DOJ Launches Criminal Investigation Into Leak of Supreme Court Decision That Overturned Roe v. Wade
With the clock ticking on potential statute of limitations deadlines, the Justice Department is reportedly engaged in a criminal probe to find the leaker of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Citing unnamed sources “familiar with the inquiry,” The New York Times reported Thursday that Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News personality and current U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., is overseeing an investigation to identify the source of the leak, which resulted in protests and death threats against conservative members of the court.
More than four years on, the source of the leak has never been identified.
Fox News published a similar report Thursday afternoon.
BREAKING: U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office is leading a criminal investigation into the 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, multiple sources tell Fox News.
The investigation comes after the Supreme Court’s internal probe failed to identify who leaked the draft to POLITICO.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.
Download the Fox News app to follow this developing story: https://t.co/ISpW9FcyGB
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 5, 2026
“Grand jury subpoenas have been issued during the probe, though it is unclear who received them,” Fox reported.
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The decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was written by Justice Samuel Alito.
In May of 2022, a draft of the decision was leaked in its entirety to the Beltway news organization Politico — a massive breach of the high court’s history and tradition of secrecy in developing its rulings.
The impact was immediate and severe, as pro-abortion mobs descended on the private homes of conservative justices, with one man actually arrested for plotting the assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
It also helped spur the current movement among Democrats to “reform” the court by packing it with new justices who would, presumably, vote more along Democrats’ preferred lines.
There is a Times report that the FBI is accelerating the investigation the Supreme Court leak of the Dobbs decision. That would be welcomed news in light of the seriousness of the breach. https://t.co/sjNv1Cmqco
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) November 5, 2026
If the goal of the protests was to prevent the decision from becoming official, they failed miserably. In June of 2022, the 6-3 decision was announced, ending the constitutional “right” to an abortion that had been invented by the Supreme Court in 1973.
But the protests did change the lives of Supreme Court justices, making them high-profile targets for harassment — or worse — by activists inflamed over their decisions.
In the aftermath of the leak, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts launched an internal probe, but came up with nothing — or at least nothing that was revealed to the public.
In 2023, Alito said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he had “a pretty good idea” of who the leaker was, but no evidence to make a public accusation.
BREAKING:🚨 FINALLY! YEARS LATER, THE DOJ IS FINALLY INVESTIGATING THE LEAK OF THE DOBBS DECISION. LET’S FIND OUT WHO LEAKED IT AND HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE. NO ONE SHOULD BE ABOVE THE LAW. Justice Sam Alito says he thinks he knows who it was….. https://t.co/qbtrH1CeEh
— American Nightmare 🇺🇸 (@thewakeninq) November 5, 2026
To many conservatives, the Dobbs leak was an obvious effort by an abortion supporter with insider access to the court to try to derail the decision before it became final.
Some liberals, The New York Times report noted, argue that the leak could have come from a conservative hoping to nail down the sweeping, scathing decision and prevent it from being diluted with compromises negotiated among the justices.
Alito found that notion ridiculous. “That’s infuriating to me,” he told the Times. “Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”
In its final form, the Dobbs decision virtually dripped with contempt for Roe’s construction:
“Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent,” Alito wrote. “It relied on an erroneous historical narrative; it devoted great attention to and presumably relied on matters that have no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution; it disregarded the fundamental difference between the precedents on which it relied and the question before the Court; it concocted an elaborate set of rules, with different restrictions for each trimester of pregnancy, but it did not explain how this veritable code could be teased out of anything in the Constitution …”
One big question for the current probe is identifying a specific crime involved in the leak.
The court’s traditions of confidentiality are just that — traditions.
And according to the New York Times report, there is no law prohibiting the release of the court’s internal records. However, there are possibilities, according to the report.
“Some experts have said prosecutors could try to charge the Dobbs leaker with violating a statute that prohibits theft of government property or one intended to protect against the disclosure of confidential government information, though either would be a relatively novel use of the laws,” the article stated.
“Another avenue prosecutors could pursue would be to target any false statements that employees made during the court’s initial investigation. During that inquiry, employees were warned that they could be prosecuted for lying to the government.”
Even if a crime is identified and a suspect is found, as The New York Times reported, prosecutors face another hurdle.
Under federal law, the statute of limitations for non-capital federal crimes is five years, meaning prosecutors must obtain a grand jury indictment or file a charge through a “criminal information” within five years of the offense being committed.
In the case of the Dobbs leak, that five-year statute could go into effect in the spring.
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