January 19, 2023
Surprise! The Supreme Court "Investigation" That Was Designed to Fail to Identify the Dobbs Leaker Has Successfully Failed to Identify the Dobbs Leaker
Failure Theater, Supreme Court Edition:
The Supreme Court said Thursday it cannot identify who [leaked] the draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org., the landmark case that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.Bullshit.
The Supreme Court marshal investigating the leak "has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence," the court said.
...
"After examining the Court's computer devices, networks, printers, and available call and text logs, investigators have found no forensic evidence indicating who disclosed the draft opinion," the marshal's office wrote in a report on the probe.
Investigators interviewed 97 employees, all of whom denied sending the draft opinion to Politico, also according to the marshal's office.
All of the interviewed employees signed an affidavit under the penalty of perjury stating that they did not share the draft opinion, officials said. If investigators later find they lied, then the personnel would be subject to prosecution.
...
The report found that the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed more work from home, along with gaps in security policies, increased the risk of inappropriate disclosures of court information.
"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. Investigators also cannot eliminate the possibility that the draft opinion was inadvertently or negligently disclosed -- for example, by being left in a public space either inside or outside the building," the report stated.
Roberts decided to leave the investigation to the Marshall of the Supreme Court, a position responsible for mere security over the physical premises of the court. It's not a law enforcement position.
He chose to give this job to a non-investigator instead of bringing in the FBI.
He also apparently agreed to make this "investigation" as non-intrusive as possible -- not securing warrants to look at people's personal call logs, for example.
This leads to certain questions.
Like: Who is it who is most invested in not finding the guilty party?
Well, the guilty party himself, would be one answer.
It's an interesting answer. I'm not saying it's correct. But there is a logic to it. If Roberts is the leaker, obviously he would want the least intrusive, least serious investigation possible.
Which is exactly what Roberts actually dialed up here.
We're always discussing the leftwing justices as having a motive to leak the decision -- well, Roberts is a left-ish justice, and he too was very opposed to overturning Roe.
We also know that he's previously played games with his court decisions to "preserve the appearance of political independence of the Court." He flipped his vote from striking down Obamacare to upholding Obamacare -- contriving a bizarre argument that no one, including Barack Obama's lawyers, argued, that "it's a tax" -- in order to "maintain the standing of the Supreme Court in the eyes of the [liberal] public," all because the leftwing media spent a month and a half battering him personally with messaging that they wouldn't like him or his court any more if he struck down Obamacare.
So keeping the Court's "authority" intact among the liberal professional class has been of paramount concern to Roberts. Nothing threatens that authority more than the Court's overturning of Roe.
And Roberts was no longer in a position to stop the decision just by flipping his vote. No, something more than that was needed. He might have to work outside of the court to direct pressure within it...
Did that happen? I don't know, but I do find it very, very interesting that Roberts delivered up an "investigation" that was widely predicted to be ineffectual and, true to that prediction, proved ineffectual.
Almost as if that was what the guilty party always had in mind from the start.
