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Eight months, 126 formal interviews and a 23-page report later, the Supreme Court said it has failed to discover who leaked a draft of the court’s opinion overturning abortion rights.
The report released by the court Thursday is the apparent culmination of an investigation ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts a day after the May leak of the draft to Politico. At the time, Roberts called the leak an “egregious breach of trust.”
The leak touched off protests at justices’ homes and raised concerns about their security. And it came more than a month before the final opinion by Justice Samuel Alito was released and the court formally announced it was overturning Roe v. Wade.
The report also offers a window into the court’s internal processes. It acknowledges that the coronavirus pandemic, which expanded the ability of people 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.” The report recommends changes so that it’s harder for a leak to happen in the future.
Some questions and answers about the report:If the investigation didn’t find the leaker, what did it find?
Lax security and loose lips. Too many people have access to certain sensitive information, the report concluded, and the court’s policies on information security are outdated. The court can’t actively track, for example, who is handling and accessing highly sensitive information.
Beyond that, some people interviewed by federal investigators called in to help with the probe acknowledged they didn’t scrupulously follow the court’s confidentiality policies.
