Someone knows who did it.In fact, it is likely that many people know who leaked the draft opinion Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Before Justice Samuel Alito’s tour of glory. But who that person is – or who those people are – will be known only to that person (or persons) and God.from Washington post:
A report by Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley said: “It has not been possible to identify any individuals who may have disclosed the document, nor how the draft opinion ended up in Politico. No one has acknowledged that the document was publicly disclosed, and existing forensic and Nor does other evidence provide any basis for identifying any individual as the source of the document.”
“While investigators and the court’s IT experts cannot absolutely rule out the possibility of hacking, the evidence to date has shown nothing to suggest improper external access,” the report said.
Hacking would be the most innocent explanation for this whole regrettable affair. That’s bad enough, but it would exonerate everyone in the courtroom, except those who arranged for cybersecurity. But someone in that building knew they did it, or knew who did it.
The outcome calls into question just how serious the court’s investigation really is. The judges spoke up about the leaks, only to do nothing. There’s a reason the justices kept it in-house.External investigations may have actually Find out who leaked the draft opinion, and then everyone will be embarrassed, and maybe there will be some talk of resignation, which in turn could jeopardize the court’s carefully engineered six-vote conservative majority. We can’t do that, can we now?
The leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion is not unprecedented, no matter how vehement the justices’ feigned outrage.Hell, Leak of Draft Supreme Court Opinion abortion issue It’s not unprecedented, according to author James Robenhalt, who wrote in Washington post.
In January 1973, then-Supreme Court clerk Larry Hammond leaked the ruling to a Time magazine reporter. timeAn article titled “Sex: Abortion on Demand” hit newsstands hours before Justice Harry Blackmun announced his decision[…]Hammond clerked for Justice Lewis Powell and was most persuasive in convincing Powell that the “viability” standard (the amount of time a fetus can survive outside the womb) was the key to determining when a state could not regulate a woman’s reproductive rights play an important role in terms of boundaries. abortion.Powell privately persuaded Judge Harry A. Blackmun and ultimately passed the feasibility standard by a 7-2 majority, which has always been roe Then Casey v. Planned Parenthoodboth of which were reversed last year.
Hammond told an acquaintance he made at the University of Texas Law School that a ruling in the Roe case was imminent.know one time A staff reporter named David Beckwith was given “background” information and should have written it up only after the court’s opinion. However, there was a slight delay in ruling, resulting in the journal publishing an article a few hours before the January 22, 1973, opinion.
According to Robinart, Chief Justice Wallenberg was as angry about the leak as Chief Justice John Roberts was last year. Berg threatened to conduct polygraph tests on all legal clerks in the courthouse. (Apparently, Burger was as reluctant as Roberts to investigate the question of whether there was justice behind the leak. This, my dear fellows, is just not done.) Hammond sorted out the leaks and with the help of Justice Powell he also smoothed things out for Hamburg before the whole thing was lost to history roe was passed down. Robinart pointed out that Hammond ended up joining the famous leak-proof Watergate prosecution team. (What can I say? It was the 70s.)
The Burger Court (not to be confused with the Burger Court below the mall).
the leak Dobbs The draft and its aftermath could be the last crack in the irreconcilable public front put forward by the Supreme Court. It makes the court’s vaunted impartiality a farce, and the notion that it transcends or transcends sordid political realities into a total farce. Subsequent events proved that such considerations no longer mattered to the court.Author by Justice Samuel Alito Dobbs It appears that embarked on a worldwide victory lap.the unanimous opinion is on the surface There is evidence that at least five other judges fabricated sworn statements during confirmation hearings. The hollowness of the internal leak investigation suggests that the court, or at least its orchestrated conservative majority, has addressed any fallout to its reputation to its own satisfaction. No harm, no foul.
In 1980, Supreme Court justices took their public image of innocence more seriously.Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong are preparing to publish a book called brethren, which promises to be a glimpse behind the scenes at the Supreme Court, which was exempted from all public agency scrutiny in the wake of the Watergate scandal. As the historian David Garrow has written, the judges were concerned about what was in the book and who among them provided the author with information.
New documents of the justices’ private correspondence about the book dramatically add to what we know about the book brethrenImplications for the Burger Court. The new documents, contained in the personal files of the late Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., provide extensive evidence of which justices spoke to Woodward and/or Armstrong. The filings also show that the justices were deeply concerned about the book’s imminent disclosure more than two years before it was published.More substantively, Powell’s document detailed the previous brethren’ publication and after, judges and former legal clerks were busy engaging in private damage control by insisting—sometimes convincingly, sometimes not at all—that they were not among a multitude of sources.Perhaps most notably, new documents show the court’s handling of its widely criticized 1980 summary judgment Snepp v. United States Significantly influenced by the outrage that Powell and some of his fellow justices directed at “whistleblowers” during the months of his presidency snape The court is under consideration.
The book hit like a bomb in the legal world and sparked some violent public spats.Armstrong and Woodward debate New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis at New York Review of Books. Lewis commented brethren earlier New York Commercial Bank, Criticism of a passage in the book in which the author accused Judge William Brennan of tweaking his opinion in a case to please Judge Harry Blackmun, whose vote Brennan later needed in more important cases. What doesn’t come up in the controversy, but does come later, is that much of the material in the book comes from the justices themselves. Again, Gallo:
As Powell’s own documents make clear, Bob Woodward has now readily confirmed that Powell, who died in 1998, was one of the Berg Court jurists who spoke to him and/or Armstrong. Woodward and Armstrong said in 1979 that a total of five justices were actively assisting them, and Woodward himself in 1989 playboy Former Justice Potter Stewart, who died in 1985, was identified during an interview with the late J. Anthony Lukas brethrensecret abettor and leading early source. In two extensive conversations in November 2000 and February 2001, Woodward also confirmed that Harry Blackmun, who died in 1999, was one of the justices who spoke with Armstrong and him. Woodward also pointed to Powell as the unnamed judge he told Lucas in 1989 that when Woodward first called him, Lucas invited him to the courthouse for an immediate conversation before Lucas at least Spoke to Woodward for hours on three days straight. Furthermore, according to his 1989 statement to Lucas, he and Armstrong were willing to identify the justices they had spoken to after the justice’s death.
According to Garo, who is working on Justice Lewis Powell’s file, the agency remains respected enough within itself that some staffers are alarmed by revelations that some of them spoke to reporters.
Christina Whitman, a 1975-76 staffer, told Powell that a former Brennan staffer had observed that “our entire generation of staffers will be remembered with shame,” but she strongly supported Powell’s view that a certain Some chamber clerks are more likely to offer Woodward wholesale co-ops than others. “I know that during the year I was there, few of our colleagues felt the kind of close personal connection that exists in your Chamber,” Whitman wrote to Powell. According to Whitman According to Mann, some clerks tended to “see the courts in terms of trivial politics.” Among the 1975-76 staff who held this attitude, “[u]Unfortunately, they are also clerks and have time to find out what is going on with each case in each room as best they can. Woodward’s book reflects their views on the Supreme Court. ”
That no longer appears to be the case. The court is seen as explicitly and traditionally political. It has always been that way, but now the political aspects of it are clearly out in the open, which in many ways is a good thing. I generally tend to mythologize human institutions. But I also strongly disagree with institutional triumphalism, especially when those systems work against the interests of the disadvantaged and marginalized.
We are all powerless and marginalized compared to today’s Supreme Court.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently idiot americaA working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
