Mollie Hemingway - Who Keeps Leaking The Supreme Court?

Another major Supreme Court leak is fueling concerns about chaos and internal breakdowns at the nation’s highest court. With confidential memos surfacing and tensions between justices reportedly boiling over, critics are asking whether someone inside the Court is deliberately undermining it.

Mollie Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist and author of Alito, joins the program to discuss the latest leaks, the culture inside the Court, and what it could mean for the future of the institution.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails. There's a brand new book out, and it is by an author who is the editor-in-chief of the Federalist, Molly Hemingway, who has been gone from my program for far too long. Uh the new book is called Alito, The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. But I want to ask Molly first, Molly, welcome to the show. And do you know who it is that keeps leaking things from the U.S. Supreme Court? And what in the world is is making that happen?

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Well, Lars, first off, it is wonderful to be back with you. And as for who's doing the leaking, I think it's a kind of new strategy that is being used by people on the left. There was news this weekend from the New York Times about the leak of a 2016 memo from Chief Justice John Roberts. It's pretty obvious that leak is coming from people affiliated with one of the current or former liberal justices. In the case of the Dobbs Leak, which I get in, I get like super into the story of the Dobbs Leak in my book, Alito, and tell about what that investigation was like and what people on the court and in the court think about who did it. I think that might be more likely to have been a clerk or someone like that rather than a justice.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

So you think the second leak might actually be a justice leaking the information?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Well, no, again, people close to the justice. So it could be people who have access to Ruth Vader-Ginsburg's papers, or it could be someone close to retired Justice Stephen Breyer. Obviously, the current three liberals on the court have been very vocal about how much they don't like the way the conservatives on the court are responding to that left-wing judicial effort to use nationwide injunctions to thwart the will of the people. But, you know, there are many people who could be involved.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I'm talking to Molly Hemingway. She's editor-in-chief of the Federalist and the author most recently of Alito, the Justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution. Why is Alito so very important and why did you choose him to profile in this way?

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Well, a couple of years ago, and I believe I was on the show talking about this with my co-author at the time, Carrie Severino, we wrote a book about Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation. And when we did that, we interviewed close to a hundred people. We talked with a lot of high-level people, including Supreme Court justices, and many of them just flat out said, it's wild that nobody pays attention to Alito because he's an absolute giant on this court. And so that kind of sparked my interest of wanting to know more about him because people really don't know about him. This was before he was he authored the landmark Dobbs decision that overturned Roby Wade, which had been a goal of the conservative legal movement for 50 years, and nobody had had the courage to do it until him. But he what he had this interesting jurisprudence, which I think is particularly ripe for right now, which is that he is very principled and he's also very pragmatic. And the right right now has all these debates about whether you should be principled or whether you should try to win at any cost. And Alito shows that you can be both, that you can be principled and pragmatic. They are not necessarily in conflict with each other, and that you shouldn't err on one side or the other. So it just seemed the right time to get his story out, his approach to the law, which I think is not just good for lawyers, but also good for Americans in general.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Molly, let me ask you about the principled side of this, because something that's kind of troubled me. Uh maybe people don't know this, but if if you're at a at the kind of level that you'd have to be at a law as a lawyer to be even considered to be an associate justice, let alone chief justice, you'd be working at a law firm probably making a couple of million bucks a year. But you agree to take a spot on the court for around I think the in round number it's about a quarter million dollars. Now you get the job forever, but you're not going to make the kind of major money that a major attorney would make. But you agree to do that because you get the stature and everything else of being on the U.S. Supreme Court. But it seems as though a lot of the members of the court in the number in the most recent years, they get favors from friends, they get book deals, they get all kinds of other things. How much could we expect of these members of the court and speaking fees and things like that? I mean, should we put some limits on that? Because the the question kind of came up, in particular about Clarence Thomas, but but about other members of the court as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Well, you are absolutely right to note that each and every one of these justices on the court could be making a lot more money than they make as public servants. Alito, in particular, with his brilliance, could be making a lot in complex uh litigation cases. And one of the things that's very frustrating, I think, is that you have all these clerks who come straight out of law school, they clerk for the Supreme Court, and then they leave and they get they get signing bonuses that are bigger than the annual salaries of the justices that they just served.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Thank you for pointing that out, Molly, because I don't think people get that.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah, it's a crazy situation. And as for the issue of like speaking, you know, be if they were able to be paid for speaking, I think the bigger challenge for the justices right now is that if you're on the left, you can fly all over the world on someone else's dime. You do get invited to elite law schools where they do fancy dinners and serve fancy wine. If you're not on the left, you might get shot and killed. I mean, it's it's a completely disparate situation. And if you take a trip, they say you've done something so horrible, even though it's like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer and you know, other people who were not on the right, who were kind of known for gallivanting all over the world or having issues of that kind. If you're going to criticize Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, who are kind of like not even in that same sphere, Sam Alito in particular, who's like never going out and always pays his half of dinner if he does, and you're not criticizing the justices on the left who are like partying with Beyoncé and getting large art donations. It's it's the hypocrisy and double standards that are untenable, I think, for the justices on the court.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

I'm talking to Molly Hemingway, who's author most recently of Alito, the Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution. I don't see a problem with any of it as long as it's all disclosed. Just say, put out a filing, you know, every six months or every year or whatever, and say, this is all the stuff I got, the trips I got, the, you know, favors I got, things like that, and just disclose it all and let the public draw their own conclusions. Is that is that a fair way of handling it?

SPEAKER_01 6:39

I think that's fair. And I also think we actually should think about the money situation. You're not going to get top caliber people willing to go through what these people have to go through, particularly on the right.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

On the right.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

If if the if the pay isn't good, the security isn't good, you know, your children's lives are being threatened. You do have to think about that. And a functioning Supreme Court, and we are blessed to have a you know pretty well-functioning Supreme Court, it doesn't just exist. You have to protect it as well.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

No, and I wouldn't I wouldn't object if they said we're going to pay more, because when you say, you know, 225,000, whatever the number is, it's it's right in that range. And you say, what does a starting associate out of one of the top law schools in America make when they go to work for a New York, Chicago, Philly, or Washington, D.C. firm about the same as a Supreme Court justice, and you say, Frank, that doesn't sound equitable to say, you know, but you get the stature and the prestige, yeah, but it doesn't pay the rent. So I I would like to see uh maybe better results and and when somebody leaks, and if it was a clerk that leaked it, I just still can't understand how they did not catch the person who did that. That is Molly Hemingway. Her latest book is called Alito. She's the editor in chief at The Federalist. We'll be back in just a moment. Glad to get your calls at 866 439 5277. Send your emails to talk at largelarston.com.