Joan Biskupic Transcript — Dec. 5, 2025

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00):

You’re so nice to be doing this and we can’t thank you enough for taking the time. So I’ll try to run through the intro real quick because they’ve all read your books, I’m sure. But what we’ve tried to emphasize most of the year is the importance of building a network of sources, reliable sources that you can depend on in a crunch like this. And Joan Biskupic is somebody who does this better than anybody on probably the toughest beat in town. And full disclosure, I used to sit across from Joan at USA Today, and I was always amazed almost daily about who she was talking to. I didn’t know at the time she could be reaming them out or talking like she was trying to get ’em to go on a date, but they were all, it was remarkable to hear who they were when she got off the phone. And so I think our time would be best served to talk a little bit about that part of it, how you approach that as when you first arrived at the court and how you do it now, and how that system is, is one that you rely on not only for your daily work, but for your work as an author.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (01:41):

Sure. Kevin,

Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:41):

Whichever one you want to address.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (01:43):

Okay. Yeah. What I’ll try to do is give the most important material first just in case all of a sudden somebody pings me and says, quickly, you have to go up for international. And what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to put my phone on regular ring at this point just to be on the safe side just in case they need me. It’s kind of neat that you guys saw me just in the moment that the news broke, and I’ll tell you about that in a second. First of all, I just do want to say that all of you are so lucky to have Kevin Johnson as your professor lecturer here, because he did what I did for the Justice Department beat that was so much harder than the Supreme Court just because you had much more competition. There’s only a small clutch of us at the Supreme Court, and that narrows my competition.

(02:28):

But I will say that I started covering the speed essentially where many of you were. The first time I started covering the Supreme Court. I was with Congressional Quarterly, and then I went to the Washington Post, and then I went to USA today, and then I went to Reuters, and then I went here and I have been doing it. I have to say I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I still am completely energized by it. I just love this beat. I keep changing publications, but I keep covering the same thing. But that also means that I have had to figure out how to get information for very different kinds of publications and over the long haul when I certainly, I have a long memory of people who might’ve done me bad. And I’m sure the justices have a memory too, and source development is something you can never let your guard down on, and you just have to hope that as you go through it, they understand why you are doing your job, they understand why you need to know some things.

(03:34):

They understand that if you’re dealing with someone as, and I did have, during those years that I sat across from Kevin, I really was fortunate that I was kind of the only person who was really trying to reconstruct cases and get to certain justices who I knew would talk to me and give me information. And that obviously broadened out through the years and has made it more challenging. And also the makeup of the court has made it more challenging because it’s moved so conservative and they’ve essentially closed ranks in a different way. They’ve huddled together and really don’t want anyone to break in so much. So it is harder to get information because some of them have been warned not to talk to me. Some of them have been warned that only bad things can happen if you lift the veil at all for members of the press.

(04:28):

But I have a couple philosophies on that. One is I am always looking for alternatives. I’m always looking for how to, I think you should think of source development as not just trying to get to the main people on the beat. For me, these nine people, but think of who’s in their orbit, former clerks, people who were their friends, law professors, retired justices, lower court judges who their pals with. And I’m constantly circling all those people too. So that’s always happening. And the other thing is, as tempting as it is sometimes to write off a source who just is so mad about something or who feels like, I don’t think I’ve ever had justices really feel like I betrayed them. It’s more that they might not have been pleased at how the information ended up coming out. Even though I try to give everybody deniability and say, I’m getting this from lots of people.

(05:23):

It’s not just you, which is the truth, because I can’t just write what I know. I have to get it okayed by bosses here and lawyers here. In some cases, I have to make sure I’ve got two sources. And how did you find this out? So it’s not like I can just say, I can’t just go with one person’s word, but I’ve tried to never write off a source and never feel like, okay, that person is mad. And that’s the end of it. I try to always be thinking of how to get back to that person, or as I say, keep widening the circle. But most of you will probably stay on a beat for not for as long as 30 years, but if you stay on a beat for any amount of time, you can’t kind of be hit and run. You can’t go in and tick off people and then just hope it won’t matter for the next story. And I kind of like that obligation that I’ve got.

(06:23):

I can’t do something that compromises the relationship because I will still need that relationship as I go along. And one other thing I would mention is if you feel like at the stage of your careers that you’re at, or if you switch beats, you’re thinking, how am I ever going to get up to speed? There are other ways to do it than just through sources, because when I was in your shoes as a younger reporter in town, I got things when I was at Congressional Quarterly, I got a rare interview with Justice Scalia. He was the first justice whoever let me into his chambers. And it was just by kind of appealing to what I knew was an interest of his at the time. And I remember the PIO. Now, did you guys meet the PIO today?

Kevin Johnson/NPF (07:12):

Sheridan.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (07:13):

Okay. You met Sheridan. She’s great. Back in the day, it was a woman by the name of Tony House. Do you remember Tony?

Kevin Johnson/NPF (07:19):

Yeah, I do. Yeah.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (07:20):

Okay. Tony, who I really liked a lot, but Tony was just getting to know me, and she included a note to Scalia that said, I recommend you turn this down and unknown to her. He accidentally handed me a stack of papers that included that sheet, which I sort of appreciated. But the thing is, but what I did with him, and I did this once with Ginsburg. Oh yeah. And I’ll quickly give an example of when Ginsburg kind of started shutting the door on me. Pardon me while I quickly just make sure they’re not asking

Kevin Johnson/NPF (07:52):

Me. Oh, go ahead.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (07:53):

No, I’m good. I’m good. So with Scalia, I really tried to pitch an idea that now is in full flower. But back then in 1990 when I got in with him was his approach to legislative history, whereas he doesn’t believe that judges should look at committee reports or floor statements and all that. And at the time, working for Congressional Quarterly, that was a great subject for me. I was covering the judiciary committees, but it was the Hill. So I was all about legislative history. So I made my pitch to Scalia. I went and saw him, and we did the story, and that was great. So that was a way I got in to see him when I was young thirties, but it was a lucky break. So now I’ll tell you something about Ginsburg. When I was sitting across from Kevin, I did have a lot of access to Justice Ginsburg, and I’m not breaking any kind of confidential source relationship by telling you that because she would speak on the record.

(08:52):

Scalia, when I wrote my book on him, gave me 12 on the record interviews all taped, which was so lucky. Most of these justices don’t want to be taped, but Ginsburg would speak to me on the record. I had the good fortune while I was working for daily newspapers to also be working on books. So that would give me some entree. So I’m interviewing Ginsburg over many, many, many years. And one of my favorite ones was Kevin, you might remember this. I was talking to her. I was interviewing her as I was doing research on my Scalia book. This was in the early two thousands. And I said, while I’m here, I’d like to also talk to you about why even though you were undergoing this radiation therapy for, at that time, it was her early version of her pancreatic cancer, you still insisted on going to a joint session of Congress. And she said, and only maybe some of you sports fans or people who really knew old members of Congress. She said, I wanted to make sure that Senator knew I was alive. And Kevin, do you remember when Senator Bunning said she’d be dead in nine months when she got the pancreatic cancer? He happened to have one time been a ball player, but

Kevin Johnson/NPF (10:10):

I didn’t remember it was bunting. But I do remember that,

Joan Biskupic/CNN (10:13):

Yes. So I’m writing back to the office listening to my tape, and one thing if you can tape, always tape, because Ginsburg, I had hardly heard her say that when I was with her, but of course the digital tape picked it up and what a great money quote. I wanted to show him that senator I was alive. He did end up dying before she did, even though she did die in 2020. But I got cross wise with her in July of 2016, I had been working for Reuters for about four or five years, and I was leaving Reuters to go teach it at the University of California just for a year. But CNN had picked me up as a contributor while I was going to be gone. And there was this just strange little month where I was, I told her that I had left Reuters, but I don’t think she understood exactly who I was working for.

(11:11):

But I went to see her, and at that point I was interviewing her for the Roberts, my John Roberts book. I did a book on him and she gave me all this great stuff on him. And then I said, which was terrific. And then I said, I wanted to ask you about what you earlier said to the AP and New York Times about how you had kiddingly said that your husband claimed that if Donald Trump won, this is summer of 2016, you’d move to New Zealand. It was something like that. And on the record, this was on the record with two different tape recorders going on. The record asked her, do you want to retreat for many of that? Because she was already getting a lot of criticism for really getting down on Trump, who I’m sure she didn’t think was going to win. Like many people didn’t. But she says to me, instead of retreating, she says, and she knows we’re on the record then because there were times when we were going off the record, but we were on the record at that moment.

(12:13):

She said, I think he’s a faker. I think that reporters should be harder on him getting his income taxes. I think she went on and on and on. So this was the thing that made it more problematic. When I was with Reuters, I could have written that up and it wouldn’t have gotten as much attention, but at that point I was a contributor for CNN, and I hadn’t yet moved to California. So my CNN folks here said, can you come on air and talk about what she said to AP just earlier today? And I said, well, I can actually give you something better. She just said this to me, and I’ll never forget. They said, can we have your tape? And then I wasn’t on staff, so it was easy for me to say, no, no, because as Kevin can attest from sitting across to me the way I interview people is not the way I’d like to sound on TV kind of cajoling.

(13:11):

And then you’re just like, oh, that just happened to my child too. You’re saying a lot of stuff that you just really do not want aired on tv. So there was no way I was going to say, oh yeah, here, take my tape. Plus it had all this other material from for book purposes. So once it became public, what I’d gotten from her, and it’s on CNN, Ruth Bader Ginsburg calls him a faker, and I don’t know why you folks haven’t been harder on him to get his disclose its income tax. She got so much blow back and the New York Times did an editorial saying that she’s jumped into the mosh pit of politicians. And so within 48 hours she had to retract that. And I got, or she had to apologize, not retract, she apologized. And for a while then she didn’t want to talk to me.

(14:01):

I mean, I could see why she never said there was some misunderstanding. She never acted like I had done anything wrong, but obviously it did not serve her. So I kept writing her notes. And one note, I was real honest, I said, you’ve told me so many things over the years. And there was one great that time when I got the great money quote about I wanted to show him I wasn’t dead. She had also, there was a case pending at the time that involved a young girl who was strip searched and I had wanted to know why during oral argument, she had just been so upset by her colleagues comments about this case. This was no big deal. It had been a woman who had handled the strip search. And Justice Ginsburg said to me, they’ve never been a 13-year-old girl, which I thought was another great quote that I used in a story.

(14:55):

So when I wrote her a note, I said, you’ve said some very honest things to me before, and I’ve printed them and it hasn’t caused you trouble, but I know this has caused you trouble. And I just want to acknowledge that I didn’t want to, I definitely wasn’t saying sorry. It was just that I wanted her to know that I was not being cavalier about this. So I kept covering the cord. I came back from my year, I had gone out on a years visiting professorship, and I came back and she was still alive and I still wanted access, and I got to see her in a couple little social things here and there. And then I, even CNN had done a film, the RBG film, and I was there at Sundance with her. And then she still wouldn’t let me into chambers until, and this gets to the point of try to get them into an area where they want to talk.

(15:47):

I knew she was fascinated by civil procedure. She really liked civil procedure, which sounds boring, but that’s the part of the law that matters for does somebody of standing to bring a case, has somebody filed in the right place and it’s kind of a gatekeeper part of the law that can really matter. So I sent her a note that said, we’ve got a lot of cases up there this term that have to do with civil procedure. And I knew that she knew my civil procedure teacher at Georgetown ages ago. I told her that. And then she, so she wanted to see me, she wanted to see me. Now what happened was it happened to be right after she had come back from yet another cancer scare, and she had just found out that she was cancer free, and she told me that, so what am I going to lead with?

(16:40):

So I wasn’t going to lead with civil procedure once she says, but she was still okay on that. So that meant I had the last in chambers interview with her in 2020 before she actually did die. I used the Ginsburg examples of someone who, we had a rocky relationship through the years, but I think she mostly kept giving me a chance. She was unusual that way where she gave me a chance more than some of the other justices who felt like, well, I don’t like how that turned out. But I guess the moral of the story is you just can’t let up and you have to do as much homework as you can to try to make it work. And if you’re being shut out, which there have been plenty of times I’m being shut out, you figure out another way to illuminate the beat.

(17:28):

That’s why I have a story that’s up today about Justice Kagan versus Chief Justice John Roberts in this really important area of the law involving Trump’s ability to fire people. And I feel like, okay, that story took more my understanding of where the two of them have been over the years, did a lot of research on past statements they had made and read in decisions. And so I can use a different, I can give people another kind of good story that doesn’t involve what I’ve heard behind the scenes. And frankly, those stories are really much more the bread and butter of this be

(21:08):

I did him some favors, but the relationship was always, we both knew, and I especially knew that it was a hundred percent professional. There have been some lawyer friends I’ve had, and that can get a little trickier. Some lawyers who argue up there who I’m a little bit closer to who I might see socially or they’ve come to me, we swap deeper family stories. And those people I’m a little bit wary about. I don’t quote them that kind of helps me. I just decide, look, I’m really close to that guy. I don’t really want to quote him. And in my job, Michael, I can get away with not quoting people because of being more analytical. And there was one man who was a really close personal friend who ended up a judge, not a justice. And I remember when he finally was confirmed because he had been a good friend and we had had dinners together with our families, I thought, I’m not covering his rulings. I’m just not going to do that. And fortunately, I haven’t had reason to be tested because he’s a lower court judge.

Audrey Decker | Politico (22:23):

Hi. Thank you so much for doing this. Can you hear me?

Joan Biskupic/CNN (22:25):

Yeah,

Audrey Decker | Politico (22:26):

Thanks. Hi, I’m Audrey Decker with Politico. I’m just curious how the Dobbs leak changed reporting at the Supreme Court and were journalists kind of shut out more after that and what that whole situation was like for you. Thanks.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (22:44):

Oh, definitely both political and the ProPublica stories, the stories that really challenged the justices by getting behind the scenes in different ways. That definitely did alter things. I would say, and I don’t know if Josh Gerstein himself feels this, but I do feel that there’s a much higher level of paranoia among the justices and people who work at the court that’s just going to be that way. And that makes it harder for those of us who’ve always tried to figure out points of entry because you suddenly have people’s guards being up. In fact, some of them have talked publicly about looking over their shoulders. And I think that certainly did not help the level of trust. So it is just something you have to deal with though. I feel like that’s the price of doing business on a very competitive beat. And these things, I mean, both the political leak that was published and the ProPublica stories about Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, I was a hundred percent supportive of those.

(23:57):

I thought those were great. I never thought, oh, wish that didn’t happen because I really am glad it happened. And look, if they were going to be, and you probably know that the subsequent reporting on the leak was that how much they had let down their guard. They had burn bags open in the hallways. They had no idea how many copies of things were being made. So that, I kind of think that since it’s now been three plus years and we don’t know how that’s happened, we might all go to our graves not knowing how that leak ever happened or those of us on the outside. But it did really change them. And as I said, the stories of what they do extracurricularly, that really got a lot of attention too. I had never been in that space that just wasn’t, I’m not an investigative reporter, but those stories I thought were first class, the ProPublica ones, and those also got the justices feeling much more defensive, which is not helpful when you’re trying to reach out to them.

(25:08):

But it’s again, the price of doing journalism and you just keep figuring out other ways. And that’s one of the thing I have to say, I always felt like there was some added benefit that I started at the Washington Post and in a time when it was really rivalrous with the New York Times and my competitor, Linda Greenhouse, who’s a very close friend of mine now, but at the time she’d been on the beat for 20 years and I was so green. I got that job out of cq and I was like, I don’t know, what was I 33 or something? And I did not feel like I had a very strong hand, but it made me work harder and try other ways if I’m not going to be the person that folks think has this great long-term understanding of where we are in the law of civil procedure or something else.

(26:04):

Because the times Linda really specialized in giving you a really deep understanding of how the law was evolving, I figured out other ways. I figured out other ways to make my reporting interesting. And that’s how I feel now and that’s how I felt during Dobbs is that look Dobbs, and as I said, all the yacht travel, those stories were great. There was no way I was going to be able to match them. But I would try to do other things that would enhance our coverage here at CNN of how people could understand how the court was reacting and most importantly, how the law was changing. And I guess that’s the other point I would make here is that the gear I’m in now, and it’s an easy gear to be in because of all the challenges based on Donald Trump’s movements, is that the most important story at the Supreme Court right now is essentially the one that’s in plain sight because Donald Trump is doing so many things that challenge constitutional norms and that are goading the court into rolling back precedent, including the one that I just told people about today, that his attempt to roll back birthright citizenship is just staggering.

(27:23):

I just cannot believe that even this conservative Supreme Court would do that. But you just never know. I feel like that’s an important thing to be able to be bringing to people, and it’s accessible to me, and I know enough backstories of what’s been going on in this SGS office. I know enough about how individual justices have been feel buffeted by all that. So I can kind of weave together some things I know from behind the scenes, but also point up this really important time that we’re all in and the challenge to our nation’s highest court.

Shrai Popat | The Guardian (28:07):

This I’m Shrai with the Guardian. I had a quick question about what’s surprising you right now about the reactions from some of the justices when it comes to particularly some of the emergency docket. I’m thinking particularly about the tariff case as well, and I was just listening to that argument. I was kind of intrigued to see how many conservative justices seem to be at odds, at least with the government’s rationale. So I’m kind of curious about any of the cases on the emergency or regular docket that have surprised you at the moment.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (28:37):

That’s a great question. I’d like to talk about my response to the tariff arguments. One other thing I should tell you guys is that I’m in the courtroom, I want to hear the arguments in the courtroom. A lot of my colleagues don’t have that luxury because they have to type up stories right away. So often they are influenced by the first half of the argument, and the first half of the argument is only one lawyer being challenged. The second half of the argument can sound the same way, but somebody already gets it in his head that it’s going this way. And on the tariff case, I actually think that’s a much closer call than it was being portrayed. But what by a lot of people who heard it, and I’ll just say this with a caveat, I felt like the conservatives, frankly, some of ’em, Thomas Kavanaugh and Alito were inclined to support Trump, but Robert Gorsuch and Barrett were more suspicious of his taking this move when the law is not explicit that tariffs will be covered under this Emergency International Act.

(29:48):

It’s been used to impose economic sanctions, but never tariffs. But one thing I will mention is that oftentimes you get a really heavy duty case like that and the votes can shift behind the scenes. So what I’ve been careful to tell people is I really tried to say, okay, I know a lot of people think they’re going to be automatically struck down, and I don’t want to quarrel with people who wrote that, including some people hear it CNN, but I just want to say two things. One is I thought it looked like a closer call. And once they leave the bench, they engage in plenty of other arguing among themselves. And when I covered the Affordable Care Act case, I was with Reuters at the time, I was so certain that Roberts was never going to be able to strike that down, that when he did vote to uphold it, I was in one of those modes that was like, oh, that’s predictable.

(30:48):

That’s what I thought he would do. But it turned out he had switched his vote, and then when I was doing my book on him, I found out he switched his vote a couple times, and you don’t know about those until you go back and reconstruct it. So I think that on the tariffs, you have a division of sentiment among the conservatives on the emergency docket. The premise of your question is exactly right. They’re acting as if all this stuff is pretty normal and they’re letting Donald Trump do it. I thought last night’s it wasn’t under the Voting Rights Act, it was under the 14th Amendment, the Texas redistricting case. They just brushed back what this lower court had done. And this lower court had held nine days of hearings, reviewed thousands of pages of documents to find that there was a racial motivation. But this court has been on a single path toward narrowing any kind of racial remedies and also favoring states as they draw their maps, irrespective of whatever claim of racial gerrymandering there is, I think this Monday case that you all will probably read a little bit about having to do with when the president can fire people.

(32:07):

Again, to your point from The Guardian, the idea that they’re just saying, go ahead, fire ’em. Donald Trump can fire these people. For now we will decide the merit. Maybe we’ll change our mind. But those people are still out of a job. And I think that, I just don’t think a prior court would’ve done it this way. And we’re at a point where this really is the most conservative court, not just that I’ve covered, but that anybody’s really known since the New Deal era.

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (32:47):

Thanks for speaking with us. My name is Sophie. I’m with the Christian Science Monitor.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (32:50):

Sure.

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (32:51):

You mentioned that you’re in the courtroom always for oral arguments. What do you get from that that you don’t get from listening, and do you have any kind of examples that come to mind of times that you feel like that enhanced your story above others?

Joan Biskupic/CNN (33:08):

Oh yeah. I love where people

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (33:10):

Have written just from listening.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (33:11):

Yeah. Well, first of all, you see the side glances. They give each other. You see them rolling their eyes. You see them turning away thinking, oh my God, I can’t believe she’s on that again. You see that kind body language. You see who smiles at what jokes. You see how they’re getting frustrated with each other. So I’ll build that kind of thing into it just so the demeanor. The demeanor has certainly informed my reporting, and in a lot of ways it’s largely atmospherics, but also it gives me ideas. While I’m sitting there, I’m recording what’s going on in the cases, but I’m also getting ideas. I can hear them and their emphases, and I can see what gets them going in a way that may be relevant to the case at hand, but also just plain reveals them in other ways. They sometimes pass notes.

(34:07):

They pass notes. So you see little things like that that just makes them, it just flushes out their dimensions. The other good reason for that is that they’re not in plain sight in other ways unless they have a book out. They rarely will be beyond the stump talking. So I just think as much that you can witness yourself is a good thing, even if it’s just saving string. I’m just a great believer in saving string and also from learning from your mistakes. So many of you are in a position that I was in in my thirties and forties where things mostly went well, but sometimes I think, oh my God, I can’t believe that happened. How am I ever going to get over that one? But you get over it and then you figure out that, okay, it’s all part of the process and it’s part of just this wonderful thing that we’re all part of trying to get to the truth of, especially these government institutions at a time that’s so important for democracy.

Linley Sanders | The Associated Press (35:19):

Hey, my name’s Linley Sanders. I’m with the ap. I was curious, it seems like every year or every couple of years, depending on elections, we hear speculations about retirements. And I’m wondering how you approach those conversations with justices when they’re getting pressure, other organizations or the public to retire. Are those areas where you’re relying more on the network surrounding that justice, or how do you handle those things when they’re kind of key scoops?

Joan Biskupic/CNN (35:51):

Right. I mean, and those really are hard because they’re often closely held. And what I say to my bosses here is that who always want to know, will Justice Breyer retire? Will Justice Ginsburg retire before she passed away? Because there was a lot of retirement talk with her. And 2013, and one good scoop I got from someone was that President Obama had invited her to lunch to try to talk her into maybe stepping down in 2013, but he lost his nerve and didn’t pull the trigger and say, please leave anyway, and the rest is history. So you, it’s tricky because it’s such a personal decision. What I’ll often say to bosses here is it’s like what you do with your family, whether you’re going to have a baby, whether you’re going to switch jobs, whether you’re going to stop working altogether, it’s so personal. So right now, let’s just take Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, who are our two eldest justices.

(36:54):

They’re actually relatively young in the whole scheme of things. Justice Alito is 75 and Justice Thomas is 77. I don’t think Justice Thomas wants to go, I really think he’s going to go feet first. He just really is interested in staying in the job. And he was appointed when he was just 43, so that’s what a tenure he’s had. And he could even end up having the longest tenure in history of any justice. Now, Sam Alito is age 75. That’s nothing. They don’t go there justice as O’Connor did. But her husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time, and I’ve been trying, so I’m watching him and I’m thinking, what will the signs be? So a lot of people on this be in touch with people who are close to him. You don’t outright say, are you going? You don’t send up. Well, I do.

(37:52):

Whenever I’m writing about retirements, I send up a note and I say, I’m writing about your possible retirement. Anything you want to tell me, you don’t usually get a note back that says, sure. It just doesn’t happen that way. So you, again, you try to find out what you can and then you try to be ready. I had my Ginsburg retirement slash obituary. It was more of an essay. In fact, the title was something like Conversations from 20 Years or whatever, because that’s what I was able to offer. When she did die, you have them ready. And I had something ready for when Justice Breyer retired and I had something ready. When Justice O’Connor died, you get as ready as you can, and I can give you examples. Sometimes it’s been leaked through, they’ve told some senator and that comes out that way, or they tell a good friend.

(38:52):

And it is like anything, if you tell one person, it’s going to come out, but it’s usually just a matter of minutes that you can, if somebody breaks it, you can usually get it confirmed with someone. I’m trying it broke. Oh, I had a real lucky thing happen to me when I was at the Washington Post, again, young and worried, how can I, very anxious about how I going up against a lot of veterans, and I got a tip that Byron White was going to die, and this was on, I can tell you, as Kevin will tell you, I have a memory for dates, and it was March 19th, 1993, and I had the week before gotten a tip that by Room White might be retiring. And I hadn’t even been at the Washington Post a full year at that point, and I was thinking, gosh, I can’t believe somebody at the court is telling me this, but it seems right.

(39:52):

And it was a single source, but a good single source. So I went back to the post and I said, I think this is true. And my boss was like, we got to put this on the front page. And again, I’m just, I don’t think my early tentativeness was necessarily a good thing, but I’m just saying that that happens. You can be tentative as a younger reporter. And I said, I just don’t know for sure, but I’ve been told this, so I think it’s true. So we ran a story and the next day everybody was like, it’ll never happen. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, the Washington Post. They’ve just got this new reporter. How would she know? So people were doing stories saying, Byron White isn’t leaving. And then within the week he announced, and it was March 19th. And the reason I remember it is because this is going to sound crazy, but I was actually in night law school still.

(43:52):

And he said, I’ll be right over. And then I asked him, did you say who was it? And he wondered whether he even found out who’s leaving. They just knew that they had to quickly pull things together, which then made a big difference to them because that’s how John Roberts, I’m giving you guys a lot of history here, but John Roberts got nominated first to replace O’Connor, which made a lot more sense. He was only 50 years old at the time, so he was pretty youthful. And then when the chief died on September 3rd, George W. Bush elevated him to the center chair position. So I don’t know if that answered your question. You just always, you try to keep your ears open and you try to be ready for a resignation. If you’re lucky enough to get a scoop, you get a scoop. But if you’re not lucky enough to get the first word of it, then at least have your story ready.

Praveena Somasundaram | The Washington Post (44:46):

Hi, Joan. Thanks for doing this. My name’s Praveena. I am at the Washington Post. I was wondering, covering the Supreme Court, you touch on so many other beats like tariffs in business, immigration, abortion. So I’m curious how you go about getting yourself up to speed and orienting yourself so that you can then frame it and contextualize for readers and viewers.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (45:08):

That’s a great question, and I always talk about how this is really like a yellow highlighter beat. I spend a lot of time with, you guys probably don’t work with as much paper as someone like I, because most people don’t as much anymore, but I’m sure you have ways to do intense reading into markup documents. But I do a lot of reading and marking up of documents, and I had to really get up to speed on tariffs. There are just a lot of areas that they handle up here, and the justices themselves are always talking about how they’re generalists. They are not as business-minded as I’m sure some of the Supreme Court bar would like them to be in terms of being business-minded. So what I did for tariffs, oh, tariffs was so much fun for me because I went back into archives. I just am crazy about archival work, and one of the key cases that the tariff dispute implicated had been decided by the Supreme Court the year that John Roberts was a clerk.

(46:07):

So I went back to that archival research. But what I did for that and what I do for a lot of these cases, that new subject matter, you read the lower court decision, you read the briefs that have come in and you can get up to speed. You don’t have to. Back in the day when we were handling so much intellectual property stuff, that was really hard. A lot of the scientific pieces, it’s hard, but you get enough familiarity with it to be able to present it. And then we have, at all the places I’ve worked, there have been people who did have expertise. Like here at C Nnn, we’ve got lots of people who know about tariffs. They don’t have to rely on me to know the business side of it because they do know it, and the same’s been true since the Washington Post.

Kevin Johnson/NPF (46:55):

Joan, I want to be mindful of the demands on your time. Let me know.

Joan Biskupic/CNN (47:00):

Yeah, I should get off right at three on the dot just because I’m not sure what they’re going to need me for.

Kevin Johnson/NPF (47:04):

Okay.

Grant Schwab | The Detroit News (47:08):

Hey, Joan, this is Grant Schwab. I’m a Washington correspondent for the Detroit News. I want to go back to the Detroit News. I want to go back to the Justice Ginsburg story. You told at the top about how she got upset with the faker quote and Trump, and then you got in and you spoke to her. You did the last interview in her chamber just as a case study and source relationship management. Did you broach that with her when you got to sit down and say, Hey, I know it’s been rocky the last couple of years, let’s address the elephant in the room, or did your note that you wrote her previously do that already and you just skipped over it?

Joan Biskupic/CNN (47:41):

Yeah, that’s a great question because again, look, we all have different styles of dealing with people, and I do tend to believe it, being direct as much as I can and to acknowledge you went away, a happy customer, unhappy. Pardon me? You went away an unhappy customer. You didn’t blame me for all the blowback because I mean, she clearly had stepped in it. She had already said stuff to the New York Times and to ap. It’s just that saying to then somebody with C Nnn, he’s a faker, just got so much more attention. I remember exactly the sequence of timing, and I had written her the note soon after that incident. I’d say probably at least by the start of 17, and then her film that came out that I was sort of just a tag along CNN just said, you want to come with us to see Sundance?

(48:36):

And I was at a private dinner with her and was, she was friendly, friendly enough back. So you’re asking what happened when I finally got into Chambers, I didn’t bring it up. I figured maybe two and a half years had passed and I felt like we had had enough. I’d been writing back and forth to her on different things. That’s the other thing. Back in the day, these justices, now, so many of’em are younger. They’re probably not into notes, but I used to write tons of notes to justices and I would get notes back. I kind of liked that because again, you can sort of explain what you’re even doing here. But I’d had enough correspondence with her and she obviously had been seeing the kinds of stories I’d been doing, and I think she felt like, let’s do it again. And so I just really appreciated that about her. I have to say, a lot of people have great regard for RBG, and a lot of people have some ill feelings because of her departure that she didn’t leave sooner, but just one-on-one. She seemed to appreciate the journalistic endeavor and that I was really trying to get it right and that I wanted to know more. I’ll tell you what she understood. She understood that I really wanted to have a good grasp of the law and her approach to it, and that’s the kind of thing I do try to convey to the justices.

(50:05):

I’m not out for a gotcha story. I’m out for a story that will explain to the readers, this is your Supreme Court and this is what you should know about what the Supreme Court is doing.