Investigators were unable to identify the culprit behind the historical leakage from last year Supreme Court, Opinion Project, cancellation of abortion rights Nationally, said the marshal on Thursday, although hunting continues.
A report From the first office of the American court of Marshal, published Thursday, explained how they had conducted 126 interviews with 97 employees and computer and printer files to try to determine who disclosed the opinion project of judge Samuel Alito in Dobbs c. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Politico. Nouvelle site published the document May 3, 2023 – more than six weeks before the court published its final opinion canceled Roe c. Wade.
“The flight was not a simple attempted protest. It was a serious attack on the judicial process,” read a Declaration of the Supreme Court Thursday published in parallel with the report. The judges underlined the need for secret during their deliberations, calling the flight of “extraordinary betrayal of confidence”.
Immediately after the flight, chief judge John Roberts ordered the Marshal’s office, What is normally responsible for providing security to judges, to investigate the issue, but the team finally came empty -handed.
“At present, based on a preponderance of the standard of evidence, it is not possible to determine the identity of a person who may have disclosed the document or how the opinion project found himself with Politico,” concluded the report. “No one has admitted to having publicly disclosed the document and none of the forensic and other evidence available has provided a base to identify any individual as a source of the document.”
Investigators said their digital analysis had believed that it was unlikely that court systems were hacked by an external actor. “Investigators cannot eliminate the possibility that the opinion project has been inadvertently disclosed or negligence – for example, being left in a public space inside or outside the building,” added the report.
In addition to the nine tribunal judges, 82 employees had access to electronic or paper copies of the opinion project, according to the Marshal.
The Marshal said that “the investigation focused on court staff – temporary (clerics) and permanent employees – who had or had access to the opinion project.” Court representatives did not immediately answer a question about the question of whether the judges themselves were one of these “permanent employees” or were excluded from the investigation.
Thursday’s report said that the Marshal’s team “determined that no additional investigation was justified with regard to many of these 82 employees.
Any employee who was invited to hand over his private mobile phones for exams did so that the investigators examine the call newspapers, SMS and billing statements, but there was no incrimination.
Tribunal employees were also invited to sign affidavits swearing under penalty of perjury that they were not behind the flight. “Some of the people interviewed admitted to having informed their spouses of the opinion project or the number of votes, they therefore annotated their affidavits for this purpose,” said the report.
Certain electronic data must still be examined, and certain survey lines remain open, but for the moment, the court seems more concerned to try to prevent such leaks from reproducing.
To do this, Marshal has made a series of security reform proposals, in particular by seriously limiting the number of employees who have access to sensitive documents.
In November, The New York Times reported This former anti-abortion chief, Reverend Rob Schenck Written to the chief judge To say that he had been informed of the favorable result of a 2014 case on contraception and religious rights before his announcement.
This case also involved a majority opinion written by judge Alito, which the reported Times had dinner with friends of Schenck, one then sent him an email a day later to say that she had learned “interesting news” and to call him – not send an email – to find out more.
Alito denied having disclosed the opinion of 2014.
