Supreme Court probe fails to find who leaked abortion ruling

An investigation into the leak of a bombshell Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion — weeks before it was officially released — failed to identify the culprit, the court said Thursday.

The inability to find the source of the leak was yet another embarrassing development for the Supreme Court, which on Thursday called the premature disclosure of the opinion “one of the worst betrayals of trust in its history” and “a grave assault on the judicial process.”

Investigators had interviewed nearly 100 Supreme Court employees in the probe, 82 of whom had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito.

Politico in May reported that it had obtained a leaked copy of that opinion indicating that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn its five-decade-old ruling in the case known as Roe v. Wade, which found there was a constitutional right to abortion.

In June, just as the leak report suggested, the Supreme Court in a majority opinion penned by Alito said there was no federal right to abortion. The opinion came in a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which challenged Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law.

On the heels of the leak, Chief Justice John Roberts directed Gail Curley, the marshal of the Supreme Court, to investigate who released the draft opinion to Politico.

“In following up on all available leads … the Marshal’s team performed additional forensic analysis and conducted multiple follow-up interviews of certain employees,” the Supreme Court said in a statement Thursday, which was accompanied by the release of Curley’s report on the probe.

“But the team has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence,” the court said.

Curley’s report suggests that leaker almost certainly was a member of the court staff, noting that “the investigation has determined that it is highly unlikely that the Court’s information technology (IT) systems were improperly accessed by a person outside the court.”

In her report, Curley said that investigators had examined the court’s computer devices, networks, printers, “and available call and text logs.”

But “investigators have found no forensic evidence indicating who disclosed the draft opinion,” Curley wrote.

She also noted that her team of attorneys and federal investigators “conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, all of whom denied disclosing the opinion.”

“Despite these efforts, investigators have been unable to determine at this time, using a preponderance of the evidence standard, the identity of the person(s) who disclosed the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. or how the draft opinion was provided to Politico,” Curley wrote.

The Supreme Court, in its statement, said that after the investigation was completed, the court invited Michael Chertoff, a former federal judge and prosecutor, and one-time secretary of Homeland Security, to assess Curley’s probe.

Chertoff “has advised that the Marshal ‘undertook a thorough investigation’ and, ‘[a]t this time, I cannot identify any additional useful investigative measures’ not already undertaken or underway,” the court said.

The statement said that investigators will continue to review some electronic data that has been collected for the probe, “and a few other inquiries remain pending.”

Curley, in her report, said, “To the extent that additional investigation yields new evidence or leads, the investigators will pursue them.”

Curley also wrote that the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting expansion of court staff’s ability to work from home, “as well as gaps in the Court’s security policies, created an environment where it was too easy to remove sensitive information from the building and the Court’s IT networks.”

That, in turn, increased “the risk of both deliberate and accidental disclosures of Court sensitive information

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