Seven years ago, on this date, a backroom trade occurred that would shift the future of the Presidency, the Republican party – and the Supreme Court, to where it all is today. Remarkably, very few people in the media paid much heed at the time.

Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee for President, who lacked the support of the financial and ideological center of his party, had been struggling in the polls against Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R. Tx) who’d come second in the Republican race, and who did have the support of the GOP establishment, had refused to endorse Trump at the Republican Convention.

Cruz’s chief worry, shared by the Federalist Society (Fed Soc), the conservative lawyers’ club he’d joined at Harvard Law School, was that Trump didn’t really care about the Supreme Court. The fear was that in Trump-fashion, were he elected President, he might nominate a bunch of cronies to the Court, who had not been groomed by the GOP establishment (aka Fed Soc). A guy atop Fed Soc called Leonard Leo and Sen. Cruz, were adamant that a list hand-picked by Leo was exclusively what Trump must select from. The greatest urgency was in the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia. The Holy Grail for a new Conservative court would be something Cruz and Leo, both staunch Catholics, had long talked about: repealing Roe v. Wade.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates