Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

You are here: Home / Politics / Activist Judges! / Case Closed: It Was Alito

Case Closed: It Was Alito

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WaPo reports the inquiry into the SCOTUS leak of the Dobbs opinion draft has reached an unsatisfactory conclusion:

The Supreme Court disclosed Thursday that it cannot identify the person who leaked a draft of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade.

A report from Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley said “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. 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.”

There’s strong evidence that Alito leaked the Hobby Lobby opinion to wealthy conservative donors weeks before the official ruling. [NYT gift link] Ask yourself who benefited from the Dobbs leak. Case closed.

Open thread.

 

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  3. 3.

    jonas

    Shit, that Alito is a piece of work, isn’t he? GW Bush was a really shitty president, whose list of shitty achievements is long, but at the top of that list are 1. Lying about WMDs and 2. Samuel Alito.

  8. 8.

    robmassing

    “cannot identify” doesn’t mean they don’t know. They just are prevented from identifying because it would be too embarrassing to Sammy and the other 5 Christo-fascists.

  13. 13.

    tobie

    Hmm…is John Roberts covering for his ideological compadres again? I know he didn’t side with the conservative wing in this instance but he’s still far closer to them than Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor.

  16. 16.

    Old School

    @Baud:

    It’s not clear that any of the justices were even interviewed.

    That’s what I wondered.

    She also noted that her team of attorneys and federal investigators “conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, all of whom denied disclosing the opinion.”

  19. 19.

    Feathers

    This is reason enough to expand the court.

    We don’t have enough circuit courts anyway. The whole Federal court system needs an overhaul.

  20. 20.

    SpaceUnit

    I’ve never really understood this story.  Were the conservative justices hoping to keep their ruling hush until after the 2022 elections?

  21. 21.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Alito’s actions make me suspect it was him, but if we are going by who benefits most, at least idealogically, isn’t ACB the most virulent Forced Birther on SCOTUS?

  22. 22.

    mrmoshpotato

    @jonas: I gotta argue that Shrub’s #1 achievement was stealing the presidency itself.

    Or whoever orchestrated that.  Looking at you, Darth Cheney!

  24. 24.

    laura

    This salty bitch wishes every bad thing that can and should befall a Sam Alito and when he kicks I’m going to dance a drunken jig in celebration.  Fuck that white male christofascist shite-bag and all who’ve assisted him in his devious political decision making including Janus and Dobbs.

  25. 25.

    Baud

    The only solution left is to treat Dobbs as a nullity and keep Roe in place until all of the justices who were on the Court during Dobbs are replaced.

  28. 28.

    laura

    @SpaceUnit: the story is that Alito leaked the draft decision to prevent John Roberts and any others from peeling off and joining the minority of liberal justices and then he polished some wood.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    @SpaceUnit

    Not possible, as far as I discern (IANAL). Rulings for the session are released by the end of June. New session convenes in October. Cannot put a hold on a completed ruling in order to carry it over from one session to the next.

  32. 32.

    Mr. Longform

    It seems clear it was a justice because they would have thrown a small fry under the bus gladly; and if it was a justice, then the chances of it being Alito and/or Thomas(es) is (scientifically) a gazillion percent.

  33. 33.

    mvr

    @Mr. Longform: Yeah, I’m not sure this increases my credence in its having been a justice (it was already high), but the fact that their language is compatible with not having questioned any justices does somewhat support that theory.

  35. 35.

    Nora

    @Suzanne: Because the last time a Supreme Court Justice was impeached was in 1804, and the Senate acquitted him.  The whole system is set up to make it really difficult to get rid of a Supreme Court Justice, if that justice doesn’t have the integrity to resign in the face of obvious improprieties (Abe Fortas, for instance).

  37. 37.

    ETtheLibrarian

    Them doing nothing when Roberts made such a big deal out of it, always was going to mean it was a Justice (or their spouse). They would have totally hung to dry and made an example of anyone else.

  38. 38.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    In the car about half an hour ago, an MSNBC reporter rather breathlessly informed me that they had even brought in Michael Chertoff! To which my brain responded, “Oh, so the fix was in”, which is not I think what the reporter meant to convey

  39. 39.

    Baud

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Recently, this Court consulted Michael Chertoff.
    Mr. Chertoff is a former Secretary of Homeland Security,
    Judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,
    Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U. S. Department of Justice, and U. S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. We invited Mr. Chertoff to assess the Marshal’s investigation. He has advised that the Marshal “undertook a thorough investigation” and, “[a]t this time, I cannot identify any additional useful investigative measures” not already undertaken or underway. Statement from Michael Chertoff 1 (2023). A copy of Mr. Chertoff’s statement is attached

     
    Apparently, Mr. Chertoff is now with The Chertoff Group.

  42. 42.

    randy khan)

    Alito would be my guess, too, but there easily could be a Thomas connection instead.  Even just Justice Thomas taking a paper copy home and his wife making a copy that she handed to someone.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if one of them gave a copy to a friend (to the extent they have actual friends and not merely functional relationships), thinking it would be kept private.  Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if copies were circulating among the anti-abortion folks for a while before it became public.

  47. 47.

    Redshift

    Yep, that was my immediate reaction to the headline – “not possible to determine” means “it wasn’t someone Roberts wants to publicly blame for it.”

    Either Roberts already knew and the investigation was a sham, or he didn’t know exactly who but he made sure s bad result wouldn’t come out. And the Court’s tattered reputation takes another hit.

    Anyone want to guess how long until Alito’s next harrumphing about how inappropriate it is to doubt the high priesthood in response to a failed investigation that we’re not allowed to see the details of?

  49. 49.

    David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Chertoff was head of DHS during Katrina.

     

    “That ‘perfect storm’ of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight,” Chertoff said.

    He called the disaster “breathtaking in its surprise.”

     
    EVERY news channel said it would be category 5 and he was surprised.

    Surprise!

    Typical Dubya – only the best people

  51. 51.

    pajaro

    @Redshift:

    My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that Roberts did this because he felt he had to, given the bruhaha that followed the leak.  I also assume he would have been fine to have discovered that some custodian did it.  But there was no way he was going to try and pin it on a member of the Court, and it would have shredded the norms that exist in that building to have put the Justices under oath.

    there was a Wall Street Journal article the weekend  before the leak that stated that it was likely there were enough votes to overturn Roe, but that there were efforts to peel off some of the conservative Republicans.  To put it mildly, the Journal does not cultivate many sources on the left.  And the value of a leaker putting the article out there would be to try and nail in the votes that were there to overturn.  Add to it that it was Sam Alito who did the draft, and that he has previously been willing to leak information, and my money is on him, with the Thomas family a second pick.

  52. 52.

    David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    What a president should do during a disaster:

    LBJ Did What Came Naturally. On September 9, 1965, category 4 Hurricane Betsy stormed ashore at New Orleans, Louisiana, killing more than 75 people, flooding much of the city, and plunging the city into chaos.

    ***

    Night fell as Johnson toured the city. At one point he came upon a shelter where a large number of blacks had taken refuge. The people apparently did not know that the man visiting them was the President of the United States. Johnson grabbed a flashlight, illuminated his face, and announced into a megaphone, “My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I am your president. I am here to make sure you have the help you need!”

  53. 53.

    Ken B

    Definitely Alito.

    If Ginny had done it, she’d have bragged about in some right wing shindig on an open mic.

    If Clarence had done it, Ginny would have bragged about it on an open mic.

  55. 55.

    lashonharangue

    From the article

    But neither Alito nor the court’s other eight justices were eyed in the investigation, according to an official report.

  58. 58.

    Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog

    @Baud:

    Apparently, Mr. Chertoff is now with The Chertoff Group.

     
    One would have been more’n enough; there’s more?

  59. 59.

    J R in WV

    @UncleEbeneezer: ​

    isn’t ACB the most virulent Forced Birther on SCOTUS?

    While this is true, I doubt that Amy Forced Birth has the courage to release a draft opinion like this, being newly appointed, and subject to her husband’s will as she is. On the other hand, maybe HE told her to drop it off to Politico? Then she would have no choice…

  60. 60.

    J R in WV

    @pajaro:

    it would have shredded the norms that exist in that building to have put the Justices under oath.

    You appear to believe that these conservative “justices” would hesitate to lie to investigators after lying bold faced to Senatorial questioners in their confirmation hearings. I doubt that — all of them would have lied without any hesitation. They are all morality free.

  61. 61.

    prostratedragon

    The thought police strike on the same day as Rep. Mfume nominates Elijah Cummings for a stamp:

    Today I noticed that the House website has been scrubbed of the report Elijah Cummings compiled detailing Mike Flynn and Donald Trump's attempts to sell our nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia bypassing our treaties and Congress… good thing I saved a copy! Read this and share!— RyanP is just waiting for justice ⏳️⚖️ (@PerspectiveRoll) January 19, 2023

    Of course, this is an attempt to do something even worse than policing mere thought.

  62. 62.

    Mike in Pasadena

    @jonas: Let us remember condoning torture, sorry, enhanced interrogation. In Dickless Cheney’s words, “We had to go to the dark side.”

  63. 63.

    dimmsdale

    Apparently Alito has claimed the leak opened up the right-wing justices to assassination attempts. Unless there were ACTUAL attempts, I find this odd and not entirely credible—lefties attempting to assassinate the Holy 6? Really?

    Then the cynical me remembered the acronym DARVO–Deny the Assault, then Reverse Victim and Offender. By which, Alito might be trying to tell us that the REAL victims here are not America’s women, who’ve lost a 50-plus year constitutional right, but Sammy Alito and the rest of the Holy 6 who are threatened by the fantasy of left-wing assassination?

    But that’s so cynical I almost didn’t type it out. Almost.

  66. 66.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Frankensteinbeck: Not really? If I remember right, some guy brought a gun and went to Kavanaugh’s house with the potential aim of killing him, but turned himself into police.

    The gun was not loaded.

  67. 67.

    KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))

    @Frankensteinbeck: Someone Came to a street block away from Kavanaugh’s house with a gun, changed his mind, and called the police on himself. It was, if anything, a pretty inept “assassination attempt.”

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