Molly Hemingway

It's wonderful to be here with you.

Well, I interviewed close to 100 people for the book, and these were Supreme Court justices and federal judges, law professors, really high-level people.

And the thing that was the most revealing for me was about the reaction of the liberal justices to the Dobbs leak.

So when that leaked, the justices who signed on to the Dobbs decision – this was the one overturning Roe after 50 years – they had their lives threatened.

They had to wear bulletproof vests.

They had to be moved to secure locations.

And the liberal justices actually slow-walked their dissent, quite intentionally so, and against the wishes of their colleagues to kind of drag that out until –

the very last minute, even though their colleagues' lives were under threat.

And I just thought that was something, obviously, nobody knew that was going on behind the scenes, and it was just really surprising to learn that.

Okay, so the Dobbs decision was disseminated to all the justices by early February.

And that meant that the dissent could be written, you know, if it weren't already written by that point, they could fine-tune it.

And yet it leaks on May 2nd, which is three months later.

And they then meet in conference, the justices meet in conference, and they are shocked to find out that the Dobbs decision, which needs both the

majority opinion and the dissent in order to be made public.

They were shocked to find out that those justices did not have anything close to being ready to have it come out.

So some of the justices who were dealing with these daily threats at their homes, which led to an assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh, they said, can you speed it up?

So they say, ah, well, maybe we'll get to it by June.

And then when they finally get the dissent together by June, they include a completely gratuitous and unnecessary footnote to a case that was still being worked on, and so it didn't come out for another three-plus weeks.

Now, when you're dealing with daily threats every day at your home—your wife, your husband, your children are facing these—

That's a really long time period to go through when you know your colleagues could have done it much more quickly.