If it isn't used for work, there is no way in hell, they would have to without a warrant. Hopefully, they also ask for ginni thomas' because that's where the leak is.
Supreme Court leak investigation heats up as clerks are asked for phone records in unprecedented move
- Thread starter biggreydogs
- Start date
Agreed and also because this is apparently not a criminal matter the power they actually have to investigate this is limited.
Like they are turning over their personal phones but they could have deleted the information or simply used another phone to contact the reporter who they leaked the draft to.
ONLY reason Roberts won't turn this investigation over to the FBI, is to keep hidden any of his own Party's potential involvement....
Cannot risk "independent oversight" here...
Google is your friend.
HINT: 'Member those 'alleged' SC nominee "background checks"?
Thanks for the example. Can you now provide an example of the FBI function that would be used in this case? What statutory authority would the FBI have to question a SCOTUS law clerk?
That is of course nonsense. Roberts is, and always has been, extremely protective of the Court's institutional independence from the other branches. And he's certainly smart enough to know that if the court becomes the center of a pissing match about whether the political branches are abusing political power, that's the last thing the Court needs.
First of all, FBI background checks of nominees are done at the behest of the legislative branch, not Scotus. Second, the FBI always has the jurisdiction to investigate crimes and other violations of law subject to civil remedies. If you can't find an agent/AUSA who can invent a theory of potential criminal/civil liability to the government under some existing law, that agent/attorney probably ought to be fired. In other words, if the FBI felt they wanted to investigate this, nothing would stop them, including the Chief Justice.
Uh huh.
That's why he allowed the Court to be used to support an entirely unconstitutional "bounty" law to prevent abortions....
...which simply means the judicial branch would have the same option to utilize the FBI, just as the legislative branch already does.
No one is claiming the FBI has "jurisdiction" to investigate it.
Just as they do not have the jurisdiction to unilaterally conduct investigations/background checks on SC nominees w/o legislative branch requests.
I’ll bet going forward you’ll see agreements put in place whereby the clerks will need to agree in advance to cooperate with investigations such as this. I’m sure there will be plenty of potential clerks more than happy to sign such agreements.
The fact that no one is claiming it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. For example, the FBI absolutely has the jurisdiction to investigate whether a federal judge has taken a bribe, because that is a federal crime. If you can come up with a crime here (and again, any attorney or agent with any motivation could do that), they can invoke jurisdiction.
The fact that they haven't is simply a reflection that (i) there's no "obvious" criminal theory here (the best I've heard is that the disclosure amounts to expropriation of government property, which is about as persuasive as it sounds), and (ii) the executive branch, to its credit, is recognizing that principles of comity and separation of powers are actually important and that it is therefore appropriate to keep one's powder dry for situations where there is a more conventional theory of a crime (rather than what is essentially an employment dispute).
This is correct. Recall some of the early post-leak coverage which noted that one of the politico co-authors typically covered the national security beat. In other words, this is a reporter who has at least some clue about how to communicate with confidential sources, and was probably on the story for precisely that reason. In many ways, the "real" data that may be of interest may not be phone calls and texts, but rather geolocation data.
You completely miss the point here.
Roberts' lamenting that "the Court risks becoming too political" is completely at odds with enabling an independent agency to conduct the investigation and take the investigation where the evidence leads. If he "doesn't find anything", this undermines his credibility in that it actually may have been a Republican leaking that he's deciding to protect.
If he is truly worried about the Court's political independence, then it would behoove him to have an independent agency (e.g. FBI) conduct the investigation. Precisely along the lines of why a Special Counsel is used when the Executive branch is accused of wrongdoing and "investigating themselves" is the concern for independence in those cases.
No, sir, I think it is you who are missing the point. The point is not about whether FBI participation risks the court becoming too political. The point is that Scotus is an independent branch of government that is not, in the ordinary course, overseen by executive branch officials, and particularly not in what is an internal administrative/employment matter.
The only person wearing political-colored lenses here is you, I am afraid.
I don’t know that they would have risked meeting in person. You could use WhatsApp on your partner’s phone, send the PDF, and then erase the app.
Anyone who’s clerked at the district or circuit level should be familiar with basic information security. Half the cases they see are criminal.
Oh, I suspect that the reporter would have demanded it for a story like this.
And neither is the legislative branch. But they utilize the FBI for certain tasks they are not set up for
And nobody us obligated to be detained unless there's articulable suspicion of a crime, and nobody is obligated to answer a single question under any circumstances. So far, I haven't seen reference to a single statute that's been broken.
I don't think anybody's talked about detention. As to questioning, as noted, I've heard a theory articulated about a statutory violation, but it's not a theory I think much of. That said, if a case file were opened, the usual investigative powers would apply.
This article reads as if it was a conservative justice or clerk who leaked the draft in order to box in Roberts, and thereby destroying Roe.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/politics/supreme-court-john-roberts-abortion-dobbs/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/politics/supreme-court-john-roberts-abortion-dobbs/index.html
They will never get to the bottom of this or the phone records thing because they dontnqctuslly want to get to the bottom of it.
That and they don’t actually have the mechanisms in place for something like this.
It was Ginni Thomas and you know it. She could not contain her glee when she discovered from a man she was sleeping with that one of her poli-porn dreams was coming true, and since she considers herself to be untouchable she felt no constraint.
Do you see the logic in a conservative boxing in Roberts? That is the point. The court never used to have leaks. Now it does. It has been weakened as an institution.
i would argue mitch mcconnell ruined it when he pulled the merrick garland stunt.
