(Washington) One of the nine conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court claimed in a rare interview published Friday that he and some of his colleagues had become a potential “target of assassination” after the leak that revealed last year that the temple of law was preparing to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
Author of the decision that effectively buried the federal abortion guarantee by returning the question to the states, Samuel Alito told the wall street journal have “a fairly precise idea” about the author of this leak, which had the effect of a bomb in the country in May 2022. But he did not say more about the presumed identity of this person.
The Supreme Court has been profoundly overhauled by former Republican President Donald Trump who brought in three judges, solidifying his conservative majority (six judges out of nine).
“Those of us who were considered to be in the majority, as having approved my draft decision, were really the (potential) target of assassination,” he said. “It was rational for people to believe that they could stop the decision by killing one of us,” he added.
Mr. Alito said he did not feel “physically in danger, because we have a lot of protection”.
He said he was moving “in what is basically a tank”, “and I’m not really supposed to go anywhere without the tank and without my police officers”.
As for the leak, “I personally have a fairly precise idea of who is responsible, but to designate someone, it is necessary to have a different level of evidence,” he said.
This unprecedented leak, revealed by the Politico site, had caused an earthquake. The media said it had obtained the draft of a majority decision written by Samuel Alito.
In this text, the magistrate said that Roe v. Wade, who nearly half a century ago argued that the US Constitution protected women’s right to abortion, was “completely unfounded from the start”.
“We believe that Roe v. Wade must be annulled”, added Samuel Alito, for whom the right to abortion “is not protected by any provision of the Constitution”.