I’m leaning towards Ginni Thomas, too. She had nothing to lose, and gains the ability to start gloating sooner, in addition to any strategic benefit. She may help lock in wavering votes. It seems totally plausible that Thomas either shared it with her or was careless in his home. (He has nothing to lose, either, and is my second guess.)
And we already know that she’s happy to, umm, act outside the established rules to attempt to get her way. This seems completely within character.
The Pubbies are indignantly demeaning the DoJ investigate the leak (despite the fact that no laws were likely actually broken). Would be hilarious if actual investigations revealed Ginni and Clarence as the leakers.
While no one knows for sure who did it (yet) I saw this article. They say in the article that no one believes it was a justice.
Sure, but again - whoever leaked this draft is headed for a lucrative career in the media circuit or tell-all memoirs, etc., that could be much more fulfilling/rewarding than any legal career they might have had in anonymous obscurity.
Whoever this was, if he or she is ultimately revealed, will be a flash in the pan. It’s unlikely that a few months as a part-time MSNBC or Fox News legal analyst and one ghost written tell-all will outweigh the decades of earnings they could have had at elite law firms or the prestige of a potential Supreme Court nomination of their own one day.
But, plenty of people make stupid decisions. Hopefully John Roberts and the Hardy Boys will solve The Secret of the Legal Leaker and we can find out who it really is!
Sure…bust your ass at a law firm for 15 years while working 80+ hours per week and maybe make partner.
Or, write one tell-all book, get a few years on TV and then go relax with umbrella drinks somewhere.
Conservatives in particular will reward this behavior.
One of the things that has been bandied about with this newly ‘activist’ Supreme Court is that protections for interracial marriage could be undone. What kind of sweet irony would it be if their focus on conservative values ends up making their marriage illegal?
I wouldn’t say it was a stupid decision. I’m very confident whoever leaked this knew the risks and thought it was worth it to achieve something they felt very strongly about. Abortion law is the entire reason for some people’s legal career.
if in theory this happens it won’t affect them. One law for thee and one for me, right?
They have plenty they want to tackle such as gay marriage. They’ll probably wait until Thomas retires before making interracial marriage illegal.
That’s just it; it all becomes a LOT easier, unless the Supreme Court is on some kind of protected network that’s largely shut off from the outside world.
Which I doubt; they’re probably on a normal sort of network with everyone having internet access, etc… and just rely on their people not to leak stuff.
I mean, all it would have taken would be one guy with a thumb drive to take a copy of the word document home, then fire up their secure VPN at home, make an anonymous email address (using Tutanota or one of the secure email providers), and send the file from that anonymous account. They can’t figure out who sent it, or where it was sent from, generally speaking. Even the shadowy government agencies like the CIA or NSA would probably have to put in a lot of effort to figure that out.
And if it was a paper copy that our leaker took home and scanned, then there’s no question of any sort of steganographic watermarks or anything like that either.
There is no way the leak will make any change in the result. My hypothesis is that the leaker is an apolitical troll who did it for the lulz.
Or a run for office. “I was the guy who made sure Kavanaugh/Barret/Gorsuch didn’t get weak at the knees, and now all the babies are safe,” would get a lot of votes in Trump states.
More likely the Russians, trying to distract us from their war. If we are going with random internet leak.
Eh, I assume they have at least as much security as an insurance company, or an investment firm, or anyone else who holds confidential customer data – which is a lot of places.
It’s moderately hard for me to get anything off my companies servers, and close to impossible to get an electronic copy of stuff they are trying to protect. Of course, for ~100 pages, I could just scroll through it on their laptop and take a photo of each page with my phone.
(I wouldn’t do that, of course. And if I did, and I got caught, I’d be fired, of course. And I wouldn’t expect to ever get another job as an actuary.)
You’d be surprised at how… laissez-faire the security can be at places with personal information. I mean, they may keep the SSN or credit card numbers encrypted, but there are always fairly easy ways to get data out- lots of laptops have bluetooth, you can take photos, you can often hook up your phone to the wifi, and so on.
The whole goal was to make it difficult to casually send/take stuff, not prevent it entirely. And they mostly succeed at that, but it’s not that hard for a determined and somewhat tech savvy person to find a way.
I think we shouldn’t expect the leaker to be perfectly rational. People make terrible, career-ending mistakes all the time. They have affairs with subordinates. They embezzle. They tweet inappropriate jokes.
There’s no reason to be confident that a peraon wouldn’t do something stupid
For what it’s worth, the actual thing that Politico posted looked like a scan of a hard copy.
True, but I’m having trouble at the moment thinking of a meaningful way to get around “black people and white people can’t marry each other,” especially as Thomas is relatively dark-skinned. Probably a failure of imagination.
Some techniques for steganographic watermarking (e.g. specific micro-adjustments in letter kerning) would be preserved in a photographed/scanned document. Whether they went to the trouble of implementing such a security protocol is another question.