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An investigation by the Supreme Court has been unable to determine who disclosed to POLITICO last year a draft opinion overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion, the court said in a statement Thursday. The internal probe zeroed in on 82 employees who had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, but “was unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence,” the high court said. ... The court’s statement Thursday emphasized the thoroughness of the probe and said former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was retained to review Curley’s work. Chertoff, a widely-respected former federal appeals court judge before joining President George W. Bush’s Cabinet, said there was little else the court could do to solve the mystery. (Gerstein, 1/19)

Here's the 23-page report on the Supreme Court's investigation into who shared the draft opinion that struck down Roe v. Wade. (1/19)

In a 20-page report, the court’s marshal, Gail A. Curley, who oversaw the inquiry, said that investigators had conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, all of whom had denied being the source of the leak. But several employees acknowledged that they had told their spouses or partners about the draft opinion and the vote count in violation of the court’s confidentiality rules, the report said. ... Investigators determined that in addition to the nine justices, 82 law clerks and permanent employees of the court had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion, the report said. (Savage and Liptak, 1/19)

“No one confessed to publicly disclosing the document and none of the available forensic and other evidence provided a basis for identifying any individual as the source of the document,” the 20-page report said, adding that the leak probably came from within. “While investigators and the Court’s IT experts cannot absolutely rule out a hack, the evidence to date reveals no suggestion of improper outside access,” the report said. (Barnes and Marimow, 1/19)

The report didn’t indicate whether the justices themselves were interviewed. A court spokeswoman didn’t respond to questions on the investigation. ... Some found the report deficient. “The court needs to immediately explain if this investigation included interviews of the justices or not,” said Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a left-leaning advocacy group. “The idea that the justices themselves may have been excluded from the inquiry undermines the credibility of the whole undertaking.” (Bravin, 1/19)

Investigators also attempted to track who printed the draft opinion, but they were only able to discover “very few” instances. ... “The pandemic and resulting expansion of the ability to work from home, as well as gaps in the Court’s security policies, created an environment where it was too easy to remove sensitive information from the building and the Court’s IT networks, increasing the risk of both deliberate and accidental disclosures of Court-sensitive information,” the report states. Two employees without electronic access to the draft accessed printed copies, according to the report. Thirty-four people with electronic access said they printed out copies, and four others were unsure. (Schonfeld, 1/19)

Former President Trump is calling for the jailing of the journalists who published a leaked draft opinion showing the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Last spring, Politico reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward published a blockbuster report on a draft opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn the landmark abortion ruling. (Mastrangelo, 1/19)