US Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley, who heads the high court’s security service, has revealed it was impossible to determine with certainty who handed US media a copy of the draft majority opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson, sparking nationwide protests.
“It is not possible to determine the identity of any individual who may have disclosed the document or how the draft opinion ended up with Politico,” the marshal said in a statement. “No one confessed to publicly disclosing the document and none of the available forensic and other evidence provided a basis for identifying any individual as the source of the document.”
“After months of diligent analysis of forensic evidence and interviews of almost 100 employees, the Marshal’s team determined that no further investigation was warranted with respect to many of the ‘82 employees [who] had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion,’” the report notes.
It was further outlined that “while investigators and the Court’s IT experts cannot absolutely rule out a hack, the evidence to date reveals no suggestion of improper outside access.”
The announcement comes just days after the investigation team said it had narrowed its list of suspects to a “small number” of people.
The draft decision, authored by Associate Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the court’s five other conservative justices, dismissed the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade as lacking a legal basis, overturning the decision. The 1973 ruling legalized abortion nationwide and established a legal framework for its regulation by state and federal governments.
While the move was anticipated, the news nonetheless sparked massive protests outside the courthouse in Washington, DC, and across the country. After the protests began to target the homes of conservative court justices, Alito denounced the leak for making justices “targets for assassination.”
The court soon confirmed the draft’s authenticity and launched the present investigation to find the source of the leak. Conservative commentators like US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called for the leaker to be prosecuted and for justices’ security to be increased.
Despite the leak and the demonstrations, the high court published the decision, essentially unaltered, in late June, triggering new protests and a new stage of struggle as anti-abortion forces rushed to implement now-legal bans in numerous states and pro-abortion activists attempted to rally supporters to stop them and to push abortion rights defense bills in more liberal states.