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Investigators spoke to the nine Supreme Court justices and their spouses in the course of their investigation into how a draft opinion on a ruling that would strike down the country’s abortion law was leaked to the media.
The interviews were not mentioned in the 23-page Supreme Court report, which details an eight-month investigation, more than 120 interviews and a forensic examination of cellphones, laptops and email accounts, leading to questions about a potential research gap.
But court bailiff Gail Curley said in a statement Friday that she had spoken to each judge multiple times and they were “cooperative” with her investigation. She said she found nothing implicating the judges or their spouses.
“During the course of the investigation, I spoke to each of the judges, several on multiple occasions. The judges actively cooperated in this iterative process, asking questions and answering mine. I followed up on all credible leads, none of which implicated the judges or their spouses. On this basis, I did not believe it was necessary to ask the magistrates to sign affidavits,’ he said in a statement issued by the court.
US Supreme Court justices were interviewed as part of the court’s investigation into the leaked opinion: Seated (L-R): Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Elena Kagan. Standing (L-R): Judges Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson
The leaked draft sparked protests across the country and in front of the court.
The report, issued on Thursday, admitted that the leaker had not been found and conceded that the chances of finding the person were low.
It effectively cleared the judges’ paralegals of the leak. But it also detailed the lack of security safeguards that made it easy to extract the information from the building.
Politico’s bombshell report on May 2, detailing the draft opinion and how the justices were to vote, shook the court to its foundations. Conservatives blamed liberals for the leak, while liberals said it was conservatives who wanted to shore up the 5-4 vote that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
The judges themselves expressed their opinion on the leak.
Judge Samuel Alito called the leak a “serious betrayal of trust by someone, and it came as a shock” that led to a “changed” atmosphere in court. Judge Clarence Thomas compared it to infidelity.
Chief Justice John Roberts has ordered an inquiry into what he called an ‘egregious trust chest’.
But even after the draft opinion revealed that Alito and four conservative justices were going to vote to strike out Roe, Roberts tried to persuade at least one of the five to vote with him and the liberals to preserve abortion rights, CNN reported.
The leaked decision further hampered Roberts’ negotiating efforts, the network reported.
The Supreme Court announced that it cannot identify the person who leaked a draft of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
And it wasn’t the first leak, according to a November report in the new york times which claimed that the Reverend Rob Schenck received early warning that the Supreme Court would rule, in a case brought by Hobby Lobby, that requiring family corporations to pay for insurance that covered contraception violated their religious liberties.
Schenck, who used to run an evangelical nonprofit in Washington, told the Times how he learned about the 2014 ruling in advance. He also said he wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts about the matter.
He said that in June 2014, an Ohio couple who donated to his group had lunch with Alito and Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann. The next day, Gayle Wright, one of the two, contacted Schenck to say that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby and that it was written by Alito.
Three weeks later, the ruling issued by the court confirmed it.
Alito denied the accusation.
“The allegation that my wife or I informed the Wrights of the outcome of the Hobby Lobby decision, or authorship of the Court’s opinion, is completely false. My wife and I first became acquainted with the Wrights a few years ago because of their strong support of the Supreme Court Historical Society, and have had a casual and purely social relationship ever since,” she said in a statement.
Politico published its explosive leak on May 2, resulting in a seismic cultural shift that was politically polarizing across the country. Since the Supreme Court ruling in 1973, the right to abortion has been federally recognized in the US, and this memo revealed that a nearly 50-year-old ruling was about to be overturned.
The high court released on Thursday a 23 page report in their review of the leak stating that they ‘have been unable to identify a person responsible due to a preponderance of the evidence.’
The researchers, however, also found fault with the court itself, saying that its security policies were outdated and that much of the system was based on trust, making it “too easy to remove sensitive information from the building,” an indication of the Mystery of the person may never be solved.
It also did not rule out that a copy of the opinion could simply be left lying around, “for example, by leaving it in a public space, either inside or outside the building.”
A cyber security breach was also ruled out.
“While the Court’s investigators and IT experts cannot absolutely rule out an attack, the evidence to date does not reveal any indication of improper external access.” said the court report.
When the final decision was released in late June, it was remarkably similar to the leaked draft. Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Judge Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn Roe.