More than four years after someone handed Politico a draft of the Supreme Court's decision overturning the right to abortion, the Justice Department is now running a criminal investigation into who did it. Prosecutors have ramped up their efforts in recent weeks, sending grand jury subpoenas for testimony and seeking information from people who worked at the court when the draft went public in 2022, two months before the justices formally released their decision.
Pirro and a Trump-Allied Prosecutor Lead the Case
According to The New York Times, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, a Trump ally, is overseeing the investigation and has assigned one of her top lieutenants, prosecutor Carlton Davis, to the case. Davis previously led efforts to investigate local fraud and violence, and he also oversaw a failed effort to indict six Democratic lawmakers for reminding troops they could refuse illegal orders, the Times reports.
The investigation concerns who provided the draft decision to Politico, and it comes despite the fact that the Supreme Court's own internal inquiry never publicly identified a leaker. That inquiry, conducted after Chief Justice John Roberts directed court marshal Gail Curley to investigate just one day after Politico's May 2022 publication, has remained the primary account of what happened inside the building ever since, per the same Times report.
A Court Investigation That Came Up Empty
The scale of the court's original effort was considerable. Investigators conducted formal interviews with 97 employees, all of whom denied disclosing the opinion, according to SCOTUSblog. A related SCOTUSblog account of the court's January 2023 findings put the number at almost 100 employees, 82 of whom had access to the draft opinion, and noted that investigators said they would continue to follow up on a few outstanding leads even after failing to identify a responsible party by a preponderance of the evidence.
That earlier report also pointed to systemic weaknesses that made the leak possible in the first place. SCOTUSblog's account of the findings described gaps in security policies, compounded by expanded work-from-home arrangements during the pandemic, as having created an environment where it was too easy to remove sensitive information from the building and the court's IT networks.
FBI Attention Predates the Current Push
The Justice Department's interest in the leak is not brand new. In May 2025, then-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said the FBI was prioritizing work on the Dobbs leak and that he was receiving weekly briefings on it, according to SCOTUSblog's reporting. The current escalation, with subpoenas now reaching people who worked at the court during the leak period, marks a more aggressive phase than anything previously reported.
The Times notes that the investigation is examining the Supreme Court's inner workings and raises separation-of-powers concerns between the executive branch and the judiciary. It is also complicated, the paper reports, by open questions about what charge could even be brought if a leaker were eventually identified. Those legal questions remain unresolved, and the Justice Department has not laid out publicly how it intends to answer them.
