WASHINGTON (AP) — Eight months, 126 formal interviews and a 23-page report later, the Supreme Court said it has failed to discover who leaked a draft of the court’s opinion overturning abortion rights.
The report released by the court Thursday is the apparent culmination of an investigation ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts a day after the May leak of the draft to Politico. At the time, Roberts called the leak an “egregious breach of trust.”
The leak touched off protests at justices’ homes and raised concerns about their security. And it came more than a month before the final opinion by Justice Samuel Alito was released and the court formally announced it was overturning Roe v. Wade.
The report also offers a window into the court’s internal processes. It acknowledges that the coronavirus pandemic, which expanded the ability of people to work from home, “as well as gaps in the Court’s security policies, created an environment where it was too easy to remove sensitive information from the building and the Court’s IT networks.” The report recommends changes so that it’s harder for a leak to happen in the future.
Some questions and answers about the report:
IF THE INVESTIGATION DIDN’T FIND THE LEAKER, WHAT DID IT FIND?
Lax security and loose lips. Too many people have access to certain sensitive information, the report concluded, and the court’s policies on information security are outdated. The court can’t actively track, for example, who is handling and accessing highly sensitive information.
Beyond that, some people interviewed by federal investigators called in to help with the probe acknowledged they didn’t scrupulously follow the court’s confidentiality policies. In some cases, employees acknowledged “telling their spouses about the draft opinion or vote count,” the report said.
The leak doesn’t appear to have been the result of a hack, but the report said investigators could not rule out that the opinion was inadvertently disclosed, “for example, by being left in a public space either inside or outside the building.”
HOW THOROUGH WAS THE INVESTIGATION?
Investigators conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees. They looked into connections between employees and reporters, including those at Politico. They looked at call logs of personal phones. They looked at printer logs. They even did a fingerprint analysis of “an item relevant to the investigation.”
Every person who was interviewed signed a sworn statement that they were not the source of the leak. Lying about that could violate a federal law on false statements.
After all that, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, himself a onetime federal judge, was asked to assess the investigation. Chertoff described the investigation as “thorough” in a statement issued through the court.
One open question: It was unclear from the report whether the court’s nine justices also sat for interviews.
WHAT WILL CHANGE AS A RESULT?
