Supreme Court

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 Supreme Court dealt President Donald Trump a blow on Monday evening, refusing to intervene in favor of the Justice Department's lawsuit demanding California set aside 20,000 ballots DOJ flagged as potentially having been cast by noncitizens.

Multiple courts have found that there is no valid reason to set aside the ballots, and the DOJ itself admitted in arguments that there is a high chance their list is full of errors.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court's denial resulted in an uproar from Trump supporters on X, with many attacking the court — and others suggesting the integrity of tomorrow's election is already doomed....

The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a fresh humiliation Monday night after it rejected an appeal to force California to set aside ballots cast by suspected illegal voters.

Earlier in the day, the Trump administration had asked the court to require California to set aside about 20,000 ballots cast by voters. However, the DOJ had admitted to lower courts that it created that list from a dataset that was chock-full of errors.

Election experts like Marc Elias, a voting rights lawyer, celebrated the court's move. ...

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority could deliver another major victory to religious conservatives, and doing so may require dismantling a landmark ruling written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, according to an analysis by CNN's Joan Biskupic.

In St. Mary Parish v. Roy, two Catholic preschools and the Archdiocese of Denver are asking the justices to let them participate in Colorado’s universal preschool program without signing the state’s nondiscrimination agreement, which covers sexual orientation and gender identity.

A federal appeals court sided with Colorado, relying on Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 decision holding that states don’t need a “compelling” interest to justify laws that are neutral toward religion and apply to everyone. “The nondiscrimination requirement exists in harmony with the First Amendment,” the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled....

In a speech at Catholic University’s law school, Justice Elena Kagan said the American public sees a troubling political system, and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and legal commentator Madiba Dennie say that’s a pointed warning about the Supreme Court itself.

Lithwick says Kagan is typically the most cautious justice on partisan topics, which makes a speech weeks before the midterms stand out.

In her speech, Kagan said Americans “look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare … and they’re right.”...

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed back Thursday after the Supreme Court blocked an order she said protected voters from misleading information about New Hampshire’s election rules.

The lone dissenter argued that her colleagues had misapplied a principle discouraging federal courts from changing voting rules close to an election.

“When a federal court determines that material misrepresentations are being made about a State’s election rules, an injunction to prohibit that conduct does not contribute to public confusion, it prevents that very problem,” Jackson wrote....

People in President Donald Trump’s orbit noticed an unsettling change after Republicans were dealt crushing midterm losses, according to author Michael Wolff.

Wolff, a journalist who has written several books about Trump, said on Thursday’s episode of “Inside Trump’s Head” that sources described a visible change in the president after Tuesday’s election, when Democrats seized control of both the House and Senate.

“The other interesting thing that I heard from two people, and they found it interesting and a little frightening, was that the day after he seemed markedly older,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles....

An election lawyer fresh from a deep-red state's ballot count says one embattled MAGA senator has hit a dead end.

Norm Eisen, the former White House ethics czar who served as counsel to House Democrats during President Donald Trump's first impeachment, told progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen in a Saturday episode of his YouTube show that Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) has no realistic path left to beat Democratic challenger Scott Colom. "It's a mathematical impossibility at this point for Senator Hyde-Smith," Eisen said.

Eisen, who said he spent three days in Mississippi and planned to head back the next day, pegged Colom's lead as "approaching a 3,000-vote margin." He compared the count to the 2000 Florida recount he worked on, when the gap bounced around in the hundreds....

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville singled out the one Republican he believes walked away from the GOP's election night drubbing stronger than before.

Speaking in a Wednesday episode of "Politics War Room," Carville named Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the GOP's surprise winner after Republicans narrowly held Florida while Texas flipped from red to blue.

"The Republican winner last night was Ron DeSantis," Carville said....