In an ugly escalation of the left’s war on the Supreme Court, The New York Times last week offered up a hit on Chief Justice John Roberts, falsely charging him with “deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited” Donald Trump in “a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases.”

Plus, the story relied in part on leaks of confidential court documents — which means court staff, and possibly one of the justices, are actively helping the progressive attack on the institution.

The smear itself was pathetic: The Times’ Jodi Cantor and Adam Liptak claim Roberts boosted Trump in three cases:

Cantor and Liptak mainly obsess on an oddity: Roberts originally assigned the task of writing the majority opinion to Justice Samuel Alito, but later took it on himself.

Yet the Times reporters themselves note that the switch came after lefties claimed Alito should recuse himself, suggesting Roberts was simply trying to avoid needless controversy — a move that, anyway, didn’t impact the ruling’s result.

And Roberts had made his view of the root issues crystal-clear in a confidential February memo to his colleagues — a memo that, per Cantor and Liptak, “several people from the court” later discussed with the reporters.

Such leaking is a far larger violation of high-court ethics than any of the lefty complaints of recent years: How can the court even function if the justices can’t communicate frankly with each other?

This follows the leak of the draft Dobbs decision (overturning Roe v. Wade) two years ago, another plainly politically motivated outrage by some court insider.

And suspicion has to fall on Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the memo leak: Her hysterical dissent in the prez-immunity case charges that the ruling makes every president “a king above the law,” causing her to “fear for our democracy.”

Plus, Cantor and Liptak paint her as upset that Roberts passed on her effort to find some compromise — again, though his February memo plainly spelled out where he was always going to wind up.  

All this follows extensive “ethics” smears against Justices Clarence Thomas (especially) and Sam Alito (plus the now-routine confirmation-hearing smears of any Republican high-court nominee).

Yet somehow there’s no ethics storm about, say, KJB’s $3 million book deal, nor Sotomayor’s $3.7 million in book payments.

Bad enough that this campaign has reduced public faith in the Supreme Court — the only branch of the federal government that’s not badly dysfunctional these days.

Worse that the leaks to the Times indicate that the rabid insanity is starting to infect the high court itself.