SCOTUS lawyer insist there is NO evidence Justice Alito violated ethics after claims of 2014 leak

Supreme Court legal counsel Ethan Torrey wrote a letter to Democratic lawmakers claiming that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (pictured March 7, 2019) did not violate ethics standards

Legal counsel for the Supreme Court insists there is no evidence that conservative Justice Samuel Alito violated ethics standards by allegedly leaking a 2014 contraceptive decision before it was released.

Ethan Torrey pushed back on claims from evangelical minister Rob Schenck claiming Justice Alito caused a Supreme Court breach in the landmark religious liberty case.

'There is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito's actions violated ethics standards,' wrote Torrey, legal counsel for the high court, in a letter to congressional Democrats.

'Relevant rules balance preventing gifts that might undermine public confidence in the judiciary and allowing judges to maintain normal personal friendships,' he added.

Reverend Schenck alleged that Justice Alito and his wife told a guest at their home, Gail Wright, about the decision in the 2014 Hobby Lobby case, allowing the company to be exempt from covering certain forms of contraception that it believes constitute an abortion.

The decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., was a landmark ruling considering it was the first time the Supreme Court recognized claims of religious beliefs of a for-profit corporation.

Torrey claimed in his letter to Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Henry Johnson that there is no evidence that Alito violated ethics standards, in response to their request for the counsel to 'assist our investigation' into Schenck's allegations.

Evangelical minister, Reverend Rob Schenck (pictured on January 16, 2016), alleged in a New York Times article earlier this month that Alito caused a Supreme Court breach by sharing the outcome of the Hobby Lobby landmark contraceptives case before the decision was released

Schneck's claims were published in The New York Times earlier in November and led to a congressional probe into potential ethics violations.

Whitehouse and Johnson said the allegations suggest 'that the orchestrators of this judicial lobby campaign may have used their access to certain justices to secure confidential information about pending cases that only deepens our concerns about the lack of adequate ethical and legal guardrails at the court.'

The claims come after a Supreme Court breach earlier this year in the draft of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and made abortion restrictions a state issue rather than a federal right.

'Justice Alito has said that neither he nor Mrs. Alito told the Wrights about the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or about the authorship of the opinion from the court,' Torrey wrote in his letter.

Alito and his wife Martha Bomgardner were acquainted with Wright and her now-deceased husband because they supported the Supreme Court Historical Society, according to Torrey.

'[T]hey had a casual and purely social relationship,' he noted in the letter.

'The Justice never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything he did in either an official or private capacity,' Torrey continued. 'Mr. Schenck's allegation that Justice Alito or Mrs. Alito gave the Wrights advance word about the outcome in Hobby Lobby or the authorship of the Court's opinion is also uncorroborated.'

Wright has previously denied Reverand Schenck's claims. 

Torrey wrote in his letter to congressional Democrats: 'There is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito's actions violated ethics standards'