Strong vibes here from Joan Biskupic that the leaker must have come from the Court’s conservative side, not the liberal one.

We already knew, or sort of knew, from the now famous WSJ editorial in late April that Roberts was lobbying the Court’s conservatives not to overturn Roe. John wrote about it on April 27, less than a week before Politico published the draft of Alito’s opinion. That created a motive for a pro-lifer inside the Court to have leaked the opinion: After all, if Roberts was going to work on Kavanaugh and Barrett to switch their votes, one way to try to lock them into those votes was to alert the wider public that they’d already voted informally to ditch Roe. Once the public knew that, any last-second vote switches to the pro-choice position would have looked like a failure of nerve, destroying the switcher’s credibility.

The timing is similarly important in Biskupic’s piece in trying to sniff out which side of the Court leaked Alito’s draft. A liberal would have had a motive to leak it if they either didn’t know that Roberts was lobbying the conservatives to switch their votes or if they did know but had reason to believe that those efforts had conclusively failed. If the five votes to overturn Roe were already “locked in” then a disgruntled lib might have decided to torch the Court’s mystique in frustration, leaking the draft to shatter the code of silence among personnel and maybe trying to galvanize a political backlash that would cause members of the majority to switch after all.

But according to Biskupic, Roberts was still lobbying the majority to switch during the week when the Court learned of the leak. And presumably, if the Wall Street Journal had reason to know that he was working on Kavanaugh and Barrett, liberals who work at the Court itself would have had reason to know as well. All of that being so, it would have been foolish in the extreme for a pro-choice employee to blow up Roberts’s efforts by leaking the opinion, knowing how it might lock the tentative majority in. But it would have been quite rational for a pro-life employee to leak it for exactly the same reason.

Biskupic claims Roberts continued to try to save Roe “to the bitter end,” preferring a ruling that would have upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban without getting rid of Roe entirely.

Multiple sources told CNN that Roberts’ overtures this spring, particularly to Kavanaugh, raised fears among conservatives and hope among liberals that the chief could change the outcome in the most closely watched case in decades. Once the draft was published by Politico, conservatives pressed their colleagues to try to hasten release of the final decision, lest anything suddenly threaten their majority.

Roberts’ persuasive efforts, difficult even from the start, were thwarted by the sudden public nature of the state of play. He can usually work in private, seeking and offering concessions, without anyone beyond the court knowing how he or other individual justices have voted or what they may be writing…

The May 2 disclosure of the first draft in Dobbs made an already difficult task nearly impossible. It shattered the usual secrecy of negotiations and likely locked in votes, if they were not already solid.

To the extent that liberals had hoped that the original vote by conservatives would change, that hope faded. Meanwhile, CNN has learned, Politico’s disclosure accelerated the urgency of the conservative side to try to issue the opinion before any other possible disruptions.

An important note: As far as Biskupic’s sources can tell, Kavanaugh’s vote was never really in play. Roberts gave it his best shot but it was “unlikely” that Kav ever got close to flipping. That diminishes the motive a pro-life employee would have had to leak the draft — but then again, how many people inside the building had a solid sense of how firm Kavanaugh’s commitment to the majority was?

It’s possible that CNN is being fed a line of bull by self-interested sources, of course. For instance, maybe people sympathetic to Roberts want it known for legacy purposes that he fought like a champ for precedent and might have succeeded if not for the rascally leaker who foiled his efforts with foul play.

Or, more deviously, maybe this was leaked by pro-choicers — possibly the leaker themselves — to throw investigators off the scent. It was just yesterday that the AP checked in with the Court to see how the probe was going, renewing public attention to the matter. Maybe the leaker is in fact a liberal and had no idea that Roberts was still lobbying Kavanaugh to switch his vote when he or she opted to share the draft opinion with Politico out of pure “burn it all down” rage. In fact, maybe the leak investigation is starting to get close to them, risking exposure. In which case they’d have an incentive to offer Biskupic some nonsense about how the leak thwarted Roberts’s effort to flip Kavanaugh, creating a phony conservative motive to have shared the opinion with Politico and obscuring the actual liberal one.

Still, there’s that small matter of the WSJ editorial on April 27. The Journal editorial board is conservative and it was conservatives inside the Court who had a reason to expose Roberts’s machinations to upset the anti-Roe majority, not liberals. That lines up with Biskupic’s report today.

Here she is this morning on CNN relaying what her sources have told her. She says Court employees are increasingly skeptical that the leaker will ever be found.

New CNN reporting from @JoanBiskupic: Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied his fellow conservative justices to preserve Roe v. Wade – but the unprecedented leak of the draft opinion may have doomed his efforts. pic.twitter.com/g0fKkIT14f

— New Day (@NewDay) July 26, 2022