On May 2, Politico published a leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the result of an unprecedented breach at the Supreme Court. NR’s Dan McLaughlin has covered this extensively (here, here, here, here, and here). But in the nearly three months since Chief Justice John Roberts ordered an investigation of the leak — an inquiry apparently overseen by the marshal of the Supreme Court, Colonel Gail A. Curley — there has been no official word on anything related to the probe. Not only is the decision now out, but, more significantly, the Supreme Court law clerks are finished with their term and have moved on with their careers. If the leaker is among them, he or she may have breathed a big sigh of relief upon leaving the Court.
The mystery regarding the identity of the leaker remains. Yet conventional wisdom has held that the leaker was probably someone close to one of the liberal justices at the time — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, or Stephen Breyer. Dan examined the case in detail here. Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog also has offered a theory. Observing that the Politico story was written by Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, a legal-affairs reporter and national-security reporter, respectively, he speculates that the only logical reason for Ward to have a byline on the SCOTUS story is that the leaker went to him. Dan has pointed out that before working for Politico, Ward was a reporter at Vox, a far-left news outlet, perhaps more reason to be comfortable in the assumption that the leak indeed came from the left.
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