The Supreme Court since last year has tried to identify who leaked a ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, which established a right to abortion.
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 majority opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito. But neither Alito nor the court’s other eight justices were eyed in the probe, according to an official report on the investigation.
Politico on May 2 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. That draft had first been circulated among the court’s justices and clerks on Feb. 10.
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 Thursday in a statement, which was accompanied by the release of Curley’s report on the probe.
