Alito: ‘Pretty Good Idea’ Who Leaked Abortion Draft

Justice Samuel Alito says he thinks he knows who leaked an unpublished draft of an opinion indicating the court was poised to roll back abortion rights and that the disclosure was “damaging” and created an “atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.”

“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 Wall Street Journal.

“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.”

The Supreme Court in January announced that after a lengthy investigation it had been unable to conclusively identify who leaked a draft of its blockbuster ruling overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion nationwide, though the probe revealed multiple holes in security measures at America’s top judicial body.

The leak — with the news outlet Politico publishing the draft ruling on May 2 — prompted an internal crisis at the court, ignited a political firestorm, and prompted rallies by abortion rights supporters at the courthouse, outside the homes of some of the nine justices, and around the country.

The leak represented an unprecedented violation of the court’s tradition of confidentiality in the behind-the-scenes process of making rulings after hearing oral arguments in cases.

It also created chaos for the justices.

“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Journal. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”

Police in early June 2022 arrested a man near the Maryland home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh after he said he traveled from California to kill the Supreme Court justice. The man, Nicholas John Roske, told the police that he was upset about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and about the leaked draft.

A theory by pundits on the left that the leak might have come from a conservative attempting to secure the five-justice majority and overturn the right to abortion was nonsense, said Alito.

“That’s infuriating to me,” he said. “Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”

He added, “I don’t feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection.” 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.” Deputy U.S. marshals guard the justices’ homes 24/7.