The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into who leaked the Supreme Court draft that overturned Roe v. Wade, years after the Court’s own probe failed to name anyone.

Prosecutors working under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro in Washington, D.C., have issued grand jury subpoenas and sought information from Supreme Court staffers who worked there when the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was disclosed, people familiar with the matter told reporters.

The Daily Caller reported the Justice Department move on November 5, 2026, describing an inquiry aimed at identifying the person who leaked the draft decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent and returned abortion policy to the states. The Department declined to comment on the reporting.

The leak remains one of the most serious breaches of trust in modern Court history. An internal Court inquiry never identified the source. Now federal prosecutors are treating it as a criminal matter.

Pirro’s office takes the lead after the Court came up empty

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is overseeing the investigation, with career prosecutors handling the bulk of the work, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to the Washington Examiner. Prosecutor Carlton Davis is among those involved.

A Justice Department spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the probe when asked.

The New York Post reported that prosecutors have issued subpoenas to people who worked at the Court around the time of the leak. The Court’s own internal investigation, ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts, ended in January 2023 without identifying a culprit.

Roberts called the disclosure an “egregious breach of trust.”

Fox News reported the criminal investigation has been underway for at least a year under Pirro’s D.C. office, with grand jury subpoenas already issued. Politico published the draft opinion on May 2, 2022, weeks before the Court released the final Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022.

The marshal’s investigation interviewed nearly 100 employees. It still failed to pin down a source.

"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 marshal’s report concluded.

Alito says the leak made justices targets

Justice Samuel Alito has not hidden what the leak cost the Court, or the people who work there.

In an October interview with Fox News, Alito said he has a view of who was responsible. He also made clear the evidence is not enough to name anyone in public.

"I do have an opinion, but the evidence available at this time is not strong enough for the court or for me to say this is the person who was responsible."

He described the leak in stark terms for what it did to the justices in the majority.

"It was a grave breach of the trust that everybody who worked in this building had before that point and it very predictably made the five of us in the majority targets for assassination!"

Alito added that the disclosure nearly got a colleague killed.

"And nearly resulted in the assassination of my colleague Brett Kavanaugh!"

Those are not abstract complaints. The draft’s publication fueled threats against the Court. Justices in the Dobbs majority faced real security consequences. The public still does not know who handed the opinion to Politico.

Kagan said the Court had not closed the books

Even before the Justice Department’s criminal track became public, members of the Court signaled the matter was not finished.

At a congressional hearing in July, Justice Elena Kagan said the Court had not “closed the books” on the investigation and that any further information would be pursued “till the end.”

That language matters. The internal review ended without a name. Kagan’s comments left the door open. Pirro’s office is now walking through it with grand jury power the Court never had.

Questions remain over what charges could be brought if prosecutors identify a leaker. Separation-of-powers concerns complicate any case that reaches into the Court’s own staff and chambers. Those limits do not erase the core fact: someone broke the Court’s confidentiality rules, endangered justices, and walked away unidentified for years.

Four years later, accountability is finally on the table

The draft leak did more than spoil a pending decision. It shattered the expectation that people who work inside the Supreme Court building keep the Court’s confidences. Alito called that expectation a trust that existed “before that point.” After the leak, it did not.

For taxpayers and lawful citizens who expect basic institutional integrity, the sequence is hard to defend. A draft opinion lands at a news outlet. Threats follow. An internal probe interviews nearly 100 people and still finds no one by a preponderance of the evidence. Chief Justice Roberts brands the episode an egregious breach. Years pass. Only then do federal prosecutors issue grand jury subpoenas.

Pirro’s office is now pressing court staffers from that period for testimony and records. Career prosecutors are running the day-to-day work. The Justice Department will not discuss it on the record. The public still has no named suspect.

None of that changes the stakes. If the Court cannot keep its drafts secure, and if no one is ever held to account when those drafts hit the street, the next breach becomes easier to attempt and harder to deter. Law-and-order government starts with protecting the institutions that draft and apply the law, including the one that sits at the top of the federal judiciary.

A leak that put justices in the crosshairs deserved a real investigation from the start. Better late than never, and better with subpoenas than with another empty report.