After World’s Worst Investigation, Supreme Court Says It Can’t Find Who Leaked the Abortion Ruling

The Supreme Court has spent months investigating who might have leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, and the results released Thursday can best be paraphrased as such: “IDK, bro.”

The leaked draft last May caused widespread outrage, both in and outside the highest U.S. court. Protesters took to the streets, demanding the justices protect the right to abortion, but Chief Justice John Roberts was more concerned about the sanctity of the court, calling the leak a “betrayal of the confidences of the Court.” He assigned the marshal of the court and her team to investigate the source of the leak.

After a months-long investigation, the team announced Thursday it is “unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence.”

The court also consulted Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security, who confirmed the marshal “undertook a thorough investigation.”

Except … maybe not so much.

Investigators conducted 126 interviews of 97 court personnel, many of which were reportedly short and not exactly in-depth. Employees were asked to turn over the call and text logs from their personal cell phones, but investigators found “nothing relevant” in the records. Investigators also examined employees’ search histories to see if anyone was essentially stupid enough to Google, “Is it illegal for me to leak a Supreme Court draft opinion?” It appears no one was.

Several personnel admitted they had told their partners about the opinion draft, which violates the court’s confidentiality rules. It is unclear whether those staffers will face disciplinary measures and, more importantly, whether their partners were also questioned as potential leakers.

What’s more, the marshal’s report doesn’t specify whether any of the justices themselves were questioned, focusing instead on “Court personnel” and “temporary … and permanent employees.”

There has been plenty of speculation about who might have leaked the draft and why, but one thing is clear: This investigation was never going to give us those answers.

Nearly 500,000 school buses carry 25 million children to school across the country every day. And now America is in a full-swing effort to replace those buses with electric ones, setting the country on the path to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than five million tons—equivalent to removing one million cars from the road.

Though states have begun transitioning buses for years, the nationwide project follows the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which commissioned $5 billion toward the effort to replace old, diesel-fueled buses with new cleaner vehicles. The first round of funding distributed nearly $1 billion to districts in states nationwide, including Washington, D.C., and territories including Puerto Rico and Guam.

Such investments not only save millions in emissions and in fuel costs but also correlate to better health and academic outcomes for children: better school attendance, lower rates of asthma, and stronger general respiratory health and cognitive functioning. While electric buses may come at a higher cost at first, the investment pays dividends almost immediately.

And districts from coast to coast are reaping the benefits.

“Our district’s diesel fuel costs are tremendous,” Heath Oates, superintendent of Missouri’s El Dorado Springs R-II school district, told The Daily Yonder. “My initial estimates show we’re going to save around $200,000 a year, which is the cost of four beginning teachers with benefits.”

Pellston Public Schools in Michigan are estimated to save 80 percent in energy use, saving the 461-student district about $33,000 annually. The estimated reduction in maintenance costs is about 60 percent, which would offer another $23,812 in annual savings.

Nevada’s Clark County district, which operates the nation’s largest owned-and-operated school bus fleet, with nearly 2,000 buses serving 125,000 students, has just unveiled its first electric model. Just one bus is estimated to save $60 a day in fuel costs—scale that to the whole fleet, and the district could save nearly $120,000 per day.

Beyond the massive fiscal and emission-reduction benefits, the bus rides themselves improve. Bus drivers cite the “smoother ride” and substantial noise reduction as improvements both for their own sake and in enabling them to more easily hear and communicate with their young passengers.

Policies like school bus transitions are good in their own right: The benefits they proffer fiscally, environmentally, and even socially are valuable. But they also show people across the country why policy—and policy battles—matter at all. A society acquainted with the benefits of things like electric school buses would be one eager to demand more such changes.

The Treasury is having to resort to “extraordinary measures” to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debt, which could plummet the country into a recession, Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress Thursday.

In a letter, Yellen explained the U.S. has reached its $31.4 trillion debt limit, forcing her to take steps to ensure the government does not default and has a little more time to solve the problem. For now, those “extraordinary measures” include redeeming and suspending new federal investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. In a letter last week, Yellen also expected that the Treasury will suspend reinvestment of the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.

Suspending investment in these funds will preserve the country’s credit until June, but Yellen noted that the amount of time these measures will work is “subject to considerable uncertainty” and urged Congress to act quickly.

She warned last week that defaulting would cause “irreparable harm to the U.S. economy.”

The debt ceiling is the maximum amount of money the U.S. can borrow. The current level was set two years ago. If the government reaches its borrowing limit, it could default on its debt or fail to make a payment. Already high prices and inflation could skyrocket, sending the U.S. into a recession.

House Republicans, who hold the majority in the chamber, refuse to raise the debt ceiling and instead are trying to slash spending in other areas, such as entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare. But Democrats and President Joe Biden refuse to negotiate, with White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre warning Wednesday that the debt limit should not be used as a “political football.”

Defaulting means the government would be unable to pay military salaries and Social Security benefits. A lower debt ceiling would also mean less funding for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP or food stamps, and meal programs for low-income students.

During the last debt ceiling standoff in 2021, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, warned that defaulting would send the U.S. into an almost immediate recession, wiping out up to $15 trillion in household wealth and nearly doubling the unemployment rate from about 5 percent at the time to about 9 percent.

“This economic scenario is cataclysmic.… The downturn would be comparable to that suffered during the financial crisis” of 2008, Zandi and Bernard Yaros, Moody’s assistant director and economist, said in a report.

George Santos has lied about most of his background, including that his grandparents fled the Holocaust, that his employees died at the Pulse nightclub shooting, and that he was a star volleyball player at a school he didn’t attend.

But this week brought another array of revelations about Santos’s past. First, there was the report that he used his fake animal charity to raise money for a homeless veteran’s dying dog, before stealing the money. Then newly uncovered immigration records showed that Santos’s mother, who Santos had repeatedly implied died from 9/11-related afflictions, was not in the United States at all that day.

And finally, another new piece of information came from old photos circa 2008 in Brazil, showing Santos adorned in drag, under the moniker Kitara Ravache, grinning alongside Brazilian drag queen Eula Rochard.

On Thursday, Santos denied stealing money from a dying dog and that he performed in drag, but notably ignored reports that he lied about 9/11.

Santos/Devolder/Zabrovsky/Ravache’s tweets are among the few public statements he has made in direct response to the endless stream of revelations and questions about his past.

The volume of new information about Santos’s background is continually shocking. Similarly interesting is what revelations seem to bother Santos and which ones he is trying to let slip through the public’s consciousness, simply by sheer will of the lies being so insurmountable, so untrackable, that it’s hard to maintain meaningful scrutiny on him.

Based on the little time Santos has actually spent denying most of the charges against him, perhaps he understands his party to be willing to overlook lies about 9/11 and the Holocaust, but not the rest.

Donald Trump mistook the woman accusing him of rape for his ex-wife in a photograph during a deposition last year, contradicting one of his weakest but most-used arguments for his innocence.

Popular writer E. Jean Carroll is suing Trump for defamation and sexual assault. Trump has rejected the rape allegation, repeatedly saying that he never knew Carroll and that she is not his “type.”

Since Carroll accused Trump of assault, a photograph has been widely circulated and cited as proof that the two had met before. Taken in 1987, the picture shows Trump, Carroll, and their respective spouses, at the time Marla Maples and John Johnson, talking at a party. In an excerpt of Trump’s 2022 deposition, parts of which were unsealed Wednesday, Trump mistakes Carroll for Maples.*

Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba is quick to correct him, but only after Trump repeatedly insists that Carroll is Maples. The fact that he can’t differentiate between Carroll, a woman to whom he said he wasn’t attracted, and Maples, a woman to whom he definitely was, undermines Trump’s main case for his innocence.

In another unsealed excerpt of the deposition, given in October, Trump appallingly claimed that Carroll “loved” the assault.

“She said it was very sexy to be raped,” he said. He also repeatedly said Carroll was mentally ill.

Carroll accused Trump in her memoir, released in 2019, of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She has sued him twice for allegedly defaming her, first in 2019 when he said she made up the rape allegation in order to sell her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

She is not the only one: At least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault since the 1970s, all of which he was denied, and he bragged in a 2005 recording of the show Access Hollywood about grabbing women’s genitals and kissing them without their consent. So far, Carroll’s case has gotten the most national attention and is one of the few to actually reach a courtroom. Trump is expected to go on trial in April.

Sexual assault is about power, not desire, and Psychology Today notes the “motivation stems from the perpetrator’s need for dominance and control.” Trump has made clear the lengths he will go to for power, from trying to bully Ukraine into digging up dirt on his political rival to lying about the 2020 election being stolen and so much more.

* This article originally misstated the year of Trump’s deposition.