Sen. Ted Cruz calls for FBI to probe Supreme Court leak one year after breach

Sen. Ted Cruz is calling for the FBI to uncover who leaked a Supreme Court draft opinion a year ago.

The Texas Republican said Sunday that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s recent statement that he said he knows who did it suggests that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. should reopen the investigation and get the FBI involved to identify the perpetrator. 

“We need to know,” Mr. Cruz told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

“The chief justice should call in the FBI to assist with the investigation,” he said. “The marshals’ office conducted the investigation. The marshals’ office are very good people, but they don’t have the equipment. They don’t have the experience in forensic investigations. The FBI does.”

Mr. Cruz said the court didn’t get another branch of government involved due to the separation of powers, but given the unprecedented nature of the breach, the chief justice should reconsider.

“Given the severity here, what I would encourage the chief justice to do is to invite the FBI to work cooperatively with the marshals — get the evidence because the individual who leaked the draft opinion should be prosecuted, should go to jail,” Mr. Cruz said.

Justice Alito told The Wall Street Journal in April that he likely knows who leaked his draft opinion overturning abortion rights. He dismissed the suggestion it could have been a conservative clerk, saying the leak made the justices targets for assassination.

In an interview in mid-April, published last week, Justice Alito said the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. We worked through it, and last year we got our work done. This year, I think, we’re trying to get back to normal operations as much as we can. … But it was damaging.” 

Last May 2, the court saw an unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that gave women a national right to abortion.

The leak caused protests outside the court and the conservative justices’ homes that’s been ongoing for months.

It also led to an assassination attempt on Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. A California man traveled to Justice Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in an attempt to kill him over the ruling and a pending Second Amendment case involving New York’s gun control law, authorities say.

Nicholas John Roske, the man charged with attempted murder of a Supreme Court justice, is awaiting trial. 

The final opinion on abortion rights was issued about a month after the leak and reflected the draft that Justice Alito had written.

Chief Justice Roberts ordered a court probe into who leaked the draft opinion, but no perpetrator has been identified. 

“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” Justice Alito said. “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside — as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

He pushed back on the suggestion from liberals that the leaker may have been a conservative clerk or court ally. 

“That’s infuriating to me,” Justice Alito said. “Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”

The high court announced in January that it was unable to identify who leaked the opinion.

An eight-month investigation produced leads but no clear culprit, the court’s marshal said. The probe couldn’t rule out an inadvertent leak or a hack, though the report said there was no evidence of such a breach.

“The team has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence,” wrote Marshal Gail Curley, whom Chief Justice Roberts ordered to lead the investigation.

Her report concluded that there were too many lapses and too few controls on possession of opinions that raised the risk of a leak — intentional or otherwise.

Court watchers said the early leak was unprecedented and damaged perceptions of the court.

The investigation was hobbled by limitations of the court’s systems, which didn’t allow for complete tracking of who shared or printed copies of the draft and by work-from-home policies.

The marshal said some employees did admit to telling their spouses about the draft and the way the court was leaning. Some of those employees said they thought that was allowed under the court’s rules.

Other employees violated document handling rules, the marshal said.

Still, none of them was linked to the leak.

• Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.