Jim Jordan demands to know why authorities were ‘discouraged’ from arresting Supreme Court protesters

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote to the head of the US Marshals Service on Wednesday demanding to know why officers were told not to arrest protesters outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices.

In the letter to US Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis, Jordan requests information related to alleged training slides that discouraged Marshals from arresting individuals protesting the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion last May in the case that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade. 

“Following the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in May 2022, some Supreme Court justices faced relentless protests at their homes, seemingly intended to influence the Court’s decision,” Jordan wrote.

“Although federal law prohibits picketing near the residence of a federal judge with the intent to influence the judge’s official duties, recent evidence indicates that the U.S. Marshals protecting the justices were directed to ‘not’ conduct arrests ‘unless it was absolutely necessary.’”

Jordan called the alleged directive for law enforcement to stand down –  apparently in violation of federal law –  “troubling,” and more so in the context of “recent left-wing attempts to intimidate and influence the Court.”

The Ohio Republican then cites Senate Democrats’ 2019 attempt to bully the court by threatening to have it “restructured,” Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) 2020  threat that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh will “will pay the price” for “awful decisions,” and the Senate’s recent attempt at judicial ethics reform as intimidation tactics. 

Jordan notes in the letter that aside from the arrest of Nicholas John Roske, who was charged in June 2022 with attempting to murder Kavanaugh, his committee is “aware of no other arrests or charges for agitators demonstrating outside of the justices’ homes — despite the actions clearly violating federal law.” 

“The training materials provided to the U.S. Marshals strongly suggest that the Biden Administration is continuing to weaponize federal law enforcement agencies for partisan purposes,” Jordan argues, demanding that Davis provide the Judiciary Committee documents related to his agency’s communications with the Justice Department and the White House. 

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, told the Wall Street Journal last week that the leak was “part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court.”

Alito also said justices who supported overturning Roe were “really targets of assassination.”

“It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us,” Alito said of threats that emerged after the leak, including the arrest of Roske — days before the ruling was announced.

Alito also recalled being forced to speak to law students at George Mason University in northern Virginia via videoconference about 10 days after the leak following the intervention of local police, who cited “severe” problems with security at the venue. 

Alito said he now feels safe in large part because he is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.”