(Some, meanwhile, are convinced that it was Alito who leaked the opinion, perhaps as a means of ousting a chief justice who has been deemed insufficiently dogmatic.) For now, it seems like these assumptions will remain frozen in amber; we may never know who leaked the decision or why it was leaked. That’s a good thing. The dramatic rise of leak investigations—and the prosecutions of leakers—has been one of the worst recent developments in American politics, which is no small achievement given how many terrible developments American politics has yielded in recent years. The Obama administration’s hunt for leakers was rightly decried by the Committee to Protect Journalists as “the most aggressive … since the Nixon administration,” by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie.

Source: Wall Street Journal January 20, 2023 21:00 UTC