John Roberts

The John Roberts Retirement Rumor: A Postscript

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The backstory behind the false rumor of Chief Justice John Roberts stepping down from the Supreme Court — initially reported (and then retracted) by Radar, and covered by us here, here, and here — continues to pick up mainstream media mentions as well. See, e.g., the Los Angeles Times and NPR.
We stand by our primary claim that this gossip arose out of Professor Peter Tague’s criminal law class at Georgetown Law, in which he tried to teach his students a lesson about the credibility and reliability of informants. But we would like to retract one aspect of our earlier coverage. We wrote:

Note the timestamps on the Radar posts. The first one came out at 6:10 a.m., i.e., the Pacific Time equivalent of 9:10 a.m. Eastern time. The retraction came out at 6:36 a.m., i.e., the Pacific Time equivalent of 9:36 a.m. Eastern — shortly after Professor Tague let his class in on the joke.

We now believe that the time stamps on the Radar post bear little or no relation to reality. David Perel, Executive Vice President of RadarOnline.com, admitted as much to Gawker, when he described the timestamps as “off.”
For those of you who are interested, we have a few more thoughts on the exact timing of events here.


We believe the first Radar item was published sometime around 12:30 PM Eastern Time on Thursday. Here’s why.
To the best of our knowledge, Nico Pitney, senior news editor of the Huffington Post, was the first to tweet about the Radar report, at 12:42 PM, and to blog about it, at 1:03 PM. We received the first of many ATL reader emails forwarding the first Radar link at 12:46 PM.
How did Nico Pitney first learn about the item? He told us he received it at around 12:35 PM, via an email blast from Radar:

From: Krasnow, Andrea [of Radar Online]
Date: Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:35 PM
Subject: RadarOnline.com EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Considering Stepping Down
To: [bcc’d recipients that included Nico Pitney]

RadarOnline.com EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Considering Stepping Down

[Text of original Radar item.]

Accordingly, we do not think the first Radar item was published at 6:10 AM, which is what the time stamp claims, or even 9:10 AM, which would have been the East Coast equivalent of 6:10 AM Pacific time. It would make no sense for Radar to send out an email blast at 12:35 PM about an item published at 6:10 AM (and retracted at 6:36 AM, again taking the Radar timestamps as accurate).
As Kash previously noted, Radar added an “update” to its original item at approximately 1:45 PM Eastern time. So we believe that maybe an hour or an hour and a half elapsed between the original Radar post and the appending of the update to the original post.
What explains this gap? Probably not Professor Tague letting his students in on his pedagogically-motivated prank, since he had done that hours ago. We speculate — and again, take this for what it’s worth, since it’s just speculation — that Radar’s original source did not immediately tell Radar upon learning that the rumor was false.
It could be that Radar’s source had the item secondhand, from a friend or family member in Professor Tague’s class, and so did not even know the item was false until later. Or it could be that Radar had two different sources — one for the original item, and one for the retraction.
But this is all speculation — and if we’ve learned any lesson from this episode, it’s about the danger of uninformed speculation. So let’s leave it at that.
P.S. Other than the brief comment to Gawker, admitting their time stamps were “off,” the Radar folks — who are in the best position to unravel this whole mess — have remained silent.
Earlier: Everybody Learns A Lesson from Georgetown Professor Peter Tague
Anatomy of a Rumor: The Story Behind Chief Justice John Roberts’s ‘Retirement’
ATL Exclusive: John Roberts Is Still Chief Justice!

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