Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has made a move to secure the deliberations, private discussions, and working drafts of the court. According to the New York Times, Roberts is requiring all clerks and permanent staff to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The writer writes about this in a hushed tone, as though she is laying out the plot of a murder mystery. But there is nothing mysterious about the erosion of the court's integrity, which points directly to publications like the NYT and POLITICO happily disseminating what is leaked to them.
The chief justice acted after a series of unusual leaks of internal court documents, most notably of the decision overturning the right to abortion, and news reports about ethical lapses by the justices. Trust in the institution was languishing at a historic low. Debate was intensifying over whether the black box institution should be more transparent.
Instead, the chief justice tightened the court’s hold on information. Its employees have long been expected to stay silent about what they witness behind the scenes. But starting that autumn, in a move that has not been previously reported, the chief justice converted what was once a norm into a formal contract, according to five people familiar with the shift.
The NYT is making this sound nefarious and offensive. What it reflects is that any respect or honor for the institution of the Supreme Court has long passed. The new wave of activist clerks and personnel no longer consider it to be an institution worth protecting or preserving. When a person uses their access in the highest court in the land as an opportunity to further their own or someone else's political agenda, then any appeal to one's sense of honor or ethical code is an illusion.
This used to not be necessary because of the ethical duties that lawyers respected concerning their oaths, but clearly some of the most privileged no longer can be trusted to self-govern. This is why we can't have nice things... https://t.co/9uL6wRwwud
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) February 2, 2026
The fallout and leftist destruction after the leak of the Dobbs draft in 2022 and the subsequent damage it caused prove this.
The justices are accustomed to controlling what the public knows about their work, sealing nearly everything but their oral arguments and written opinions behind a high wall of secrecy. Courts are excluded from the open records laws that require many other government bodies to maintain and make available internal information.
The justices claim their papers belong to them, not the government or the public, and generally arrange to have them locked away until long after their deaths. The court releases no visitor logs to reveal who meets with the justices.
But in 2022, in a shock to many at the court, someone leaked a draft of the court’s decision overturning the federal right to abortion to Politico, which published the document weeks before the justices had intended to make it public. The court conducted an investigation of its staff but mostly spared the justices, and the source was never publicly identified.
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That is the heart of the problem: there was no public accountability for having leaked the document, and any punitive price (if any) was done in secret, instead of out in the open. No one batted an eyelash; thus, the leaks continued.
What is more interesting is that the leakers all seem to go to the New York Times, which has zero interest in the integrity of the court either; otherwise, they wouldn't publish these exclusives from anonymous sources.
More recently, The Times has been regularly publishing stories illuminating the court’s inner workings, including accounts of sensitive debates among the justices.
In September 2024, The Times published an article describing how the chief justice pushed to grant President Trump broad immunity from prosecution. The article quoted from confidential memos by the chief justice and other members of the court who applauded his reasoning. Weeks later, the chief justice abruptly introduced the nondisclosure agreements, after the term had begun.
And of course, the NYT and so-called experts do not see Chief Justice Roberts' move from the honor system to a legally-binding document as proactive; they see it as a sign that the court is weak, and, of course, it's Trump's fault.
Former clerks and academics, told by The Times about the Supreme Court’s new nondisclosure agreements, said they were a sign that the justices felt they could no longer rely on more informal pledges or longstanding norms to guard their internal workings from public view.
“They feel under the microscope and are unwilling to rely simply on trust,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher, co-director of the Supreme Court litigation clinic at Stanford Law School and a former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens.
The switch to formal contracts is “a sign of the court’s own weakness” and the erosion of an internal compact, said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida.
Court employees see the justices’ maneuverings, their compromises, tensions and reversals. They read the memos and draft opinions that tell the story of how the law is really shaped. That includes the secret negotiations behind so-called “shadow docket” decisions, emergency orders the court issues often with little or no public rationale. Since Mr. Trump took office, the court has repeatedly issued such emergency orders, allowing him to implement his agenda.
Much like what is transpiring over at the Pentagon, the SCOTUS is working to batten down and say less, while ensuring the work actually gets done. The spokesperson for the Supreme Court declined to comment to the NYT on the matter or answer their question on whether the justices were also required to sign NDAs. Despite these signed documents, "leakers" still appear to be actively leaking. Otherwise, the NYT would not have been able to wax eloquent about how secretive the court has become by requiring NDAs, while teasing all the court's secrets that they were still able to unearth.
Should this procedural shift ultimately have its intended effect, the SCOTUS journalists at the NYT and other outlets may suffer the same fate as their sports and foreign correspondent counterparts over at The Washington Post.
Editor's Note: Radical leftist judges are doing everything they can to hamstring President Trump's agenda to make America great again.
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