I gave you a response without explaining, so let me say why I immediately recognized it as fake.
This part: “You are forgetting what your role here is Neil, and I don’t want to hear from the two junior justices anymore. I will tell you how you will vote.”
is absurd if you know anything about the Court and how it operates. No justice could ever tell another how they will vote, or control them, regardless of seniority. Each of their votes counts equally, and you are just as important the day you get there as any other justice. If Roberts said anything remotely like that, they would tell him to take a flying leap.
The only way in which being junior matters is in selection of offices, the chair you sit in when on the bench, and whether you get to select who writes the opinion. The Chief gets to select who writes an opinion when he is in the majority. When he is not, the next most senior justice who is in the majority gets to decide who writes it. McConnell might talk to his caucus that way, but Roberts cannot. He has no power over any of them.
The idea that Kavanaugh was smiling after this supposed meeting also strikes me as very unlikely. I would imagine the hatred for the democrats and their attacks on the proper conduct of business in a democratic republic burns very brightly in him. He experienced first hand what Trump goes through every day. Would he really be happy that a suit to prevent the theft of the Presidency by those same democrats would be defeated? I doubt that very much. More likely, they want the suit to be through a different vehicle, brought by the President. Maybe they fear state vs state every time there is an election in the future. They know that President Trump has his own lawyers sending similar suits to the Court, so they may want to wait for those.
I don’t doubt that Roberts can’t be trusted, and he would vote against Trump if it came down to his vote. But if you saw ACB at her hearing, do you really think she would sit there silently while Roberts told her what to do? Gorsuch also doesn’t give a crap about what Roberts thinks.
It was all clearly fantasy.
good analysis + I agree; the other ‘tell’ that it’s made up is that the junior justices are ACB + K, Gorsuch came before.