Fix the Court yesterday received a fifth batch of documents from the State Department concerning Supreme Court justices’ international travel from 2018 to 2024, for which the Department’s Diplomatic Security Services arranged protection.

The documents are being produced as a result of a FOIA lawsuit FTC filed in Mar. 2025. We previously received documents in March, April, June and July and expect more later in the fall.

These documents cover several of the justices’ trips that were mentioned in prior releases: Justice Sotomayor’s 2023 vacation to Greece; her 2023 trips to Austria, Czechia, Switzerland and the U.K.; Justice Kavanaugh’s teaching trip to Italy in 2022; and Justice Breyer’s post-retirement (summer 2022) trip to the U.K.

With Kavanaugh’s visit to Rome to teach a course for Notre Dame taking place just three months after the assassination attempt, it’s not surprising that much of the discussion about it is security-related, with several lengthy redactions (see pp. 44-45).

Sotomayor’s vacation in Greece centered on a yacht trip around the Greek Isles, which she paid for herself and which was also discussed, in equally great detail, in the second batch.

As far as her travel around Europe went, the strangest note concerned her security detail. “The Czech police have a strict
matrix for how many foreign security officials may travel with a protectee,” the U.S. embassy’s regional security officer wrote to their Supreme Court counterpart (p. 52).

Czechia is the one country visited by a justice in this batch for which a cultural note was included. In the RSO’s email is the following line: “Czechia is strongly pro-NATO, mostly pro-EU, and almost entirely anti-Putin” (p. 53). Good to know.

Finally, for someone who’s visited the U.K. dozens of times and is married to a Brit like Breyer, it’s not surprising that his travels mostly comprised private meals and stays and private residences, with the identities of his hosts redacted.