Justice Alito Says Leak of Dobbs Opinion Made Supreme Court ‘Targets for Assassination’

In remarks at a Heritage Foundation event Tuesday, Justice Samuel Alito bluntly stated that the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last May made him and his fellow conservative justices “targets for assassination.”

The leaked Dobbs draft, written by Alito, overturned prior case precedent on abortion from Roe and Casey and ignited protests and threats against the court across the country. The identity of the person or persons who leaked the draft to Politico is still not known.

One liberal organization offered bounties on Twitter for anyone who could provide the location of Justices Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, or Chief Justice John Roberts; another group went so far as to post a map of their home addresses that was taken down by Google. A 26-year-old man was arrested in June near Kavanaugh’s house after allegedly threatening to assassinate him; he was carrying a backpack with a Glock 17, two magazines and extra ammunition, and burglary tools and said that he had found the justice’s address online.

Alito addressed the controversy surrounding the leak of his Dobbs draft and its effect on the Court in a live Q&A session organized by the Heritage Foundation Tuesday evening, moderated by Heritage VP of Constitutional Government John Malcolm.

Malcolm broached the topic by commenting that “in an age of incessant leaks,” it was “remarkable” how the Court had been able to operate for so long with confidentiality over its internal deliberations.

“Unfortunately,” said Malcolm, “that changed this last term with the horrific and completely unprecedented leak of your draft majority opinion in Dobbs. How has the leak affected the Court?”

Alito replied that the leak was “a grave betrayal of trust by somebody” and “a shock, because nothing like that had happened in the past,” and “changed the atmosphere” in the Court for the remainder of the last term.

“The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe and Casey targets for assassination,” Alito continued, “because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.” He mentioned the man who was arrested for the threat to assassinate Kavanaugh.

Now that the Court was in a new term, he said — adding a mention of the “wonderful staff” — everyone was hoping things would get “back to normal,” the way they were before the leak and before the restrictions from the Covid-19 pandemic, “to the greatest degree possible.”

Alito added that in his 16 years on the Court, “the Justices have always gotten along very well, on a personal level,” even though “the public, when they read our opinions, probably misses that.”

“We sometimes — you can see by reading those opinions — we sometimes disagree, pretty passionately, about the law,” he concluded, “and we have not, in recent years, been all that restrained about the terms in which we express our disagreement. I’m as guilty as others, probably, on this score, but none of that is personal, and that is something that I think, I wish the public understood.”

Video of the full event with Alito:

Watch the videos above, via Heritage Foundation.

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