The release of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion about Roe v. Wade was not only unusual, but it also sparked protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices. An inquiry was conducted to determine the cause of the leak, but no one was held guilty when the investigation completed.
Stuart Varney, a Fox News commentator, questioned the Supreme Court’s credibility this month after a probe into who may have leaked a draft judgment in the historic Dobbs v. Jackson case in May yielded no probable identities.
During a segment on “Varney & Co,” he expressed displeasure and surprise that the Supreme Court inquiry into the leaker of the Roe v. Wade draft judgment failed to identify a suspect after questioning over seventy-five individuals over the course of many months. In May 2022, Politico published a leaked draft ruling for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, prompting widespread demonstrations and death threats against conservative justices.
According to Varney, the Supreme Court conducted interviews with roughly one hundred employees, but not with the justices themselves. He said that it appeared peculiar that no justices had been interviewed in an inquiry of this scale.
Fox’s Stuart Varney drops big news on the Supreme Court “leaker”investigation: pic.twitter.com/VTV1AIl5z0
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In the U.S. Supreme Court’s inquiry into who may have leaked a draft ruling in the momentous Dobbs v. Jackson case last May, new material has emerged. CNN reported that the court’s security has been described as inadequate.
CNN stated that the Supreme Court’s document security consisted of so-called “burn bags” that were left unattended in corridors. “Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month,” CNN Supreme Court Reporter Ariane de Vogue said.
“New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of years long lax internal procedures that could have endangered security, led to the leak, and hindered an investigation into the culprit,” the reporter said.
“Supreme Court employees also used printers that didn’t produce logs – or were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking – and ‘burn bags’ meant to ensure the safe destruction of materials were left open and unattended in hallways,” she said. “This has been going on for years,” a former employee said. Another said that the justices were “not masters of information security protocol.”
This month, the Supreme Court issued its investigation on who may have leaked the draft ruling that reversed the precedent set in Roe v. Wade about a “constitutional right” to abortion and returned the matter to the states. Unknown was the source of the leak to Politico. Conservative Brief noted that no interviews with the justices were conducted for the article.
The investigation by the marshal of the Supreme Court included a forensic investigation of laptops and phones but found “no relevant information from these devices.” The marshal’s office determined that 82 employees had access to the opinion and interviewed 97 employees, all of whom denied leaking the opinion.
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
Several have pointed out that it seems odd that none of the justices appear to have been interviewed in the investigation:
It is no exaggeration to say that the integrity of judicial proceedings depends on the inviolability of internal deliberations. CONTINUE READING…