Washington is a city of journalists.
The capital of
Watergate
and the
Pentagon Papers
.
The home of Deep Throat and the boulevard of broken dreams for young reporters who come from all over the country to work day and night while dreaming of
that
exclusive.
It's also that place where a leak can still become a phenomenal news story on its own.
It happened on Monday night, when the
Politico
website , founded in 2007 to report on the intricacies of US power, published the first draft of the majority opinion of five of the nine Supreme Court justices against abortion.
If confirmed, it would strike down the precedent of another court ruling,
Roe v. Wade,
that guarantees since 1973 the right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy in the United States, to return that legislative power to the 50 States.
Despite such fierce competition for the scoop, it is the first time in the modern history of the institution in which an escape of these characteristics takes place, which threatens to change its rules of the game forever.
At the moment, it has precipitated an investigation, launched by its president, John Roberts, to locate the exact point of the leak.
In a statement issued Tuesday, he said: “If this betrayal of confidentiality that governs our work is intended to undermine our integrity, it will not succeed.
Our work will not be affected in any way.”
More information
The United States Supreme Court is preparing to repeal the right to abortion
That secrecy in which the nine magistrates (and their teams of advisers and assistants) had operated until now was taken for granted in Washington as a guarantee of the integrity of an institution that, in a certain way, was placed above the rest.
There are leaks (almost always self-interested) from the White House, the Pentagon and the legislature (just one example: the committee investigating the assault on Capitol Hill in Congress is a source of fresh news).
But the high court had always remained on the sidelines: the judges' feelings were reported in this or that deliberation (journalism about the Supreme Court is based above all on the interpretation of its texts and interventions in the oral hearing) and even on one occasion
time
magazine
He advanced a sentence by two hours, but nobody remembers the full publication of a draft.
Written in February by conservative judge Samuel Alito, it is still subject to review and may have changed since it was written.
For the reporter Joshua Prager, who last fall discovered in his book
The Family Roe
the identity of the girl who was in the middle of the case (her mother sought her abortion, but the slowness of justice caused her to be born and given up for adoption) , what happened this week is the definitive demonstration that the Supreme Court has become a "political body."
“I am a journalist, I believe in exclusives, but I am also an American who loves his country.
For this to work, you have to let those judges work.
From now on they will be paranoid, and that is not good.”
In an opinion article published this Wednesday in
The New York Times,
Adam Liptak, a reference in Washington for everything that has to do with the high court, points out that this only confirms what "much of the nation already knew" : that the current Supreme is not abstracted from the political polarization that governs the country.
“The internal disorder that the leak suggests is a blow to its legitimacy, sentence in a text that starts with a Latin “as old as the Roman Empire”:
“Cui bono?
Who benefits?
Answering that question correctly would tighten the net on would-be leakers.
But it is not so easy, because, like almost all the questions that arise every day on the political scene of a country that is increasingly split in half, it admits of two answers.
It could serve the interests of the Democrats, who are in need of stimuli to mobilize their undecided voters for the November legislative elections, in which they are losing.
Just the news that the repeal of
Roe v. Wade
is approaching has managed to propel thousands of his supporters onto the streets of cities across the country.
It is also possible that whoever leaked the text wanted to show a still photo of the judges' positions in February to ensure that they do not change in June (or early July), when the final sentence is expected.
The Josh Gerstein Exclusive
The guy who got the part is a Politico
court reporter
named Josh Gerstein (who co-signed the piece with Alexander Ward of the national desk).
Obviously, they have not revealed his sources, but the scandal has put those sources in the spotlight, so much so that, according to some voices, the FBI could become involved in the investigation.
Have they then committed any crime?
Experts on the First Amendment, that of free speech, basically agree that it isn't.
Law professor Orin Kerr, from the University of Berkeley, is among them: “Criminal laws persecute the dissemination of classified information, of course.
But such a document is not classified.”
Every journalist knows that the feeling you get when your competition
raises
a story (so they say in the jargon) is quite similar to the stages that the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross established to define the phases of grief: denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance.
In this case, everything went a little faster.
The big US media skipped several steps and rushed to publish the exclusive, replicated by reporters who recognized that, exceptionally, they had not been able to contrast it, due to the proverbial impenetrability of the Supreme Court.
The Washington Post
justified itself by saying that "they had no reason to believe that the document was false."
Gerstein conceded almost immediately after hitting the publish button an interview with Rachel Maddow, MSNBC's star presenter, which made her opponent, Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, suspect on air that something was up to the left en bloc (she defined in twice what happened as "insurrection against the Supreme").
Gerstein was confident on the air of the authenticity of the draft ("we have information that supports that assessment," he added, with a certain frightened face).
It's not hard to imagine that when, the next day, Roberts, the chief justice, admitted that the draft was “authentic, but not final”, the
Politico
journalist , who tweeted the statement quickly, could breathe a sigh of relief.
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