In a new In the recording, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito attacks the news organization ProPublica, describing its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Supreme Court as driven by political hostility, insisting, “They don't like our rulings.”
Alito was taped at a June 3 event hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society. The recording was exclusively granted to Rolling rock by Lauren Windsor, the liberal documentary filmmaker, who has paid an annual dues to the society and spent $500 on a ticket to attend the dinner. Windsor colleague Ally Sammarco also attended and spoke with Alito, recording their conversation.
The questioner approached Alito with flattery, calling him an “American hero” and engaging the justice in a debate over media scrutiny of the Supreme Court: “Why do you think the Supreme Court is so attacked and targeted by the media. days?”
Alito responded: “They don't like our decisions and they don't like how they predict that we can decide some cases that come up. This is the beginning of the end of it,” he said. But Alito didn't stop there. He volunteered: “There are groups that are very well funded by ideological groups that spearheaded these attacks. This is”.
Asked to elaborate, Alito was specific. “ProPublica,” he said. “ProPublica gets a lot of money and they've spent a fortune investigating Clarence Thomas, for example. You know, everything he's done in his whole life.” Alito then drew on his own experience in the debate. “And they've done some of that to me,” he said. “They look for any little thing they can find and try to make something out of it.”
The nine unelected Supreme Court justices have been entrusted with enormous powers to shape individual and collective rights in America. In 2024, ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize for its “groundbreaking and ambitious reporting” on the high court and “how a small group of politically influential billionaires won over justices with lavish gifts and trips.”
Essentially, Alito is now accusing ProPublica of being unduly influenced by the media organization's own financial patrons. A spokesperson for ProPublica defended its investigative reporting Rolling rock. “ProPublica exposes abuses of power regardless of which party is responsible, and our newsroom operates with fierce independence,” the spokesperson said. “No donor is told about stories before they are published, or has a say in which stories reporters follow.” The news organization claims more than 55,000 donors “of every stripe” and also publishes a list of its “major donors”, which includes several key foundations.
In a series of stories for 2023, ProPublica reporters uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth private travel and holidays which Thomas took and Crowe paid. ProPublica also found Crow bought a house by Thomas and paid his nephew boarding school. Another friend of Thomas loaned him $267,000 to buy a luxury RV and then forgive all or most of the loan. ProPublica separately revealed that Alito flew on a private jet paid for by billionaire financier Paul Singer during a 2008 luxury vacation in Alaska.
When ProPublica reached out to Alito for comment in June 2023 for his story, he declined to comment. Instead, he prompted their story with one opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal defending his decision not to mention the Alaska excursion on his ethics forms. ProPublica wrote later that, through this strange maneuver, Alito had accused the media of “misleading readers on a story that had not yet been published.”
Although Alito dismissed the agency's reporting as focused on “petty” things, ProPublica's stories prompted the court to issue a new code of conduct, signed by all nine justices, in November 2023. A court statement said the document “represents to a large extent a codification of the principles we have long held to govern our conduct.”
After ProPublica's report, Thomas show up a new private jet trip provided by Crowe and a real estate deal with the billionaire donor featured in the ProPublica report. A statement accompanying the disclosure from Thomas' attorney acknowledged “prior reporting errors” but called them “strictly unintentional.”
Last week, Thomas' financial disclosures for 2023 were released to the public. He included a memo amending his 2019 financial disclosures to acknowledge two free vacations he received from Crow — trips previously reported by ProPublica — writing that the information was “inadvertently received at the time of filing.”
“The fact that Clarence Thomas redacted his previous records to officially disclose trips paid for by billionaire Harlan Crowe speaks for itself,” adds the ProPublica spokesperson. “These gifts, and Justice Alito's fishing in Alaska with a man whose hedge fund later decided a Supreme Court case, would not have been public knowledge without our report.”
Windsor has released two additional recordings from the Supreme Court Historical Society — both provided as exclusive Rolling rock. In the first recorded conversation, Alito spoke of the difficulty of expecting the left and the right to live “peacefully” because of their “differences on fundamental things that really cannot be reconciled.” He also said he agrees with the idea that people in America who believe in God should fight “to return our country to a place of godliness.”
In the second recording, Windsor spoke to the judge's wife, Martha-Ann Alito, who complained that she had to “look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month” and discussed wanting to design and bring the own flag with the Italian. word for “shame”, apparently in response.
Windsor is working on a documentary, “Gonzo for Democracy,” which will document the rise of Trumpism, election denial and religious extremism.
She says Rolling rock that Alito's comments about ProPublica are “really indicative of the kind of grievance he carries — or the kind of thumbing his nose at moral standards that he doesn't think he should be subjected to.”
He adds, “I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider a free RV, your nephew's college tuition or buying your mother's house a 'little thing'. These are all purchases from a donor – gifts from a donor – that I think any reasonable person would consider extraordinary.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/samuel-alito-supreme-court-recording-propublica-windsor-1235037796/
