U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito participates in taking a new family photo with his fellow justices at the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 1, 2017.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito may have planted the story of his resignation that was published then retracted by NPR on Tuesday in an attempt to uncover a leak in his staff. This so-called “canary trap,” says one advocate of the theory, is the only explanation for the news outlet’s mistake.
This is according to conservative journalist Miranda Devine, who posted on Wednesday, “The only way the Totenberg-Alito story makes sense is that this veteran NPR legal reporter had a trusted and highly placed source inside SCOTUS who confirmed that Alito was retiring. No editor would publish such a story unless the reporter were reliable. A reliable reporter does not say 'oh I thought I heard something' without double-checking with a source to confirm. Ideally she would call Alito to confirm as well. But somehow Totenberg and her editors at NPR were satisfied that her sourcing was impeccable without official on the record confirmation.”
In other words, Devine is saying that it is highly unlikely that such a story would be run based solely on what the NPR journalist who wrote the story, Nina Totenberg, claimed was something she misheard in the court halls. Typically a new organization requires a report to be confirmed, and as CNN noted, Totenberg’s explanation “didn’t fully explain why NPR published the report without additional confirmation.”
With all this in mind, Devine suggests, it is more likely that Totenberg, in fact, did have a second source inside the court who had provided reliable information in the past. “That leaves a very small list of suspects,” writes Devine. “Someone close to Alito who was very confident that he was retiring. As people have speculated, Alito may have planted a false tale to catch out the leaker: a canary trap.”
This theory appears to have been first raised by a conservative podcaster who on Tuesday posted, “Did Justice Alito just Canary Trap the Dobbs v Jackson leaker????”
A canary trap is a leak‑sniffing tactic where one seeds slightly different versions of sensitive information to different people so the specific version that is revealed identifies the source. As the poster mentioned, in the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s highly consequential 2022 ruling regarding Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ultimately overturned Roe vs. Wade, a draft of the opinion was leaked to Politico, and the source of the leak has remained a mystery ever since. The canary trap, then, could be an attempt to identify that person.
This isn’t the only theory surrounding the resignation. According to Douglas Farrar, Former Director of Public Affairs at the Federal Trade Commission, “This looks like an embargo broken to me,” referring to the practice of providing sensitive information to reporters on the condition that they “embargo” it until a certain time. If that is the case, concludes Farrar, “I expect we'll see Alito announce his retirement soon.”