US: Justice Alito denies allegations of involvement in 2014 Supreme Court leak, amid calls for probe

According to a report by the New York Times, a former evangelical activist in a letter claimed that he knew the outcome of the 2014 Supreme Court decision involving contraception and the Affordable Care Act prior to the formal ruling. The information was supposedly given to him by a wealthy political donor who was allegedly told about the ruling by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito during a dinner at his residence.

The letter in question was sent by Rev. Rob Schenck earlier this year to Chief Justice John Roberts and was later procured by the Times, said that he was told about the upcoming ruling by Gayle Wright weeks before the public announcement after the two had dinner at Justice Alito’s home with his wife Martha-Ann Alito.

Notably, Alito wrote the majority opinion in 2014 for the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby which ruled in the favour of family-owned corporations like Hobby Lobby which had objected to a provision of the Affordable Care Act mandating employers to provide health insurance that includes contraception coverage.

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This comes months after the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion, was leaked and reported first by Politico in May, also written by Justice Alito. However, since the New York Times report emerged, the supreme court justice in a statement to the media has vehemently denied these allegations and called them “completely false”.

“The allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife is completely false,” said Justice Alito in a statement. He added, “My wife and I became acquainted with the Wrights some years ago because of their strong support for the Supreme Court Historical Society, and since then, we have had a casual and purely social relationship”.

The Wrights also never made any effort to obtain “confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity”, said Alito and would be “shocked and offended if those allegations are true,” to ABC news. Meanwhile, Gayle Wright, in a telephonic interview with the Times also denied obtaining or passing along any such information.

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Schenck said that he came forward with the letter now to help with the ongoing investigation into the leaked draft of the majority opinion to overturn Roe. However, his account of the leak “has gaps”, said the Times report, but a series of exchanged emails and conservations imply that he knew about the ruling beforehand.

The former evangelical activist also wrote that since there may be a “severe penalty” levied on the person responsible for the initial leak or the recent draft opinion he thought that the 2014 incident might, “bear some consideration”.

This comes as the SCOTUS has been under scrutiny since May 2022 after the leak of the majority opinion to overturn Roe with many accusingthe conservative majority ofpoliticisation. Several recent polls have indicated that the supreme court'spublic approval has reached record lows. Earlier this year, Alito had called the draft opinion leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case a “grave betrayal”, the ruling for which was announced in June.

Meanwhile, several mostly Democrat lawmakers have called for an investigation including US Representative Mondaire Jones, a Democrat from New York, who took to Twitter and said, “Today’s well-sourced NY Times article strongly suggests Justice Alito leaked the 2014 opinion in Hobby Lobby, and describes a conspiracy by the far-right donor class to influence the Supreme Court Justices. The House Judiciary Committee must investigate this while we still can.”

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The executive director of the judicial group, Demand Justice, Brian Fallon, also called on the Senate Judiciary Committee “to investigate the apparent leak.” He added, “The whistleblower in this report…should be called to testify about both the leak and the yearslong lobbying effort he once led to cultivate Alito and other Republican justices,” he said in a statement.

The Times report was the latest proof of “Republican justices on the Court are little more than politicians in robes,” said Fallon. Meanwhile, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat and head of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement said the panel is reviewing these “serious allegations” and urged the passage of pending legislation in Congress which would create a code of ethics for the Supreme Court.

“It is unacceptable that members of the highest court in the land are exempted from the judicial code of ethics when wealthy special interests are spending millions of dollars in dark money to influence the Court’s decisions,” said Durbin in a written statement on Saturday.

(With inputs from agencies)

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