Supreme Court Says It Hasn’t Identified Person Who Leaked Draft Abortion Opinion

The leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, published by Politico in May, was an extraordinary breach of the court’s usual secrecy.

The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that an internal investigation had failed to identify who leaked a draft of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had established a constitutional right to abortion.

In a 20-page report, the court’s marshal, Gail A. Curley, who oversaw the inquiry, said that investigators had conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, all of whom had denied being the source of the leak. But several employees acknowledged that they had told their spouses or partners about the draft opinion and the vote count in violation of the court’s confidentiality rules, the report said.

The investigation did not determine that any of those discussions led to a copy of the draft opinion becoming public, however. Investigators also found no forensic evidence of who may have leaked the opinion in examining the court’s “computer devices, networks, printers and available call and text logs,” the report said.

The report said the marshal’s office would investigate any new information that arose, and it made several recommendations for improving security practices. But it conveyed the distinct impression that given the select measures in place and the number of people with access to the opinion, the mystery of who leaked the opinion might never be solved.

It added: “The pandemic and resulting expansion of the ability 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 I.T. networks, increasing the risk of both deliberate and accidental disclosures of court-sensitive information.”

Investigators determined that in addition to the nine justices, 82 law clerks and permanent employees of the court had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion, the report said.

“It is unlikely that the public disclosure was caused by a hack of the court’s I.T. systems,” the report said. “The court’s I.T. department did not find any indications of a hack but continues to monitor and audit the system for any indicators of compromise or intrusion into the court’s I.T. infrastructure.”

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