NY Times smearing Chief Justice Roberts strikes new low in left’s Supreme Court war

In an ugly escalation of the left’s war on the Supreme Court, The New York Times last week offered up a hit on Chief Justice John Roberts, falsely charging him with “deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited” Donald Trump in “a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases.”

Plus, the story relied in part on leaks of confidential court documents — which means court staff, and possibly one of the justices, are actively helping the progressive attack on the institution.

The smear itself was pathetic: The Times’ Jodi Cantor and Adam Liptak claim Roberts boosted Trump in three cases:

• One (slapping down Colorado’s attempt to keep Trump off its ballot) was decided 9-0, showing Trump needed no help: The issues were clear even to the three liberal justices.

• The second wasn’t really about Trump, but whether prosecutors had improperly charged 250 Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol rioters with “obstructing an official proceeding.” It wound up 6-3 — with Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett “switching sides” to vote with the opposite “blocs.”

Cantor and Liptak mainly obsess on an oddity: Roberts originally assigned the task of writing the majority opinion to Justice Samuel Alito, but later took it on himself.

Yet the Times reporters themselves note that the switch came after lefties claimed Alito should recuse himself, suggesting Roberts was simply trying to avoid needless controversy — a move that, anyway, didn’t impact the ruling’s result.

• Only the third decision meaningfully “helped Trump”: the ruling on presidential immunity. Yet the main way Roberts “deployed his authority” was by agreeing with the court’s liberals that the Supremes should take up Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling immediately, rather than not hearing the case until October, which would’ve stalled any trial past Election Day.

And Roberts had made his view of the root issues crystal-clear in a confidential February memo to his colleagues — a memo that, per Cantor and Liptak, “several people from the court” later discussed with the reporters.

Such leaking is a far larger violation of high-court ethics than any of the lefty complaints of recent years: How can the court even function if the justices can’t communicate frankly with each other?

This follows the leak of the draft Dobbs decision (overturning Roe v. Wade) two years ago, another plainly politically motivated outrage by some court insider.

And suspicion has to fall on Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the memo leak: Her hysterical dissent in the prez-immunity case charges that the ruling makes every president “a king above the law,” causing her to “fear for our democracy.”

Plus, Cantor and Liptak paint her as upset that Roberts passed on her effort to find some compromise — again, though his February memo plainly spelled out where he was always going to wind up.  

All this follows extensive “ethics” smears against Justices Clarence Thomas (especially) and Sam Alito (plus the now-routine confirmation-hearing smears of any Republican high-court nominee).

Yet somehow there’s no ethics storm about, say, KJB’s $3 million book deal, nor Sotomayor’s $3.7 million in book payments.

Bad enough that this campaign has reduced public faith in the Supreme Court — the only branch of the federal government that’s not badly dysfunctional these days.

Worse that the leaks to the Times indicate that the rabid insanity is starting to infect the high court itself.