President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has quietly taken its hunt for whoever leaked the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs abortion ruling to a grand jury, pushing the inquiry inside the court.
Prosecutors have sent grand jury subpoenas for testimony in recent weeks and sought information from people who worked at the court when the draft leaked in 2022, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, is overseeing the investigation, the newspaper reported. She has assigned one of her top deputies, Carlton Davis, to the case along with several career prosecutors.
The inquiry could expose the court’s inner workings to the kind of scrutiny it has always worked to avoid, people familiar with it told the Times.
Cooperating with prosecutors could mean giving them access to court employees and highly restricted records, including files that show the justices’ private deliberations in the abortion case, the Times reported.
Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe did not respond to the newspaper’s questions, including how much the court has cooperated. A spokesman for Pirro’s office declined to comment.
If the leak was not a crime, the investigation could violate the separation of powers that protects the court’s independence, Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, told the Times. That could amount to “the executive branch harassing members of the judicial branch,” he said.
The case follows a familiar pattern in which Trump demands an unusual investigation and his political appointees try to deliver, the Times reported.
“That person should be found,” Trump said of the leaker in July, according to the newspaper.
“I can’t discuss anything regarding that matter,” Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) at an October 2025 hearing when he asked whether the leak was a crime, SCOTUSblog reported. “That should answer your question.”
The Times reported that the criminal case had not been reported until Thursday. Bondi’s answer signaled the matter was still open, but the grand jury work went on out of public view.
It is also unclear why the case has picked up now, including whether White House pressure played a role, the newspaper reported.
The leaker has never been publicly identified, and even if prosecutors find the person, it is not clear what crime they could charge, the Times reported.
In May 2022, Politico published the draft, two months before the court formally released the ruling, according to the Times.
The court’s own investigation interviewed 97 staff members and clerks but could not identify a suspect, the Times reported.
Some experts have said prosecutors could use a law against stealing government property or one meant to protect confidential government information, though either would be an unusual use of those laws, the Times reported.
Some of the laws that could apply give prosecutors five years to bring charges, a window that would close in the spring, the Times reported.
Davis, the deputy that Pirro assigned to the case, also oversaw the failed effort to indict six Democratic lawmakers who reminded troops they could refuse illegal orders, the Times reported. A Washington grand jury declined to indict them in February, the legal news site Jurist reported.
Grand jurors and judges in Washington have repeatedly thwarted cases that carry even a hint of following Trump’s demands, the Times reported. Grand juries’ growing distrust of the Justice Department has convinced some senior officials that a politically sensitive case may be impossible to bring until Trump leaves office, the report said.