The FBI’s investigation into leaks at the Supreme Court hasn’t stopped new details from emerging about the fault lines that have developed between Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her fellow conservative justices.
President Donald Trump appointed Barrett in 2020 with the specific goal of overturning Roe v. Wade.
But in a key internal vote, she opposed taking up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 case that challenged a constitutional right to abortion, The New York Times reported.
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The other four conservative justices voted to hear the case anyway, betting that if forced to decide, Barrett would vote to eliminate federal abortion rights, two sources told the Times.
Her colleagues were right, and in May 2022 a draft of the decision was leaked to Politico that showed Barrett as the crucial fifth vote declaring that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start” and “must be overruled.”
The Supreme Court investigated the leak but announced in early 2023 that it had failed to uncover a culprit. The Trump administration announced last month that the FBI would revisit the issue.
The move came as FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino—a former MAGA podcaster—faced anger from their base for failing to expose the “deep state” conspiracy theories they had vowed to root out.
MAGA loyalists have also turned on Barrett after originally hailing the Dobbs decision as a “monumental miracle” from God. More recently, they’ve blasted her as “evil” and a “DEI hire” for failing to automatically greenlight President Donald Trump’s most authoritarian policies.
According to the Times, Barrett has forged bonds with the court’s liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor has been especially welcoming, calling Barrett to congratulate her on her appointment, offering her kids Halloween candy, and giving her daughter an 18th birthday present, Barrett has said in speeches.
The newest Supreme Court justice remains reliably conservative and has locked in conservative victories on gun rights, affirmative action, and the power of federal agencies, according to the Times. But since Trump took office, her decisions have not been as nakedly partisan as her supporters had hoped.
Over the past few months, the administration has bombarded the Supreme Court with emergency requests asking the justices to overturn lower court decisions blocking Trump’s agenda.
In Trump-related disputes, Barrett has emerged as the conservative justice who sides with the president the least, making her the Republican appointee who most frequently joins liberal decisions, a Times analysis found.
Along with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who has emerged as the court’s other swing vote, Barrett could be one of the few people in the country checking the president’s authority, according to the Times. Barrett notably has nevertheless avoided being targeted by the MAGA backlash.
That has put her at odds with the court’s most conservative wing, especially Justice Samuel Alito. Even when she sides with the conservatives, she sometimes writes concurrences saying she agrees with the outcome but not the path her colleagues took to get there.
One source from the court told the Times that Barrett was the Hermione Granger of conservatives, after the Harry Potter character who always tells the boys what they’re doing wrong.
Those concurrences might seem like minor points to the lay public, but they can have a profound impact on establishing new constitutional standards, which require a 5-4 majority.
Before being appointed to the Seventh Circuit federal court of appeals in 2017, Barrett was a professor at the University of Notre Dame teaching evidence, procedure, and topics focused on legal process.
During her lectures, she would say the U.S. has bound itself to the Constitution the way Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship, to resist the call of political sirens.
That worldview puts her inherently at odds with the Trump administration, which has viciously attacked the judiciary and refused to produce evidence in legal challenges to the president’s deportation policies and government cost-cutting initiatives.
In March, Barrett and Roberts sided with the liberal justices to reject Trump’s attempt to freeze $2 billion in congressionally approved aid for work that had already been completed.
Barrett then joined the liberal justices in a 5-4 case opposing Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, though the deportations were able to continue because Roberts sided with his fellow conservatives.
Last month, she did what the justices are supposed to according to the Code of Conduct they adopted in 2023 and recused herself from a case in which she had a personal conflict. Her decision led to a split 4-4 vote and a de facto loss for the conservatives.
Publicly Trump has defended Barrett, telling reporters she’s “very smart” and a “good woman,” but privately he has lashed out at her for being “weak.”
Before he appointed her just weeks before his 2020 election loss, some people had tried to warn the president that Barrett wasn’t conservative enough.
According to the Times, though, she looked the part of a deeply religious conservative woman—she has seven kids, two of them adopted—who would overturn Roe as Trump had promised.
In a statement to the Times, a spokesperson for the president said that Trump “may disagree with the court and some of its rulings, but he will always respect its foundational role.”
