Legal experts warn that recent Supreme Court leaks are “hugely destructive”

Following the revelation of private memos and conversations between Supreme Court justices published in the New York Times, legal experts are warning that such sensitive leaks are “destructive” for the Supreme Court.

The New York Times reported that internal memos and deliberations showed that Chief Justice Roberts “influenced” the outcomes of three key cases involving the court’s January 6 rioters and granted former President Donald Trump some immunity for presidential acts.

Roberts wrote the majority of the decisions, and the report claims he provided “crucial assistance in hearing the historic [immunity],” and made unexplained last-minute changes to the authorship of the politically charged statements.

The leak follows the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs draft opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, as well as a concerted effort by Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration to make sweeping changes to the court and ethics enforcement.

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Republican lawmakers such as Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) claim these efforts are politically motivated and aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the court, which currently has a majority of Republican-appointed judges.

Some legal experts say this latest leak is part of an effort to undermine the Supreme Court.

“I think it’s enormously damaging to the court when people inside the court leak confidential memos, confidential emails and even remarks apparently made at the judges’ conference to the press,” James Burnham of King Street Legal and a former senior Justice Department official told Fox News Digital.

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“It’s destructive because the justices can’t talk openly to each other if they’re afraid that everything they say might end up in the New York Times. And that means they’re going to talk to each other less. It means they can’t deliberate with the same openness that they’ve historically had, and it ultimately undermines the court’s decision-making,” he added.

“It reads to me as if someone is trying to cast the Chief Justice and the other justices of the majority in a bad light for a decision that I think was clearly right and courageous,” he said.

Carrie Seveino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said: “If there is anyone on the court who deserves censure for being overly political in this case, it is the person who leaked the highly confidential internal documents.”

She added that the incident was “part of the left’s ongoing PR campaign against the court.”

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“It is an attempt to discredit the court as an institution and in this context some judges have been targeted more than others,” she said.

Constitutional lawyer John Shu, who served in both Bush administrations, believes the leaks are politically motivated and most likely aimed at keeping Roberts in the center or perhaps pushing him to the center-left in the coming term – especially if Trump is elected in November of this year.

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“Because he is the chief justice, he can assign opinions when he is in the majority, which is often the case, and he has administrative powers that the other justices do not have,” Shu said. “And just as the president is the embodiment of Article 2, the chief justice is the embodiment of Article 3.”

“It is really frightening that another norm has been broken, violating the sacred confidentiality of the deliberations and opinion-forming process,” Shu said.