Trump administration doubles down on investigation into 2022 Supreme Court leak

President Donald Trump’s administration is conducting a criminal investigation to identify the individual who leaked the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, according to a recent report.

The New York Times reported Nov. 5 that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro is leading the investigation, which has already sent federal grand jury subpoenas seeking testimony from those involved with the Supreme Court case at the time.

In 2022, as the Supreme Court was preparing to release its much-anticipated ruling in the Dobbs case, which centered on Roe v. Wade and abortion, Politico published a draft of the opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. The draft confirmed that five of the court’s nine justices had determined to reverse Roe’s holding that the Constitution established federal protections for abortion.

Within weeks, a gunman was apprehended outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the five who voted to reverse Roe. The gunman, California resident Nicholas Roske, admitted that he planned to assassinate Kavanaugh before moving on to attempt to assassinate the other justices who agreed with Alito’s draft opinion.

The Supreme Court conducted its own investigation into the leak, which concluded in 2023 without identifying a leaker. In an unsigned statement, the court characterized the leak as “one of the worst breaches of trust in its history” and “a grave assault on the judicial process.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that the integrity of judicial proceedings depends on the inviolability of internal deliberations,” the court’s statement continued. “For these reasons and others, the Court immediately and unanimously agreed that the extraordinary betrayal of trust that took place last May warranted a thorough investigation.”

The internal investigation, led by Marshal of the Supreme Court Gail A. Curley, scrutinized 82 employees who “had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion,” but was ultimately “unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence.” The justices themselves, however, were not formally investigated.

Alito said in a 2023 interview that the leak’s effect on the court was “damaging,” emphasizing heightened security concerns and the justices’ own fears for their lives. He said that the leak was “part of an effort to prevent” the justices who had decided to reverse Roe from doing so through a “campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

The author of the Dobbs opinion said that he had a “pretty good idea who is responsible” for the leak, but he agreed with the internal investigation that there was not enough clear evidence available to publicly accuse the individual.

Since the Dobbs draft opinion was leaked, threats against Supreme Court justices have only increased. Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appeared before Congress earlier this year to request more funding for security, testifying regarding the threats that they and their colleagues faced on a regular basis, as Zeale News reported at the time. Barrett shared that she has been asked to wear a bulletproof vest by her security detail.

“I carried it into my house, put it into my bedroom, dropped it down on a table, turned around, and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and he wanted to know what it was and why I had it,” she recounted. “I didn’t know how to respond because, maybe I lack imagination, but I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was, and why I had to wear one.”

Shortly after returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump made identifying the Dobbs leaker a priority for his Justice Department. Then-White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the Trump administration has “an interest in finding leakers,” according to the Daily Wire.

The President himself reiterated the point in July 2026, laying particular emphasis on finding the Dobbs draft leaker.

“That person should be found, and the way you find them is to tell the journalist — if it’s something having to do with national security — you tell the journalist, ‘Who is it?’ And we have a long way to go with that case,” he said.

“We’re after leakers. We’re after people that are cowards, people that are unpatriotic, people that are treasonous in many cases. And the way you find them is through the journalists,” he continued. “When the journalists probably know they shouldn’t write, they shouldn’t be giving information out like that particular information or others.”