"It was quite a shock," Alito said. "But within a relatively short period of time, the thought occurred to me, and I think to the others in the majority, that this would endanger us. And it made us targets for assassination."This isn't the first time Alito has said this. He made the same argument in October 2022, a few months after the assassination attempt.
Security, Alito said, ramped up immediately. A month later, in June of 2022, the world would know why. In the middle of the night, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family slept in their Maryland home, a would-be assassin approached their backyard with a bag containing a gun and rounds of ammunition, a knife and nail punch, duct tape, zip ties, a crowbar and other burglary tools, including special shoes to silence his footsteps.
He was intent on killing justices before the Court released its Dobbs decision. With its narrow 5-4 majority, it would only take one justice. He said on private messaging boards he aimed to kill at least three of the conservatives and, as prosecutors later put it, "single-handedly and irrevocably to alter an entire branch of the United States government."
At the last minute, the man spoke to his sister on his cell phone, and she managed to talk him out of it. He was arrested and later convicted for the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh.
"His goal was to change the decision in the case. So that was quite predictable," Alito said. "And whoever leaked it knew or had good reason to know that that would be the consequence of leaking it. And Politico knew, or should've known, that that would be the consequence of their decision to publish it."
The leak to Politico ahead of the decision confirming that opinion overruling Roe v Wade "gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us," Alito said in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.He made the argument again six months later in a Wall Street Journal interview.
“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview....Except that the would-be assassin, then known as Nicholas Roske (and now known as Sophie Roske), didn't know it would be a 5-4 ruling. At the time of the leak, Politico reported that five right-wing justices were on board and three liberal justices were dissenting, but
“It was rational for people to believe they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”
How Chief Justice John Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already written opinion or draft his own, is unclear.It was also reported at the time that this wasn't Roske's sole motivation:
Roske told a Montgomery County Police detective "that he was upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to abortion as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas," the court documents say.No gun decision had been leaked at the time of Roske's assassination plot.
The court papers add, "Roske indicated that he believed the Justice that he intended to kill would side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws."
Please note that Alito hasn't argued that the leaker and the would-be assassin knew each other. In fact, he's implicitly arguing the opposite, because if they'd known each other, the leaker could have given the leaked decision to the would-be assassin privately -- it didn't need to be published. What Alito is arguing is that the leaker's thought process was this: I'll make this draft decision public, secure in the knowledge that someone out there will read it and think, "Okay, that's it, I'm going to start killing Supreme Court justices."
That's quite a leap of faith.
It also supposes that would-be assassins are motivated only by the perceived opportunity to change a specific government course of action and never by anger at a specific past act or series of acts. If you believe Alto's conspiracy theory, an assassination attempt was much more likely to happen happen when the Dobbs decision was pending than when it was on the books -- no one would be murderously angry at that point!
And this isn't how anything works. Powerful government officials will inevitably anger their critics. Some of those critics, inevitably, will want to react to what angers them with violence. In a society with free speech, that's not a justification for withholding important information from the public, although Alito -- whose job it is to defend the First Amendment -- may believe it is. The government (sometimes augmented by private security services) should protect public officials from violence. That's all a free society can do.
