterans support program. And, most recently, he claimed that former President Donald Trump had never said the 2020 election was stolen.
The campaign source painted a picture of an operation that for months has been at the mercy of a volatile, deceitful candidate.
“A campaign’s worst nightmare,” the source said. “It’s like a shitshow on a train in the middle of a wreck.”
But if the campaign is headed for a disaster, the Republican Party appears to be in the dark about just how bad it is.
In conversations with GOP higher-ups, senior Walker campaign aides have held back on their ongoing struggles with containing, directing, and cleaning up after Walker—even if, internally, they believe he’s a serious liability, according to this source who is familiar with those conversations.
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University of Georgia Bulldogs’ running back Herschel Walker #34 poses for the camera in front of Lovett Stadium in 1981. Herschel Walker was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999.
Focus On Sport
The revelations come at a critical time. The national party—with the all-important blessing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and National Republican Senatorial Committee chair Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL)—has lined up behind Walker after his easy primary win last month. The GOP is now investing in major political and fundraising operations across The Peach State.
Many establishment Republicans were lukewarm on Walker from the jump. When the first reports broke last summer detailing Walker’s checkered personal history, influential GOP figures balked. Some hoped that “somebody else” would take over the closely watched race, which will likely determine which party controls Congress heading into the 2024 presidential election.
“Some of it’s pretty bad, obviously: physical abuse and pulling a gun on his wife, if that’s true,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told Politico last July, adding, “I’d prefer to have somebody else.”
(Walker has denied these claims.)
But the skeptics couldn’t stave off the MAGA-fueled boost Walker got as Trump’s handpicked candidate. The two men have been friends since the 1980s, when Trump showcased the phenom running back as a main attraction in his NFL knock-off, the USFL. And with Trump’s early endorsement last September, the popular athlete was quickly out of reach, quickly going dollar-for-dollar against Democratic incumbent opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock, the top fundraiser in Congress. By April, Cornyn had forked over his personal endorsement.
ATHENS, GA—Heisman Trophy winner and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Herschel Walker speaks at a rally on May 23, 2022.
Megan Varner/Getty Images
The party now appears all-in. When The Daily Beast recently asked Scott, the NRSC chair, whether he felt his organization had failed to vet Walker, Scott called him a “good candidate” and predicted a win.
But while NRSC contacts have been checking in with Walker advisers over the last several months, the campaign source said, staffers haven’t been forthright about the internal turmoil.
Donors are jumping ship, the campaign source said, pointing to Home Depot founder and GOP megadonor Bernie Marcus, who has already contributed more than a million dollars to a pro-Walker super PAC. According to the source, Marcus recently told a top Republican fundraiser that he doesn’t feel comfortable going through with another planned seven-figure gift in light of the revelations about the children.
The Daily Beast reached out to Marcus for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.
While those revelations may have taken backers by surprise, they weren’t news to the campaign.
Aides have secretly derided Walker for months, according to this person and internal communications seen by The Daily Beast. They have ridiculed his intelligence. They fear his mood swings and instability. And staffers worry he could embarrass himself at any moment, setting the campaign back yet again and burning energy on damage control.
The overriding concern is that the stress and pressures of campaigning—criticism and backlash in particular—might make him “just not mentally stable,” the source said.
But this person noted that the months of bombshell reports about Walker’s trumped-up business record, erratic personal life, and the legions of lies and ludicrous exaggerations have so far clouded the mental health issue in the media.
The strategy now is to keep Walker off television and on script, this person said. “Except he doesn’t listen,” the campaign source said. “He doesn’t take direction, because he comes from a place where he says, ‘I have built myself up in the media for years.’”
In a meandering 40-minute phone interview with The Daily Beast the evening before The Daily Beast reported on his second and third previously undisclosed children, Walker tried to duck the issue more than a dozen times, preferring instead to grill this reporter on topics ranging from gas prices and climate change to the “definition of a woman” and abortion.
Eventually, Walker acknowledged both sons in a statement, in which he stated plainly, “I have four children. Three sons and a daughter.”
(Two people with direct knowledge of the events told The Daily Beast that Walker took a DNA test for the daughter, whom he fathered in college but only met in the mid-2000s.)
Walker’s instinct to lie has shredded the campaign’s trust in its own candidate, according to the adviser and communications reviewed by The Daily Beast. Over the following weeks, the source said, allegations of more children poured in. Most of them were readily dismissed—but one stood out. Because senior staff no longer trust Walker’s denials, the campaign has quietly investigated the anonymous allegation behind the candidate’s back, The Daily Beast has learned.
While staffers often exercise tight control over a candidate’s schedule, in Walker’s case, the reasons behind those efforts appear unique. With Walker, the campaign source said, any public interaction carries enormous risk, which aides try to mitigate with curated public appearances and strict media gatekeeping.
“He screws up on Fox News where people agree with him, so the idea of him taking an adverse interview or interacting with people who don’t agree with him is a non-starter,” the adviser said, likening the prospect to sending him “into the lion’s den.”
Walker’s top staffers bring years of experience to the table, but they struggle to keep him on message and don’t trust Walker to speak coherently, according to communications obtained by The Daily Beast. Aides establish guardrails, but Walker blunders over them.
Currently, Team Herschel is reckoning with three potential debates against Walker’s incumbent opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), a number they hope to whittle down to one, the source said—and only if it is on their terms.
The campaign hired a renowned debate coach, who prepped former President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—two men who had their own rhetorical hurdles to clear.
Walker recently called on Reverend Warnock to “name the place and the time” for the debates, and has been champing at the bit since last fall.
Still, several sources in Georgia said that, among the GOP rank and file, Walker’s controversies don’t seem to be making a dent.
Jason Shepherd, a longtime party leader in the state, told The Daily Beast that Republicans aren’t talking about Walker’s secret children, and if they do, it’s to blame the media for “highlighting what many are seeing as a personal issue.”
But when it comes to Walker’s opponent, who himself is involved in a custody dispute, Republicans—including the national party—haven’t been afraid to highlight that issue, accusing the pastor of “ignoring the financial needs of his own children,” despite the fact that Warnock is not accused of evading child support.
The Walker campaign has recently trained much of its resources on countering the reports of the secret children. The team released its first general election ad on Tuesday, framing Walker as a “uniter,” and aides have been angling for public appearances with his closest family members: his wife, Julie Blanchard Walker; his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman; and his 22-year-old son, Christian Walker—a brash right-winger who profits off of swag promoting his father’s candidacy.
While Julie Walker is a continual presence on the campaign trail, both Grossman and Christian Walker have resisted the campaign’s entreaties in the wake of The Daily Beast reports.
It’s still unclear when Grossman and Christian Walker first knew about the two other sons. Previously, Christian, an aspiring MAGA world influencer who has made campaign appearances with his father, frequentlytargetedabsentee dads in social media rants. The focus of those attacks, however, appeared to shift after the Daily Beast reported his half-brothers.
With just four months until Election Day, it’s unclear whether the Walker campaign and its candidate can right the ship—but it’s not out of the question.
Walker, who grew up poor and shaped himself into one of the most stunning all-around athletes of his era, achieved much of that success through sheer determination. (“Most people who know Herschel believe he willed himself into his current condition,” reads a 1981 New York Timesprofile.)
So far, Walker and the campaign appear to have run a strong race since he got out of the blocks last August—quickly raising tens of millions of dollars, and coasting through the primary with about two-thirds of the vote.
And while the general election contest against Warnock shows no signs of being anything less than brutal, the campaign, like Walker, is projecting an air of confidence.
“Do we have problems? Yes! Can we solve them? Yes!,” Walker says at the end of his new campaign ad. “Georgia is my family. The United States is my family. So I’m going to fight and take care of them.”
Sam Brodey contributed reporting.
Donors are allegedly bailing—including Home Depot megadonor Bernie Marcus, who threatened to pull a million-dollar gift after the kids were revealed. Worse, campaign officials have apparently been lying for months to higher-ups in the Republican Party about how bad this all is.
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) July 7, 2022
I goofed on the last post and hit publish before I realized instead of two different videos I postedd the same video twice. I have fixed that to show the orginal and the update. Thanks. Every now and again I get in too much a hurry and don’t proof well enough. Hugs
Due to a recent comment I realized that some people missed a case where a policeman is being held to account for excuting a black man. There are two videos here. Hugs
An indignant Rep. Debbie Lesko said she’d do anything to protect her grandchildren, including shooting all five of them. That June floor speech during debate over landmark gun reform has gone viral.
In early June, as the House debated measures that would become the most significant gun legislation in decades, the Arizona Republican strode to the microphone to deliver her impassioned argument against red flag laws — by raising the reddest flag in congressional history.
“I have five grandchildren. I would do anything—anything—to protect my five grandchildren. Including, as a last resort, shooting them, if I had to, to protect the lives of my grandchildren,” Lesko said.
Read the full article. It’s not clear why Lesko’s June speech suddenly went viral yesterday or how even how it passed relatively unnoticed at the time.
Holy crap. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) said she would shoot her own grandchildren to oppose a gun safety reform bill that would keep guns out of the hands of those who should not have them. (h/t @RyanShead) https://t.co/LSOuI0jDif
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) July 6, 2022
It is telling that instead of just saying she misspoke, Lesko immediately pivoted to unhinged conspiracy mongering https://t.co/OnpS2KIcYx
If she shot her five grandchildren, wouldn’t that make her the violent criminal? Oh, I get it, she thinks “criminal” is some kind of essential spiritual state like “demonic”. Wouldn’t be surprised if she thought the same about “Jewish” or “Black”. “But I’m a good Christian; this is not who I am.”
Now I feel like a monster, I am about to welcome my 1st granddaughter any day now and am thinking of what education fund to setup and she is talking about killing her grandchildren. I need to work on my priorities.
She also said that guns shouldn’t be taken away from violent mentally ill people. Then she said Republicans passed, and signed, into law, something that prevents mass shootings. I wonder what that was. It ain’t a-workin’.
She’s so “pro-life” she’ll kill her grandchildren to protect her guns fetish and idolatry. I hope the grandchildren and their parents understand grandma wants to kill them.
She would shoot them so that they would not have to undergo the horror of living in a country where there is health care for all and equal rights for people of color and gays.
BILL BENNETT (CONTRIBUTOR): You need police. You need parents for sure. You need schools. You need to clean up social media. You need all that.
But you know, you may need an exorcist, too. Before your audience shakes its head on that, if you look at these boys, these men, these young men, they have deeply spiritual problems. Deeply.
If you go into the labyrinthine caves of the internet way down and I don’t recommend it, it’s ugly stuff and these guys dwell there. They live there. They drench themselves in it and it’s as ugly and evil as it gets.
Where are the ministers? Where are the rabbis? The priests? Look, I don’t want to suggest something that would seem farcical to a lot of your audience, but I think that the domain of religion ought to be involved here.
It’s a deeply spiritual void, I think, that these young men have in their hearts and their souls, and I think it needs to be addressed.
Bennett, who was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, last appeared on JMG in April 2020 when he declared coronavirus to be a mere “flu” and definitely not a pandemic. In 2019 we heard from Bennett when he said that Trump’s extortion of Ukraine was a “good thing.”
In 2006, Masters penned an article for an obscure libertarian publication in which he referenced a “poignant quotation” from Nazi leader Hermann Goering, while citing a noted conspiracy theorist who has suggested that an infamous antisemitic tract “accurately” describes “much of what is happening in our world.”
The essay was published on the eponymous website of a controversial libertarian author and think tank leader named Lew Rockwell, who is alleged to have ghostwritten a series of bigoted newsletters for former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The site, founded in 1999, describes itself as “anti-state,” “anti-war” and “pro-market.”
Among his main “sources,” Masters says in a parenthetical at the beginning of the piece, is G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island, a conspiracy-laden polemic — published in 1994 and widely revered in die-hard libertarian circles — that calls for the abolishment of the Federal Reserve.
Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been dogged by a trail of youthful writings in which he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s.
As he had in other forums, Mr. Masters wrote on the CrossFit chat room that he opposed American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he conceded, “is harder to argue because of the hot button issue of the Holocaust (nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?).”
Mr. Masters has also been denounced for contemporary statements, like his April 11 remark that America’s gun violence problem boiled down to “Black people, frankly,” and his apparent embrace of the “replacement theory” promulgated by white supremacists when he accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.”
Masters last appeared on JMG when he was “strongly endorsed” by fugitive Nazi leader Andrew Anglin. Last month he called for overturning the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.
Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of Donald Trump, wrote that he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars and approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal.https://t.co/tUtgxGjLrx
Negative campaigning has real costs. It turns people off. Early in the race, @RichardGrenell endorsed one of my opponents, Jim Lamon. Then Jim started spending millions smearing me. That was a huge red flag for many, including Ric — and now I’m thrilled to have his support. pic.twitter.com/CKlWOLfe3n
I can’t believe Jarvanka are just quietly going along with this business of Trump endorsing literal nazis. But I guess it’s that they-got-theirs-so-screw-everybody-else phenomenon so common among the GOP. Exhibit A: Richard Grenell.
You wont see this in the regular media. They wont touch the Nazis and white nationalist. Its only sites like this and others similar that are trying to get out this info while “mainstream” media focuses on bullshit and fluff
GOP Senate candidate Eric Greitens, the disgraced ex-governor of Missouri, has released a second campaign ad promoting violence against his political opposition.
Greitens, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was widely condemned after the release of a spot last month in which he encouraged his supporters to “hunt” Republicans who have broken away from Trump.
“Because I fought for you, they came after me. But we’re back, wiser, stronger, and still fighting. And this time, with an army of patriots,” Greitens says. Three camouflaged individuals emerge from a field behind Greitens, who then destroys a secondary target.
Read the full article. Greitens claims that he previous ad was meant to be humorous.
What a horrible, perverted, dangerous human being. He does not belong in civil society, much less than a position of public trust https://t.co/51CUN1iAkO
What could be more “humorous” than a campaign ad that glorifies gun violence against your political opposition? I’m sure the survivors of all the US mass shootings will agree.
This is long but describes an incredible intertwining of the religious fanatic justices with the religious legal hate group arguing cases in front of them to restrict rights for others and expand them for religion. Things the court then did. Also when the court has refused to restrict protesting at abortion clinics they did severely limit demonstrations at their court establishing an exclusion zone that this religious group had headquarters with in. This is where the long game came in, the religious right just kept working their way in until they won. Hugs
A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade
Peggy Nienaber, left, the vice president of the Faith & Liberty evangelical group, prays outside the Supreme Court in 2009. Next to her is the Rev. Rob Schenck, who led the group’s predecessor organization, Faith and Action, for years before leaving in 2018.
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.
This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”
But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.
Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”
Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images
In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.
The home serves as Faith & Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.
The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)
At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)
To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.
Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda. No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret. “Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.
“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.”
When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith & Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith & Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)
“There’s a lot of things that Faith & Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.
Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”
In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”
Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith & Liberty’s website.
Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith & Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith & Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith & Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.
Staver, in denying that members of Faith & Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,” he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”
In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”
But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”
Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court. He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.
Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”
In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”
When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”
Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.
But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”
That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”
For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”
Let’s just get one thing straight: there are 5 rogue SCOTUS justices and 1 more not too far behind them. They are going to take power away from state courts next year and that will be the end of democracy. And nothing is going to be done about it. So plan accordingly.
Distractions are working but more importantly the gravity of the situation either hasn’t hit with the right people or they don’t care/are in on it (Manchinema).
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Scottie's Playtime 