Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sat down with The Wall Street Journal for an interview where he discussed the investigation into the leaking of the Dobbs draft, the associated effort to intimidate the court and related threats and violence.
About the leak, he said, “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.”
He described the campaign of intimidation against the court. “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.” Alito said.
“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito said, as reported by Fox News. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”
An actual assassination attempt targeted Brett Kavanaugh. The sometimes-transgender activist and abortion extremist who traveled across the country armed with an entire kit for the purpose actually reportedly hoped to kill three Justices.
An investigation into the leak led by the marshal of the court failed to yield a suspect who could be definitively identified as the leaker. Alito said that the marshal “did a good job with the resources that were available to her,” and agreed that there wasn’t enough evidence to make an accusation publicly.
Responding to some on the left who suggested that the leak may have come from the conservative side of the court, Alito said, “That’s infuriating to me.”
“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,” he said.
Commenting on recent questioning of the “legitimacy” of the court, Alito reportedly said, “This type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices [is] new during my lifetime. … We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”
The leak resulted in illegal protests at the Justices’ homes. Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the official position of the Biden White House was to encourage the protests, which violated federal law, and the gatherings outside of the justices’ homes continued.
This all occurred in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms when President Biden campaigned against the GOP on the message that Republicans were a threat to democracy.
“American Democracy is under attack,” the president told America, blasting Republicans and emphasizing that “there’s no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America.”
In more recent news, documents produced by a whistleblower seem to show that US Marshals were instructed not to arrest protesters at the justices’ homes. The evidence also suggested the possibility of the Marshals having foreknowledge of some DOJ unwillingness to prosecute cases involving arrests occurring at the homes of the conservative justices.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has since been questioned about prior testimony he gave that does not appear to square with the newly released information.
In condemning the “dark forces that thirst for power,” President Biden reminded Americans that Republicans were full of “anger, violence, hate, and division.” He appeared to attribute Republicans’ “embrace” of political violence to its hostility to democracy.
Around this time, pro-life centers were firebombed, and the justices who made up the conservative wing of the court made their adjustments to living as “targets of assassination,” as Alito said this week.
Alito said he is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go any place by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.”
How does Alito feel about the safety of the conservative justices now? “I don’t feel physically unsafe,” the justice said, “because we now have a lot of protection.”
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