Confidential Supreme Court memos reveal how Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the emergency blocking of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2016, marking the second major leak from the nation’s highest court in just four years and raising serious questions about institutional integrity.

Roberts Led Emergency Intervention

The leaked documents obtained by the New York Times show Roberts urgently pushed fellow justices to halt Obama’s climate regulation before lower courts finished their review. The chief justice warned that without immediate action, the Clean Power Plan would cause irreversible changes to America’s power sector before the court could determine its legality. Roberts wrote the plan would force substantial reordering of domestic energy production, potentially cementing federal overreach before judicial review could occur.

Leakers Sabotaging Supreme Court AGAIN: Internal Memos Exposing Conservative Push to Block Obama’s Climate Power Grab Leaked to NYT | Cassandra MacDonald, The Gateway Pundit

In yet another brazen breach of the Supreme Court’s confidentiality, internal memos from a pivotal 2016… pic.twitter.com/oPXc0e7ufB

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) April 21, 2026

Justice Samuel Alito backed Roberts with his own memo, stating that failing to stop the regulation threatened to make meaningful judicial review impossible. Alito warned the court’s institutional legitimacy hung in the balance. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan pushed back hard, expressing serious concerns about the unusual nature of the emergency request. The justices ultimately voted 5-4 along ideological lines to block the plan in February 2016, effectively killing the regulation when Republicans won the White House nine months later.

Second Major Court Leak Raises Alarm

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley condemned the anonymous leak as clearly designed to damage specific justices. Turley noted this marks the second confidential breach after the 2022 Dobbs abortion decision leak. He wrote that for an institution built on confidentiality and insularity, the Supreme Court now appears increasingly porous and partisan through these security failures. The Supreme Court’s communications team has not responded to requests for comment about the breach.

What This Means

The leaked memos expose how swiftly the Supreme Court moved to stop a major presidential initiative, completing their emergency review in just ten days between late January and early February 2016. Legal experts view this case as an early example of aggressive use of the emergency docket, sometimes called the shadow docket. The Obama White House publicly dismissed the ruling as a minor setback at the time, but officials privately expressed shock at the court’s rapid intervention. The breach represents another blow to Supreme Court confidentiality and raises fresh concerns about political motivations behind high-profile leaks targeting conservative justices.