In an effort to combat “potential public corruption,” the nation’s top law enforcement agency is revisiting one of the most significant and high-profile unsolved cases from the Biden administration era. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced Monday that he and FBI Director Kash Patel are going to “re-open” an investigation into the consequential 2022 leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which sparked widespread violence across the nation, including at least one attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice.

“Shortly after swearing in, the director and I evaluated a number of cases of potential public corruption that, understandably, have garnered public interest. We made the decision to either re-open or push additional resources and investigative attention to these cases,” Bongino shared. He continued, “I receive requested briefings on these cases weekly, and we are making progress. If you have any investigative tips on these matters that may assist us then please contact the FBI.”

John Malcolm, vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government and director of Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, told The Washington Stand, “The Dobbs leak was a gross abuse of trust by someone within the court system.” He explained, “I doubt that the Dobbs leak itself had much impact on how the public views the court’s legitimacy and impartiality. The public’s view of such matters is more governed by whether they like the results in particular cases and by ill-considered, harsh rhetoric challenging the integrity of some of the justices and criticizing opinions in controversial cases.” He continued, “In a very real way, though, the Dobbs leak imperiled the lives of the justices and their families.”

In May of 2022, Politico published a draft Supreme Court opinion, authored in February by Justice Samuel Alito, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The draft opinion made it evident that not only was the Supreme Court all but certain to rule in favor of the Mississippi pro-life law at the center of the case, but that a majority of justices on the Supreme Court were prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, prior Supreme Court opinions (handed down in 1973 and 1992, respectively) which had extended broad federal legal protections to the practice of abortion.

Politico cited a “person familiar with the court’s deliberations” to confirm that Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett had already voted in favor of Alito’s opinion following oral arguments in December of 2021, yielding a five-justice majority to strike down Roe and Casey, as the abortion-centered precedents are known colloquially.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the majority on Mississippi’s pro-life law but did not join in overturning Roe and Casey, publicly confirmed that the leaked draft opinion was authentic. He said in a written statement at the time that “this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations…” Roberts added, “This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here.” CNN later reported that Roberts had been attempting to sway his fellow Republican-appointed justices to join him in his own opinion, which would not have affected Roe and Casey, but would have still upheld Mississippi’s pro-life legislation. The news outlet said that the leak of the draft opinion “made the effort all but impossible…”

When the Supreme Court issued its final verdict in late June, the published opinion was almost identical to the leaked Alito draft, and Alito was joined by Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, just as Politico had anticipated. Of course, other news outlets — such as SCOTUSblog, CNN, and CNBC — had made similar predictions following oral arguments, over six months before the Supreme Court rendered a final ruling, based purely on the line of questioning pursued by Republican-appointed justices.

Although the draft opinion leak was declared “unprecedented” by some news outlets, there have been some leaks in the past. It has been reported that the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, holding that black slaves were not legally classified as U.S. citizens, was leaked to then-President-elect James Buchanan just a few days before the ruling itself was published. However, the narrow scope of the leak naturally narrowed its impact, only allowing Buchanan to prepare to deal politically with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

In 1973, the Supreme Court’s Roe ruling was leaked to Time Magazine. While this leak was broader in scope than the Dred Scott leak, being published in a well-read national news magazine, it still had little impact on the court’s actual ruling. Larry Hammond, a clerk for Justice Lewis Powell, gave a copy of the opinion to a Times reporter, expecting the ruling to have been published by the Supreme Court before the magazine could publish its next issue. A slight delay in the Supreme Court’s publication of the decision, however, meant that the text of the controversial opinion was printed and published by Time hours before the Supreme Court published its decision officially.

The Dobbs leak was, perhaps, equally broad in its scope but significantly deeper in its impact. The Supreme Court, in this instance, was not mere hours away from publishing an already-finalized opinion — as the final opinion itself makes clear, Alito made several changes between February and the date of the Supreme Court’s final ruling — but was still in the late stages of deliberation and would not officially render an opinion for nearly two months. A lot can happen in two months.

Already anticipating a possible ruling aborting Roe and Casey, groups like Planned Parenthood had planned a series of demonstrations and protests, but rapidly re-organized the events in the wake of the Dobbs leak. Thousands of pro-abortion activists marched through Washington, D.C. and major metropolitan centers like New York City and Los Angeles less than two weeks after the Dobbs leak. Some pro-abortion groups warned that the nation could expect a “summer of rage” if the Supreme Court followed through on the leaked opinion. With the disastrous Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 — which cost unparallelled billions of dollars in property damages, injured at least 700 police officers in a matter of mere months, and claiming 25 lives or more — fresh in the minds of many Americans, the threat was not taken lightly.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) specifically warned in a memo that political violence was likely to occur as a result of the Dobbs leak and would only “persist and may increase leading up to and following the issuing of the Court’s official ruling.” While the memo, issued under the tenure of pro-abortion then-President Joe Biden, claimed that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ embrace of pro-life narratives may be linked to the perception of wanting to ‘save white children’ and ‘fight white genocide,’” the DHS ultimately warned that political violence would most likely be carried out by pro-abortion activists.

Pro-abortion activists made clear their intent to target pro-life pregnancy resource centers and Catholic parishes in response to the Dobbs leak. DHS reportedly warned the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) of credible threats against Catholic parishes and leaders. The Catholic Church, of course, has long opposed abortion and Justices Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are all Catholics; Gorsuch was raised Catholic and educated by Jesuits, and both Roberts and Sotomayor identify as Catholic, although Roberts did not join the majority in reversing Roe and Casey and Sotomayor has long been an abortion proponent. The advocacy organization CatholicVote reported that there have been, to date, nearly 340 attacks on Catholic churches in the U.S. since the Dobbs leak, ranging from vandalism and property destruction to attempted arson and firebombing.

Five weeks after the Dobbs leak, a man flew from California to D.C. with the intention of going on a killing spree. His target: Supreme Court justices. Nicholas Roske went to Kavanaugh’s house first, in Montgomery County, Maryland. He was armed with a pistol and equipped with gear to break into the justice’s house undetected. Roske confirmed that he intended to kill at least three justices and specifically cited the leaked Dobbs opinion as his inspiration. Notably, the Chief Justice had been courting Kavanaugh as a potential ally in defecting from the majority and joining him in his own opinion, which would have effectively split the Supreme Court and preserved Roe and Casey. Thanks to the increased presence of U.S. Marshals deputies providing security for Kavanaugh and the other justices, Roske turned himself in to police. He is slated to be sentenced in October of this year.

Malcolm commented to TWS, “This should not have been surprising.” He explained, “The would-be assassin no doubt figured out that if he could kill one of the justices in the majority, that would not only change the outcome of the case (since a four-to-four tie would have left the lower court opinion, which upheld Roe, in place), but also would have resulted in President Biden getting to replace one of the Republican appointees; there is no question that anyone he would have appointed would vote in a future case to uphold Roe. Thankfully, that assassination attempt failed.”

Immediately following the leak, Roberts ordered Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley to conduct an investigation determining who leaked the draft opinion and how. Nearly nine months later, in late January of 2023, Curley and the Supreme Court admitted that the investigation had been unsuccessful. The investigation included forensic analysis, nearly 130 interviews with staff members, and an examination of Supreme Court policies and processes regarding the circulation of drafts and the use of technology. A report from Curley’s office concluded that “investigators have found no forensic evidence indicating who disclosed the draft opinion.”

Glenn Fine, a former Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Justice and deputy I.G. for the Department of Defense, wrote a scathing critique of Curley’s investigation in March of 2023. “This result did not surprise me,” Fine said of the investigation’s lack of resolution, noting that, in his prodigious experience, leaks “are notoriously difficult to resolve.” The IG extraordinaire wrote, “Unfortunately, the leak investigation … demonstrates how not to conduct a leak investigation.” He continued, “The first problem in the Court’s leak investigation was whom the Court asked to conduct it.” Fine pointed to Curley’s lack of experience in “conducting this type of complex investigation” and the fact that she “did not have the necessary independence to conduct the investigation. In essence, she was asked to investigate her bosses, the justices, who are in the universe of potential leakers. They supervise her and can fire her.”

Fine also noted a point that numerous news outlets, political pundits, and armchair investigators had also raised their eyebrows over when Curley’s report was first published: while the investigation interviewed nearly 100 staff members, law clerks, and others under oath, the justices themselves were not put under oath. Interviews were conducted with them, sometimes multiple interviews, but neither the justices nor their families were put under oath or asked for sworn depositions. Fine wrote that Curley did not give “any reason for this double standard. It was an Alice in Wonderland investigation: The conclusion seemed to come first — let’s focus on the clerks and employees, not the justices, as the likely source of the leak — rather than result from a consistent investigation focusing on all potential leakers.”

Although Bongino announced that the FBI will “re-open” an investigation into the Dobbs leak, the law enforcement agency never formally opened an investigation in the first place. Concerned with ensuring the Supreme Court’s independence and autonomy, Roberts did not ask the FBI to intervene but instead suggested that the Supreme Court investigate itself.

Malcolm commented, “While I do not know whether the initial investigation was inadequate, I do know that the FBI has certain tools at its disposal that the Supreme Court’s Marshal’s Office and an outside contractor do not have.” Those tools include “being able to issue subpoenas, obtain electronic evidence, and convene a grand jury to receive evidence, including live testimony. I hope that with these tools the FBI will be able to uncover the identity of the leaker,” he added.

Malcolm further anticipated that the leaker, if identified, could face years of prison. “The leaker could be subjected to criminal penalties. Two crimes come to mind. First, obstruction of justice (18 U.S.C. § 1503), which carries a potential 10-year sentence, makes it crime to ‘corruptly … endeavor[] to influence, intimidate any … court of the United States … or endeavor[] to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice ….’” Malcolm explained. He continued, “The second, conversion of government property (18 U.S.C. § 641), which carries a potential 10-year sentence, makes it a crime to ‘knowing[ly] convert[] to his use or the use of another … any record … or thing of value of the United States or of any department of agency thereof ….’” He added, “And, of course, if the perpetrator lies to a federal agent or before a grand jury during the course of this investigation, there are additional criminal statutes that would apply.”