Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse added more fuel to the speculative fire Sunday following an internal investigation by the Supreme Court that fell short of identifying last year’s leaker.
“The whole thing makes no sense,” the Democrat concluded.
(Video: MSNBC)
On May 2, 2022, Politico posted a majority draft opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that would result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The unprecedented leak of that opinion and the manner in which Democrats used it to rally their base left many believing the perpetrator had been from the progressive side of the Court.
Joining MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on “The Last Word” Monday, Whitehouse contended that Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley’s investigation furthered that belief, though naming no one, and presented more questions than answers.
“I’ve been involved in investigations as my state’s attorney general and United States Attorney,” the member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responsible for vetting Supreme Court nominees, told the host, “and there’s a lot about this investigative report that is very weird. It starts out weird in the very first sentence, where they describe the crime here, the incident as being ‘no mere misguided attempt at protest,’ which flags the prospect that the Democratic appointees did it, that it was their offices’ attempt to protest the Dobbs decision.”
In a manner that may have protested too much, Whitehouse took umbrage with that despite those words being the opinion of the court, not the marshal, and the next line stating “It was a grave assault on the judicial process.”
“Well, if you can’t solve whodunit, then you’ve got no business trying to flag a motive,” the senator fumed. “And they do that in page one, and it’s only a motive that would apply to the guilty party being a member of the staff of the Democratic justices.”
“Then you go on to the fact that they couldn’t get anything done and didn’t make it clear whether they interviewed a bunch of prime suspects, which is the justices themselves about their activities, or their spouses, or whether they took the opinion home,” he went on before touching on the additional statement from Curley that came out Friday.
In it, the marshal expressed how the justices were involved in the investigation but, unlike staff members, were not asked to sign sworn affidavits regarding their testimonies on the matter.
SCOTUS marshal didn’t ‘believe it was necessary’ to have Justices sign sworn affidavits in leak probe https://t.co/p7T3KhyaEr pic.twitter.com/QHPyaeBWEr
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) January 22, 2023
“It’s peculiar. It’s an iterative process, not an investigative process? The judges were asking questions as well as answering them? The whole thing makes no sense,” Whitehouse further snarked before turning his focus to once again leveling an attack on Justice Clarence Thomas specifically regarding the justice’s stated claims to have no part in the private business dealings of his wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.
“So, it’s a very, very peculiar investigative report, and frankly doesn’t look very investigative,” the senator concluded on that point in a manner that harkened back to efforts from leftists ahead of the midterm elections to challenge the integrity of the court itself as initiatives of court packing were proposed.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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