Kagan calls leak of draft opinion overturning Roe ‘horrible’ and expects investigation update by month’s end

By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade last term “horrible” and said she expects justices to be given a status update by the end of the month on an investigation into the leak.

“I don’t know anything. I suspect my colleagues don’t know anything, except for the chief justice maybe, about what the investigation has turned up if anything,” she said of Chief Justice John Roberts and the probe he launched late last spring. But she called the leak “shocking” and an “obvious, blatant violation of the court’s rules.

If investigators have “not figured out who the perpetrator was” the next serious questions is how the court prevents the same thing from happening again, she said. The court, she added, depends upon its deliberations and reasoned decisions, “and you can’t do that if you know that you might wake up tomorrow morning and there is a decision and it is on the front page of newspapers.”

Kagan appeared at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center for a conversation with Judge Alison J. Nathan who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The talk came less than a month before the new term is set to begin — on October 3 in the shadow of the midterm elections — when the justices will consider issues including voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, environmental regulations and religious liberty.

Kagan also spoke about the legitimacy of the court in comments that contrasted at times with remarks delivered Friday by Roberts.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.