re: Joan Biskupic, 'Supreme Court leak investigation heats up as clerks are asked for phone records in unprecedented move,' CNN (May 31, 2022, 12:37 GMT)
Should you not inquire (and report) if the investigators are also investigating non-law-clerk Supreme Court personnel in a similar fashion?*
Should you not inquire (and report) if the investigators are also investigating all nine Supreme Court Justices in a similar fashion? You might ask each individual Justice if he or she authorized the leak, or if he or she knows the identity of the leaker. It is up to you to ask.
See also: Seth Barrett Tillman, 'Courthouse Security Checks,' New Reform Club (Aug. 7, 2016, 7:33 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2016/08/my-personal-brexit-courthouse-security.html>;
Seth
PS: To be sure, I do not think we can rule out the possibility that the leak was from someone other than a law clerk--and, perhaps, by a person who is not Supreme Court staff at all. Furthermore, I do not think we can rule out the possibility that the leak (whoever did it) was authorized by a Justice.
Seth Barrett Tillman, 'Query for CNN's Joan Biskupic,' New Reform Club (May 31, 2022, 11:30 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2022/05/query-for-cnns-joan-biskupic.html>;
Biskupic wrote: "It is not known if court officials are asking employees who are part of the permanent staff, beyond the one-year law clerks, for their phone records." Seth's response: You might know if you ask.
4 comments:
It’s a Justice. Otherwise, we would already know.
Just throwing this out there: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/213933-cia-admits-to-wrongly-hacking-into-senate-computers
Given there are no publicly available facts, then anyone who had possession of the draft opinion at any time could have leaked it, and we don't know what comprises that set of people. Presumably all Justices and all clerks. But are there staff attorneys? Are there are other personnel who would have had it. And of course any of these people could have distributed it to any third party on earth. How well any such person could have covered their tracks is a technical question. Since answering the question might cause embarrassment, we may never get an answer.
And there's always the possibility that the Court's IT system is the source of the leak. Lawyers, especially geriatric ones, are notoriously bad at electronic security.
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