The Supreme Court is dealing with yet another breach of its internal deliberations after the New York Times published 16 pages of confidential memos exchanged among the justices over five days in February 2016, Just the News reported. The documents, which the Times said it verified for authenticity, shed light on how the court handled an emergency request tied to the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, and they mark the latest in a pattern of high-profile leaks that has shaken public confidence in the institution.
The Times report, titled "The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court," describes behind-the-scenes discussions led by Chief Justice John Roberts as the court moved to issue a stay blocking the EPA rule. The court acted without full briefing or oral argument, a procedural shortcut that drew scrutiny at the time and has drawn more since.
The memos suggest the majority was concerned that, absent intervention, the Environmental Protection Agency would impose what justices viewed as unlawful regulatory burdens on electric utilities. That framing matters. The February 2016 stay was a landmark moment in the court's willingness to resolve high-stakes disputes through expedited orders rather than the traditional appeals process. The leaked documents now offer a rare, unauthorized window into how that decision came together.
This is not the first time confidential Supreme Court materials have reached the press in recent years. In 2022, a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade, was leaked to Politico, setting off a political firestorm and an internal investigation that consumed the court for months.
That investigation, led by Supreme Court Marshal Gail Anne Curley with later assistance from the Chertoff Group, ended inconclusively. The court's report stated that investigators were "unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence," even as some electronic data review and other inquiries remained pending.
The scope of the Dobbs probe was itself a source of controversy. Breitbart reported that the court's public report initially appeared silent on whether the nine justices themselves had been interviewed, prompting sharp questions about the investigation's thoroughness. The Marshal later clarified that all nine justices were interviewed, but none were asked to sign sworn statements under penalty of perjury, a gap that left lingering doubts.
Ninety-seven court employees did sign such sworn statements denying they had disclosed the draft opinion. More than 120 interviews were conducted over roughly eight months. The result: no leaker identified, no accountability, and a court left to manage the fallout on its own.
As the Associated Press reported, the Dobbs investigation also exposed serious institutional weaknesses. Investigators found outdated information-security policies, overly broad access to sensitive documents, and increased risks created by pandemic-era remote work. The report noted that "the risk of both deliberate and accidental disclosures of Court-sensitive information" grew as employees shifted to working from home during the coronavirus pandemic.
Those findings were supposed to prompt reform. And to some extent, they did. In late 2024, the court under Roberts implemented nondisclosure agreements for employees, a step that acknowledged the problem but, given the latest leak, has plainly not solved it.
The substance of the newly leaked memos is not trivial. The February 2016 stay of the Clean Power Plan was one of the most consequential uses of the court's emergency powers in recent memory. It blocked a signature Obama-era environmental regulation before any appellate court had ruled on its merits. The decision signaled a shift in how the Supreme Court would use its authority on what legal observers have come to call the shadow docket, the growing body of significant rulings issued outside the traditional briefing and argument process.
The memos reportedly capture Roberts orchestrating that process in real time, coordinating among justices as the court moved to act swiftly. For critics of the shadow docket, these documents are ammunition. For defenders of the court's independence, they are a violation of the confidentiality that allows justices to deliberate candidly.
Both things can be true. But the more immediate concern is institutional: if the court cannot protect its own internal communications, the quality of those communications will degrade. Justices who fear their private exchanges may end up in the New York Times will write less candidly, deliberate less freely, and hedge more carefully. That is not a hypothetical cost. It is the predictable consequence of a system that has failed, repeatedly, to hold leakers accountable.
Chief Justice Roberts has publicly pushed back against the notion that the court is a political institution beholden to partisan interests. He has called such suggestions "absurd", and on the merits, the court's independence depends on the public believing that its deliberations are shielded from outside pressure. Each new leak makes that case harder to sustain.
The question that hangs over every Supreme Court leak is the same one the Dobbs investigation failed to answer: who did it, and why?
The Times has not disclosed its source for the 2016 memos. The court has not publicly commented on the latest breach. And the identity of the leaker, or leakers, remains unknown. What is known is the pattern. In 2022, the Dobbs draft reached Politico. In 2024, the Times reported on internal deliberations in cases involving President Donald J. Trump, citing confidential materials. Now, in 2026, another set of internal documents has surfaced.
Each leak has served a particular political narrative. The Dobbs leak landed in the middle of a national debate over abortion rights. The 2024 disclosures touched cases involving a sitting president. The latest memos concern the court's intervention against an Obama-era environmental regulation, a decision that progressives have long criticized as judicial overreach.
None of this proves motive. But the pattern is worth noting. Leaks from the Supreme Court do not happen in a vacuum. They happen when someone inside the institution decides that the political value of disclosure outweighs the institutional cost of betrayal. And they keep happening because the cost of getting caught has, so far, been zero.
The court's composition and future direction remain subjects of intense political interest. Justices Alito and Thomas have signaled no plans to step down, but speculation about vacancies and replacements continues to swirl in Washington.
Meanwhile, the court's recent work has exposed sharp internal divisions. Justice Jackson stood alone in dissent in a recent case backing police authority in a D.C. traffic stop, a reminder that the ideological fault lines on the bench remain deep and public even without leaks.
The nondisclosure agreements Roberts implemented in late 2024 were a reasonable first step. But NDAs are only as strong as the enforcement behind them. If the court cannot identify leakers after months-long investigations, if 97 employees can sign sworn denials and the trail still goes cold, then a signature on a confidentiality form is unlikely to deter someone willing to hand documents to the press.
The Dobbs investigation revealed a court with outdated security protocols, too many people with access to sensitive materials, and an institutional culture that had not adapted to the realities of modern information warfare. The question now is whether anything meaningful has changed since then, or whether the court simply layered paperwork on top of a broken system.
Sixteen pages of confidential memos from a decade ago may seem like old news. But the breach itself is current. And it tells the public something the court would rather not advertise: that its internal walls are still porous, its accountability mechanisms still toothless, and its ability to protect the integrity of its own deliberations still in doubt.
An institution that cannot keep its own secrets has no business lecturing the rest of the government about the rule of law. Until someone is actually held accountable for these leaks, expect more of them.
