Before I get into this, let me say: Sorry for the dearth of posts!
Sometimes it feels like I’m in some kind of acceleration chamber. My last post, made some 15 days ago shocked me. I’ve been busy, but surely I haven’t been away from here that long, have I?!
Welp, it appears I have and truthfully I find it hard to account for the lost time, even as busy as I have been.
Regardless… onwards!
So yesterday the people investigating the Supreme Court’s Alito opinion piece on Dobbs, the ruling which did away with Roe v Wade and which, IMHO, is going to have pretty severe repercussions for the next few election cycles, issued their report and they said…
…they couldn’t find who leaked Alito’s opinion. An article presented on CNN.com does a pretty good job explaining what this report stated:
Supreme Court issues report on Dobbs leak but says it hasn’t identified the leaker | CNN Politics
The bottom line from the report is that there were some 90 people interviewed and it seems like the Supreme Court’s records are kept in a rather… sloppy way and, bottom line, they couldn’t determine whodunnit.
However…
This article, also presented on CNN.com and written by Joan Biskupic, goes into how…
Supreme Court embarrassed by the opinion leak is embarrassed again | CNN Politics
The author notes that the investigation did not interview any of the Justices themselves or their spouses, a rather odd thing to do if one is bent on getting to the bottom of such things.
There are many who feel, based on examining the report and what’s gone on in this investigation, that perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts ultimately didn’t really want to know who leaked Alito’s draft.
One can speculate as to the why, but it seems somewhat obvious: It very well could have been someone quite high up, up to and including Justice Alito, Justice Thomas, or perhaps Thomas’ wife, who has -shall we be delicate here?- a seemingly very strong political agenda of her own.
I agree with the ultimate opinion of Ms. Biskupic’s article, though: By issuing this “non finding” the Supreme Court does itself no favors. If the original leak was such a huge embarrassment and a stunning breach of decorum and therefore an investigation into the source of this leak was something that had to be done…
…why hamper the investigation from the very beginning?
Mind you, I feel Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley, who conducted the investigation, likely did as well as could be done but the reality is that there are other Justice agencies it seems could have done a more thorough job… and are built to take on such cases.
And as was noted in Ms. Biskupic’s article, the final report is also damning in that it suggests the Court’s internal security is anything but, and further leaks are certainly possible.
Again: One can’t help but speculate as to whether this whole investigation might have been more of a PR move rather than a serious attempt at getting to “the truth” of the leak. One can’t help also speculate that maybe for Chief Justice Roberts, in a Supreme Court which seems to be having its share of problems, felt the need to do something for the purpose of looking like he was doing something… but may have ultimately hoped for this result.
The boat’s rocking enough without the revelation that perhaps a Supreme Court Justice -or a close confidant/spouse of one- is a leaker.
POSTSCRIPT:
Today a few more interesting opinion pieces have been published and are worth giving a read.
First up is Aredba Shah’s article from Salon.com:
This article points out the fact that bothers many regarding this investigation: It seems like from the onset it was given certain parameters, including not talking to or interviewing any of the Justices or their spouses, which seems wrong considering the supposed “egregious” nature of this lead.
There is at least one really fascinating tweet referred to in this article and its by Elie Mystal, The Nation’s legal analyst:
I told everybody, from the very beginning, that if the Dobbs leaker turned out to be a Republican, the Supreme Court would somehow never find who did it. Welp, the report’s out and, what do you know, they don’t know who did it.
Yikes.
A second interesting article is by Katherine Fung and presented at Newsweek…
Supreme Court Report Sparks Suspicions About Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito (newsweek.com)
What I’m noticing from many of these articles is that the initial line of suspicion, that perhaps a more liberal minded clerk had possibly leaked the Alito Dobbs decision, seems to be less and less likely.
Sadly, that means that the Supreme Court and its conservative majority is looking increasingly like it has decided to “move on” from this because, let’s be clear here: They kinda know it was either a conservative clerk or someone much higher up responsible for this but simply don’t want to let things get messier than they are.
As I said before…
Yikes.