Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito revealed Friday that he has a “pretty good idea” of the identity of the person behind the leak of his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year.
Alito, who wrote for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, told the Wall Street Journal that the unprecedented breach “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust” inside the nation’s highest court.
“We worked through it, and last year we got our work done. This year, I think, we’re trying to get back to normal operations as much as we can … But it was damaging,” Alito said of the unauthorized release of his draft opinion to Politico in May 2022, more than a month before the final Dobbs ruling came down.
An investigation into the leak was ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts, but the marshal of the Supreme Court, Gail Curley, said in January she had been unable to definitively determine the leaker’s identity.
“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” Alito told the Journal.
Despite Curley’s failure to finger the culprit, the justice told the Journal that she “did a good job with the resources that were available to her.”
The 73-year-old conservative justice also said that he is certain of the motive behind the leak.
“It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside — as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court,” said Alito, arguing that justices thought to support overturning Roe were “really targets of assassination.”
“It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us,” Alito said of threats that emerged after the leak, including the arrest of an armed man outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh — days before the ruling was announced.
Alito also recalled being forced to speak to law students at George Mason University in northern Virginia via videoconference about 10 days after the leak following the intervention of local police.
“Our [Supreme Court] police conferred with the George Mason Police and the Arlington Police and they said, ‘It’s not a good idea. He shouldn’t come here … The security problems will be severe.’ So I ended up giving the speech by Zoom,” he said. “Still, there were so many protesters and they were so loud that you could hear them.”
Today, according to Alito, he feels safe in large part because he is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.”
The justice dismissed an alternative theory that a conservative trying to lock five justices in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade may have been responsible for the leak, calling the idea “infuriating.”
“Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself?” he asked.
“Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”