Posted on 05/04/22
| News Source: NY Post
Whoever leaked Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in a crucial abortion-rights case violated a key tenet of the Supreme Court — and might even have committed a crime, legal experts said Tuesday.
“It is a core, central principle of working there to keep everything confidential,” said Washington, DC, lawyer Bill Burck, a former federal prosecutor who clerked for former Justice Anthony Kennedy..
If the leaker is a clerk — or even one of the court’s nine justices — “it’s hard to see how a crime was committed” because the document isn’t classified and they’d have a right to possess it, Burck said.
But amid the investigation ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts, others said the unprecedented disclosure of Alito’s 98-page work in progress may have run afoul of a federal law that prohibits the theft of public money, property or records.
“Somebody took something that belongs to the Supreme Court and gave it to someone else without authorization. That seems problematic,” said American University law professor Stephen Wermiel, an expert on the high court.
The statute — Title 18, Section 641 of the US Code — makes it illegal to swipe “any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof.”