For more than four years, one of the most explosive leaks in Supreme Court history has gone unanswered.
Now U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is leading a criminal investigation into who handed the Dobbs draft to the press before the justices had finished their work.
The new probe is a major escalation. Investigators reportedly have grand jury subpoenas in play and are seeking testimony and information from people who worked at the Court when the draft was disclosed.
This is the development conservatives have demanded since the original internal investigation came up empty:
The Washington Examiner reports that Pirro's Washington office is overseeing the investigation, with career prosecutors doing much of the work. Carlton Davis, one of Pirro's top prosecutors, has also been assigned to the case.
The inquiry is reportedly reaching back to people who worked at the Supreme Court in 2022. Prosecutors have sought testimony and information through the grand jury process, giving them tools the Court's internal investigators did not have.
The Justice Department declined to confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation. No suspect has been publicly identified, and the specific criminal theory behind the inquiry has not been disclosed.
The investigation opens a new chapter in a case that has been dormant in public for years. It also raises a question the Court's narrower inquiry could not answer: whether federal subpoena power can finally establish who removed the draft and how it reached Politico.
That caution does not make the underlying breach any less outrageous.
Politico published Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in May 2022, nearly two months before the Court issued its final decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The leak detonated a political firestorm while the case was still pending and put enormous public pressure on the Court.
The Supreme Court called the disclosure one of the worst betrayals of trust in the institution's history. Investigators interviewed Court employees, examined forensic evidence and reviewed internal practices, but still could not identify the responsible person by a preponderance of the evidence.
The report also found serious weaknesses in the handling of sensitive documents, including gaps in recording printed copies and too many people having access to confidential material. Those findings made clear that the failure was bigger than one missing name: the Court had a security problem capable of shaking public confidence in its work.
Senator Mike Lee says the failure to conduct a thorough investigation was inexcusable. He also pointed to the apparent effort to influence the case and the danger that followed for members of the Dobbs majority:
Thank you, Jeanine Pirro, for investigating the Dobbs leak.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) November 6, 2026
The fact that this has never been thoroughly investigated is inexcusable.
It’s time to find out who did this—in an apparent attempt to influence the outcome of the case, potentially subjecting the Dobbs majority to… https://t.co/3quJRK7wnz
Fox News reports that the leak exposed the Court's planned reversal of Roe v. Wade before the final opinion was released. Chief Justice John Roberts ordered the Marshal of the Supreme Court to investigate, but that inquiry ended without publicly identifying the leaker.
The final Dobbs decision returned abortion policy to the states. But the breach itself remained unresolved, leaving the country with no public accounting for how a draft from the nation's highest court was taken and delivered to a news outlet.
Justice Alito has since said he has an opinion about who was responsible, while also stressing that suspicion is not the same thing as evidence strong enough to make an accusation.
This current clip puts that unresolved tension at the center of the new investigation:
🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: DOJ has just opened a CRIMINAL investigation in the LEAK of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, not long after Justice Sam Alito says he thinks he knows who it was
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 5, 2026
FINALLY!!
ALITO, RECENTLY: "I do have an opinion [of who it was], but the evidence… pic.twitter.com/9bPIVPuWH4
Pirro's office now has a chance to use federal investigative power where the Court's own inquiry failed.
Read the full Supreme Court ruling here: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
If the evidence leads to the person who did this, the public deserves the truth. A breach this consequential cannot be allowed to disappear into Washington's permanent fog of unanswered scandals.
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