Tipsheet

Will the Judiciary Committee Investigate the SCOTUS Leaker? Here's What Dick Durbin Had to Say.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN on Sunday they will not devote time to investigate who leaked the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization draft decision as the official inquiry has yielded no main suspects. 

The 2022 leak was unprecedented in the Court's history, especially given the hotly contested nature of the draft decision detailing how Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned. The justices and their immediate family members did not have to sign sworn affidavits saying they didn’t leak the draft opinion for the Court's investigation, unlike their clerks. 

"So, do you believe that that was a mistake? Should they have done so to figure out where the leak came from?” host Dana Bash asked. 

"Listen, the universe of people who are suspects in this leak of an opinion of the Supreme Court is really a small universe. It includes the justices and their families, if they had access to this opinion, which I assume some of them did," Durbin said. "They should have gone into the — at least a position of assertions by each one of the justices as to what they did or did not do when it came to these opinions. But I find it hard to imagine, with this small group of people who had access to this opinion, they couldn’t come up with more information." 

"Are you going to try, in your capacity as Judiciary chair?" Bash asked. 

"No, I don’t think this is an area where we can go in with any kind of force and make for a changed result at this point," Durbin replied.