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Supreme Court Says It Hasn’t Found Who Leaked Opinion Overturning Roe


WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that an internal investigation failed to identify the person who leaked the draft Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision established the constitutional right to abortion.

In a 20-page report, the court’s sheriff, Colonel Gail A. Curley, who oversaw the investigation, said that investigators conducted 126 formal interviews with 97 employees, all of which Both denied being the source of the leak. But some employees have admitted that they told their spouses or partners about the draft opinion and that the counting of votes violated court confidentiality rules, the report said.

The investigation did not determine whether any of those discussions resulted in a copy of the draft opinion being made public. The report said investigators also found no forensic evidence by examining “available court computer equipment, networks, printers, and call and text messages.”

The leak, announced in May by Politico, is an unusual breach of the court’s usual secrecy. In a statement shortly after, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. confirmed the veracity of the draft opinion but said it did not represent the final version and announced the opening of an investigation.

The report said the sheriff’s office will investigate any new information that arises and make several recommendations to improve security practices. But it conveys the clear impression that there are enough holes in the system that the mystery of who leaked the opinions may never be solved.

“If a court employee discloses a draft opinion, he or she is in flagrant violation of a system that is fundamentally built on trust with limited safeguards to regulate and restrict access to access to highly sensitive information,” the report said.

It added: “The pandemic and resulting expansion of the ability to work from home, as well as loopholes in court privacy policies, have created an all-too-easy environment for removing sensitive information from court buildings and IT networks, increasing the risk of both willful and inadvertent disclosure of sensitive court information.”

The report said investigators collected all court-issued laptops and cell phones from people who had access to the draft opinion but “found no relevant information.” from these devices”.

It also said that it found nothing relevant in call logs, messages and payment records from individual cell phones; Although the report says that “all employees required to do so voluntarily provide” such logs, it does not indicate the extent of such requests.

In particular, when discussing the scrutiny of court “employees,” the report did not say whether investigators looked into the personal communications of the judges themselves or the wives or their husbands or not.

But the report also says that investigators do not believe outside hackers were responsible for extracting a copy of the comments.

The leak caused a rift between the judges. Justice Clarence Thomas likened it to an infidelity. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the opinion’s author, said the disclosure endangered the lives of most of the judges.

When the court issued Its decision overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the draft opinion was essentially unchanged.

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