US supreme court justice and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis found to have rubbed elbows with hardliner Leonard Leo

The supreme court justice Samuel Alito and a German aristocrat and “networker of the far right” from whom Alito accepted expensive concert tickets, are both linked to an ultra-conservative Catholic US group whose board members include the dark money impresario Leonard Leo and the founder of a hardline anti-abortion Christian group, documentation reviewed by the Guardian shows.

In 2018, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, told the New York Times about attending a dinner hosted in Rome by James Harvey, an American cardinal and hardliner, and sponsored by the Napa Institute, a group founded by Timothy R Busch, a conservative Catholic businessman and political activist.

Leo, 59, is an activist and fundraiser who worked on the confirmations of all six rightwing justices who now dominate the supreme court, Alito among them. Now controlling billions of dollars in funding for rightwing groups, Leo is a director of the Napa Institute Legal Foundation, also known as Napa Legal Institute, and the Napa Institute Support Foundation.