Left-wing mobs camped outside conservative justices’ homes after somebody inside the Supreme Court handed them a target.

Democrats shrugged, called it free speech, and let the trail go cold for years.

And Donald Trump just made one move the leaker’s allies never planned for.

Pirro’s Grand Jury Pried Open a File the Court Gave Up On

President Trump’s Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the 2022 leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe v Wade and returned the protection of unborn life to the states.

US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office in Washington, DC is running the probe, according to multiple sources who spoke to Fox News. Those sources say the investigation has been underway for at least a year, and prosecutors have already sent out grand jury subpoenas.

Nobody outside the probe knows who got them. The New York Times, which broke the story, reported that prosecutors are seeking information from people who worked at the Court when the draft slipped out the door.

That’s a long way from where things stood in January 2023. Court Marshal Gail Curley and her team interviewed nearly 100 employees, picked through devices, printers, and phone logs, and walked away with nothing. Nobody confessed. No forensic trail pointed at anyone.

Chief Justice John Roberts even brought in former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to grade the homework. Chertoff couldn’t think of another stone to turn over.

But the leak never really belonged in a filing cabinet. It started something.

The Leak Handed Activists a Map to Five Front Doors

Politico published the draft on May 2, 2022. Within days, a pro-abortion outfit calling itself Ruth Sent Us started steering protesters toward the private homes of what it called the “six extremist justices, three in Virginia and three in Maryland.”

The group dressed it up nicely. “If you’d like to join or lead a peaceful protest, let us know,” it posted.

Peaceful. On the sidewalk outside a judge’s house. With his family inside.

Federal law already had a name for that. A statute Congress passed in 1950 makes it a crime to picket or parade near a judge’s home with the intent of influencing a case. The crowds barely hid their intent. They wanted the justices to flip their votes before the final ruling came down.

And Merrick Garland’s Justice Department never brought a single case under that law. Republicans in Congress went further and accused the department of actively discouraging the US Marshals Service from enforcing it.

On June 8, 2022, police arrested an armed California man near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland. Prosecutors charged him with attempting to assassinate the justice. That very same day, according to the Daily Signal, Ruth Sent Us called for protests at Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home and church in a post that discussed her family’s daily schedule.

The man later pleaded guilty, and a federal judge handed him roughly eight years. Plenty of conservatives still consider that a bargain for somebody who crossed the country armed and hunting a Supreme Court justice.

Washington Shrugged While the Firebombs Flew

The home protests were only the polite wing of the movement.

A militant group called Jane’s Revenge claimed credit for firebombing the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action, a pro-life group in Madison, just days after the leak. The attackers left a spray-painted warning on the building telling pro-lifers that if abortion wasn’t safe, they weren’t safe either.

Then the group kept going. It claimed responsibility for firebombing a pregnancy resource center in western New York in June 2022, and its blog cheered on a wave of vandalism and arson against pro-life centers and churches from Oregon to Vermont.

US Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) put it bluntly in a letter to the FBI. “Perhaps most concerning are organized violent groups like Jane’s Revenge and Ruth Sent Us,” he wrote.

But federal prosecutors took their sweet time. Not until January 2023 did a grand jury indict two activists tied to the group over attacks on Florida pregnancy centers. Meanwhile, the same Biden Justice Department found plenty of energy to haul pro-life activists into court under the FACE Act for praying and blockading outside abortion facilities.

One set of activists got SWAT-style urgency. The other got patience.

Left-Wing Violence Didn’t Stop at the Justices’ Driveways

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Dobbs majority opinion, recently told Fox News host Shannon Bream exactly what the leak did.

“It was a grave breach of the trust that everybody who worked in this building had before that point,” Alito said. “And it very predictably made the five of us in the majority targets for assassination and nearly resulted in the assassination of my colleague Brett Kavanaugh.”

Alito added that he has an opinion about who did it, but said the evidence isn’t strong enough yet to name anyone. That restraint is worth noting. Washington rarely sees a man with a suspicion keep his mouth shut.

Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the finest justices of the modern era and a man the Left has tried to tear down since 1991, described the damage in plain terms shortly after the leak. “You begin to look over your shoulder,” he said.

And that feeling didn’t stay inside the marble walls. The radical Left spent the next few years proving the leak was no one-off. Two assassination attempts targeted Donald Trump in 2024. A gunman murdered Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. US Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) recently warned that the radical Left has embraced what she called “assassination culture.”

Maybe the leaker never pictured a gunman on Kavanaugh’s street. Then again, anybody who follows the news knows what a list of names and addresses does in this climate. It doesn’t take a law degree to see where a target list ends up.

The usual suspects will now cry politics. Democrats just grabbed both chambers of Congress, and they’ll hold subpoena power over the same Justice Department now chasing the leaker. Expect them to point at Pirro’s recent grand jury failures and call this probe a witch hunt aimed at former clerks.

Fair or not, prosecutors still have to figure out which crime fits. No federal statute specifically bans leaking a draft opinion, so any case could hinge on something like lying to investigators. That’s a hard road. But a grand jury with subpoena power can ask questions a court marshal never could.

The Democrat Party never treated the summer of 2022 as the emergency it was. Its leaders branded January 6 an existential threat while firebombs hit pregnancy centers and crowds chanted outside the homes of judges. That double standard tells voters everything about whose violence counts.

The Senate passed extra security protections for the justices’ families by unanimous consent in May 2022. The House didn’t pass the bill until June 14, six days after police arrested an armed man near Brett Kavanaugh’s home.

Sources:

Fox News, “DOJ launches criminal probe into Supreme Court leak that exposed ruling overturning Roe v Wade”

Townhall, “Trump DOJ Pursuing Criminal Investigation Into the Dobbs Decision Leak”

Washington Examiner, “Pirro’s office leading criminal investigation into Supreme Court Dobbs leak”

Daily Signal, reporting on Ruth Sent Us and enforcement of 18 USC 1507

Office of US Senator Chuck Grassley, letter to the FBI on abortion-related extremism

MinistryWatch, “Pregnancy Center Sues Jane’s Revenge for Attacks Last Summer”

Catholic League, Jane’s Revenge fact sheet