MAGA Pundits Randomly Targets Supreme Court Clerk After Roe . Leak

Leaked comments show Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade sent conservative experts scrambling to find out who passed the documents to Politico. Instead of finding evidence of who was behind the breach, pro-Trump figures instead attacked online mobs against random Supreme Court clerks based on tortured connections. with the authors of the article.

On Tuesday, right-wing figure Will Chamberlain tweeted that he thinks “I found the Supreme Court leaker.” Chamberlain then brought up a thread naming a secretary of Justice Stephen Breyer as his prime suspect,

“I could be easily wrong,” Chamberlain admitted in a tweet, but then continued with the rest of the stream, which has earned more than 8,000 retweets as of Wednesday afternoon.

“In my humble opinion, she is the one most likely to have leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion,” Chamberlain wrote.

Chamberlain’s suspicions were based on the thinnest of connections. Clerks have written legal arguments for the right to abortion, which should come as no surprise to a lawyer who has gone on to clerk for a liberal justice. The secretary is married to a former Politico reporter who co-wrote an article five years ago with Josh Gerstein, the Politico reporter who covered abortion views.

Despite Chamberlain’s lack of factual evidence, the clerk divulging the opinion to Gerstein, his internet conservatives became frenzied with the allegations. Trump’s former intelligence chief, Richard Grenell, hailed Chamberlain’s speculation as “journalism.” MAGA character Dinesh D’Souza tweeted to his more than two million followers that Chamberlain’s allegations were “compelling.” Amy Kremer, a conservative activist who organized the January 6 White House rally before the Capitol riots, echoed Chamberlain’s statements against the secretary.

“That Supreme Court speaker?” Newsmax host Greg Kelly tweeted. “Looks like Will Chamberlain figured it out!”

The conservative witch hunt to accuse random people of being behind this leak recalls earlier pro-Trump online mobs. In 2020, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and MAGA online amateur investigators falsely accused a Georgia election employee of stealing the election for Biden. The accusations caused a wave of death threats against workers. In 2016, Trump supporters terrorized a pizzeria in Washington, convinced by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton sexually abused children in the restaurant’s basement. That conspiracy theory was promoted by right-wing figure Jack Posobiec, a frequent collaborator of Chamberlain.

It’s not clear whether the secretary was the one who came up with Gerstein’s comments or the leak came from a libertarian. Leak hunters can’t even agree on which employee they think was behind the release of the comments. Elsewhere on the conservative internet, another group purportedly acted as a secretary to Justice Sonia Sotomayor. On Monday, Republican strategist Matt Wolking posted a viral thread on Twitter naming the employee and accusing secretary Sotomayor of leaking opinions. Wolking’s evidence consisted mainly of the fact that the secretary, many years earlier, had been cited in an article by Gerstein while at law school.

Chamberlain and Wolking did not respond to requests for comment.

At least one leak hunter will blame Future Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her secretary for leaking the comments – never mind that she hasn’t been sworn in yet.

Newsmax presenter Grant Stinchfield said Jackson would be “my first suspect” and asked to know if her law clerks might have disclosed the decision.

“I find it suspicious that the first leak from the Supreme Court in history occurred shortly after Judge Jackson was confirmed,” Stinchfield said. “I would like to know if her law clerk, who I am sure was hired, may even have worked in high court before she was sworn in, has access to these decisions. or not.”