The Supreme Court marshal and her investigators couldn’t find out who leaked Alito’s draft abortion decision.
Her report (here) says they don’t believe the IT system was hacked from outside; and besides the justices, 80 court employees had access to an electronic copy and 2 more had print copies, for a total of 82 court employees, all of whom cooperated with the investigation.
All these employees were interviewed, some more than once; and investigators also scoured electronic devices — including phones, printers, and laptops — but turned up nothing suspicious. They even looked for fingerprints, literally.
They looked at employees’ connections with reporters, and whether they told spouses about the draft decision (a few did, but that doesn’t explain how Politico obtained the actual word-for-word draft decision). They investigated, and found “nothing to substantiate,” social media posts pointing to certain individuals (e.g., liberal justices’ law clerks).
What they found was the court’s security measures were somewhat porous, especially during the pandemic when employees were working from home, and a surreptitious download or print job could have escaped detection:
“Assuming, however, that the opinion was intentionally provided to Politico by a Court employee, that individual was evidently able to act without being detected by any of the Court’s IT systems. If it was a Court employee, or someone who had access to an employee’s home, that person was able to act with impunity because of inadequate security with respect to the movement of hard copy documents from the Court to home, the absence of mechanisms to track print jobs on Court printers and copiers, and other gaps in security or policies.” (Report, p. 21; emphasis italics added by me.)
That’s interesting; maybe the pizza delivery guy did it.
What they didn’t do was interview the justices or their spouses, which has legal experts and journalists calling the investigation a “sham” (read stories here, here, and here).