Speculation Swirls After Veteran NPR Reporter Publishes False Story About Alito Retiring
“Did Justice Alito just Canary Trap the Dobbs v Jackson leaker????”
On a big morning for more decisions being handed down by the Supreme Court, NPR apparently decided to send conservatives and liberals alike into a tailspin by publishing a report that claimed conservative Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.
“Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday,” the first line of the story read, according to an archived version of it.
The article, written by longtime legal affairs/Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, 82, went live around 10:50 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, but NPR retracted it about five minutes later.
— Joe Chalfant (@JoeChalfant) June 30, 2026
How it started – How it's going pic.twitter.com/Z82E35oyMP
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) June 30, 2026
In place of the story they likely pre-wrote (a standard media practice for retirements, deaths, etc) that contained their opinion of Alito’s judicial history was this short editor’s note:
Earlier today, we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. Neither Alito nor the court’s public information office has announced his retirement, and we have retracted the story.
Why was it yanked? The story wasn’t true, NPR editor-in-chief Thomas Evans asserted soon after, claiming it was published “due to a misunderstanding”:
Full statement from NPR Editor in Chief Tommy Evans on retracted Alito report pic.twitter.com/MBNn3jI48D
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) June 30, 2026
When Totenberg appeared on the program, she read the apology letter she sent to Alito, giving a bizarre explanation that was astonishing considering she’s been with NPR for 50 years and understands very well how a story like this must go through checks and balances first:
“Dear Justice Alito, there are no words to adequately apologize for today’s error in reporting your retirement. It was entirely my fault. I rushed out of the courtroom after the opinion announcements, and when I realized that the usual rush of folks after a few minutes had not happened, I asked somebody was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the ‘s’ on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed something no reporter should ever do, that you were retiring. It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism. I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say, except that I am so, so sorry.”
Meanwhile, here’s how NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride tried to explain it:
Totenberg spoke with both her intern, who was at the court with her, and NPR Executive Editor Krishnadev Calamur and told them what she heard. Calamur surfaced the story that NPR had previously prepared for the day Alito did announce his retirement and published it.
[…]
In the minutes after it was published, Totenberg called Calamur to tell him she was mistaken.
“I was looking to see who else was reporting it, and nobody was reporting it, and then, basically, we realized that it was not true,” Calamur said. “She called and said, ‘I made a mistake,’ and we rushed to make a retraction.”
[…]
“She’s the preeminent Supreme Court reporter in the courtroom,” Calamur said. “So I’m assuming that’s what she heard. … She’s in the room. It’s like when we report opinions. I’m not waiting to see what the Times is reporting. It’s when Nina says, here’s what happened, and we do it. That’s the trust you build up.”
McBride would also say on her LinkedIn page that it boiled down to “confirmation bias” on Totenberg’s part:
NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride now admits reporter Nina Totenberg engaged in "confirmation bias" when she wrongly claimed Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.
Basically, she heard what she wanted to hear, then passed that along to an editor, who hit "publish" without checking. pic.twitter.com/1YmLQFD4i5
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) July 1, 2026
Adding to the confusion in the aftermath was that NPR was having to make corrections to its explainer:
The NPR situation gets weirder…@kellymcb initially wrote that Nina Totenberg "misheard Roberts' statement" about Supreme Court-related retirements.
Then after Totenberg appeared on NPR, the post was amended with a correction. pic.twitter.com/Tu1iidytWi
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) July 1, 2026
Their frenzied clean-up effort was leading to more questions than answers. Was it wishful thinking? Why would she have just assumed the retirement announcement was about Alito? Or was this an embargoed story that simply went out a few days/weeks too soon?
In the mad dash to figure out the mystery, some on social media are speculating that Alito used the canary trap tactic to try and flush out the SCOTUS leaker:
what's a canary trap? grok: pic.twitter.com/h4pwTXYeKo
— Judy MM (@JudyMM123) June 30, 2026
If so, it looks like it worked! https://t.co/R9GKGr67EQ
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 30, 2026
New York Post writer Miranda Devine offered these observations:
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.
– That leaves a very small list of suspects: 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. Now what?
‼️ Sotomayor and Nina Totenberg (NPR) have had a close relationship for decades.
Notably, she reported on a spat between the two justices last week highlighting tensions.
Did Justice Alito canary trap Justice Sotomayor herself?! 😱 pic.twitter.com/hChXShoGEh
— Erikaaa (@ErikaCA47) June 30, 2026
Inquiring minds want to know!
– Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –
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Comments
The Left”s motto: Spread lie and chaos all the time, everywhere.
Let’s hope it was a trap and that it was successful/
Nina Totenberg? Didn’t she go to the Dan Rather School of Journalistic Fabrication?
It would be nice to think this was a ll a trap that an idiot happened to fall into but I’m afraid it’s more likely it was just that she’s an idiot acting idiotically.
Yeah, this is not the first time she pulled these shenanigans, only to come up with a lame excuse afterwards.
In one way or another, it’s a fair bet that Totenkoof was involved in the 2022 leak of the Dobbs draft. She’s always been an unprincipled individual, making her a natural fit for the Democrat party.
Yes. And graduated summa.
“Mark Twain” says that his reported death has been greatly “exaggerated.”
John Roberts: “I know nothing. I see nothing.”
I thought Totenberg was dead. Same with Mitch, Biden and Hillary. They all are to me.
Well, her name in German translates to approximately “mountain dead” – maybe like zombies? 🙂
I think it was “dead mountain”, like maybe an extinct volcano?
Actually, I did check with the always expert (wink) Google Translate. They originally agreed with me but now go with you. Weird.
Totenberg should apologize for claiming to be a journalist.
The best way for her to rectify this egregious error is to announce her own retirement. If we were to believe her explanation, it is obvious that she is clearly beyond her “use by” date.
Now if a similar story had implicated a so-called “conservative” justice, I wonder how the left would react? They wouldn’t rest until the justice resigned or was impeached. May I suggest the same for Sotomayor? Actually, I’d suggest the same for Barrett on principle but it seems we’re stuck with the protégé disgrace of Roberts.
One would hope that “conservative” justices are more principled than thier leftist colleagues.
Personally, I don’t actual want a conservative justice, certainly not a liberal/progressive one. I’d prefer one committed to faithfully and reasonably interpreting the Constitution regardless of politics. Sotomayor is not that thing, Neither is Roberts or Barrett. I used quotes to emphasize the inappropriateness of the political labels the media likes to use. Roberts, notwithstanding the pretense he loves to display, is a political animal,
Roberts and Barrett are that thing. Sotomayor is not.
Thinking this through, if a Justice is found to be leaking information (not staff), that might be cause for early retirement. What if we got a 7-2 split out of this?
”that might be cause for early retirement”
If Totenberg burned Sotomayor, that would be just perfect.
I would have said that NPR seriously damaged their credibility, but they have no credibility to damage.
This farcical incident demonstrates — for the umpteenth time — the vile, stupid and evil nazi/communist/Islamofascist/Muslim supremacist Dhimmi-crat subversives’, pukes’ and fifth columnists’ gleeful penchant for engaging in brazen and self-serving mendacity, deceit and propagandistic Narrative(TM) contrivances and dissemination.
If Justice Alito was attempting to do the job that the FBI and SCOTUS security had shamefully and indefensibly failed to do, which is catch the leaker of the Dobbs decision, this was a cunning and boss move that shows that Alito doesn’t mess around and he understands the Dhimmi-crats’ threat to our nation, fully.
Nina Totenkopf has always been a shameless hack. Her apology means nothing.
The fact that she may have outed herself and Sotomayor as leakers is just icing on the cake.
Totenkopf has been spreading malicious lies for decades. Her apoplectic rages during the Thomas confirmation process were a good indicator of how far she would go to smear those she hated, and as far as I know she never has had any consequences, so why not make things up to insult your enemies and inspire your cronies? 20 years ago Dan Rather had to resign over similar shenanigans, but not Nina! Her devotees could care less.
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