The Supreme Court on Monday defended Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. against allegations that a former anti-abortion leader had been tipped off in 2014 to a landmark contraception ruling written by the justice. The court also sidestepped questions from lawmakers about whether the claim would be investigated further.
The New York Times reported this month on secretive, yearslong efforts by the Rev. Robert Schenck, an evangelical minister and longtime anti-abortion activist, and donors to his nonprofit, to reach conservative justices to bolster their anti-abortion views. Mr. Schenck wrote to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. this summer, saying that he had learned in advance the 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a case involving contraception and the religious rights of corporations.
That decision — like the one that was leaked this spring, overturning the right to abortion — was written by Justice Alito. Mr. Schenck said he obtained the Hobby Lobby information after two donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife.
In a letter on Monday to two lawmakers, Ethan V. Torrey, legal counsel to the court, reiterated Justice Alito’s earlier denial to The Times. “Justice Alito has said that neither he nor Mrs. Alito” told the donors “about the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or about the authorship of the opinion of the court,” Mr. Torrey wrote.
He also told the lawmakers that, while the justice had a social relationship with the donors, “there is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito’s actions violated ethics standards.”
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Later on Monday, the lawmakers responded that the counsel “did not substantively answer any of our questions” and called the letter “an embodiment of the problems at the court around ethics issues.”
The lawmakers, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia, noted in a joint statement that, unlike all other federal courts, the Supreme Court has no formal process for complaints, fact-finding inquiry or independent review. “That absence of independence violates the ancient maxim,” they wrote, that “‘no one should judge their own cause.’ These multiple failures of orderly process are peculiar, coming from the highest court in the land.”
The lawmakers had demanded an investigation of the alleged breach at the Supreme Court as well as Mr. Schenck’s operation, and called for binding ethics rules for the justices.
The Times article “only deepens our concerns about the lack of adequate ethical and legal guardrails at the court,” Mr. Whitehouse and Mr. Johnson, both Democrats, who respectively lead the Senate and House Judiciary courts subcommittees, had written in a joint letter to the court.
Mr. Torrey noted in his letter that the evidence for Mr. Schenck’s account is not complete, which The Times had reported: The minister was not present at the meal between the Alitos and the donors. And one of the donors, Gayle Wright, denied learning the information from Justice Alito.
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However, in months of examining the minister’s claims, The Times found a trail of contemporaneous emails and conversations that strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public. Mr. Schenck also said he had shared the information with a small circle of advocates and with Hobby Lobby’s president, whom he was courting as a donor.
In addition, interviews and thousands of emails and other records show how the minister gained access to the court, using faith, favors traded with gatekeepers, and wealthy donors he called “stealth missionaries.”
