The leaked bombshell opinion showing that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade has sent conservative pundits scrambling to find who passed the document to Politico. Rather than find evidence of who’s behind the breach, the pro-Trump personalities have instead whipped up online mobs against random Supreme Court clerks based on tortured connections to the authors of the article.
On Tuesday, right-wing personality Will Chamberlain tweeted that he thought “I’ve found the Supreme Court leaker.” Chamberlain then launched a thread naming a clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer as his prime suspect.
“I could easily be wrong,” Chamberlain admitted in one tweet, but then went ahead with the rest of the thread earning more than 8,000 retweets as of Wednesday afternoon.
ADVERTISEMENT
“In my humble opinion, she’s the most likely person to have leaked the draft Supreme Court opinion,” Chamberlain wrote.
Chamberlain’s suspicions rest on the thinnest of connections. The clerk has written legal arguments for abortion rights, which wouldn’t be surprising for a lawyer who went on to clerk for a liberal justice. The clerk is married to a former Politico reporter who co-wrote an article five years ago with Josh Gerstein, the Politico reporter who broke the news of the abortion opinion.
Despite Chamberlain’s lack of actual proof the clerk had leaked the opinion to Gerstein, his fellow conservative internet personalities went wild with the allegations. Former Trump acting intelligence chief Richard Grenell praised Chamberlain’s speculation as “journalism.” MAGA figure Dinesh D’Souza tweeted to his more than two million followers that Chamberlain’s allegations were “fascinating.” Amy Kremer, a conservative activist who organized the Jan. 6 rally by the White House that preceded the Capitol riot, echoed Chamberlain’s claims against the clerk.
“That Supreme Court Leaker?” Newsmax host Greg Kelly tweeted. “Looks like Will Chamberlain figured it out!”
The conservative witchhunt to accuse random people of being behind the leak recalls earlier pro-Trump online mobs. In 2020, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and amateur MAGA sleuths online falsely alleged that a Georgia elections worker had committed crimes to steal the election for Biden. The accusations prompted a wave of death threats toward the worker. In 2016, Trump supporters terrorized a Washington pizzeria, convinced of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that held that Hillary Clinton sexually abused children in the restaurant’s basement. That conspiracy theory was promoted by right-wing figure Jack Posobiec, a frequent Chamberlain collaborator.
It’s not clear that a clerk was the person who gave Gerstein the opinion, or that the leak came from a liberal. The would-be leak hunters can’t even agree which clerk they think was behind the opinion’s publication. Elsewhere on the conservative internet, another group has fixated on a clerk for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. On Monday, Republican strategist Matt Wolking posted a viral Twitter thread naming the clerk and accusing the Sotomayor clerk of leaking the opinion. Wolking’s evidence consisted primarily of the fact that the clerk had, years earlier, been quoted in a Gerstein article while still in law school.
Chamberlain and Wolking didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At least one would-be leak hunter blamed future Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her clerks of leaking the opinion — nevermind that she hasn’t been sworn in.
Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield said Jackson would “be my first suspect,” and demanded to know whether her law clerks could have leaked the decision.
“I find it suspect that the first leak coming out of the Supreme Court in history comes shortly after Judge Jackson is confirmed,” Stinchfield said. “I want to know if her law clerks, who I am sure already have been hired, possibly even working at the high court already before her swearing-in, have access to these decisions.”
