Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito can be heard in new audio slamming the news outlet ProPublica for covering the ethics of the highest court in the nation.
Alito claimed that the reporting was motivated by politics, saying, “They don’t like our decisions.”
The audio, provided to Rolling Stone by liberal documentary maker Lauren Windsor, caught Alito speaking on June 3 at a Supreme Court Historical Society event.
A questioner on the audio asked Alito why he thinks the Supreme Court “is being so attacked and being so targeted by the media these days?”
“They don’t like our decisions, and they don’t like how they anticipate we may decide some cases that are coming up. That’s the beginning of the end of it,” he said. “There are groups that are very well-funded by ideological groups that have spearheaded these attacks. That’s what it is.”
When asked to say more, Alito said “ProPublica gets a lot of money, and they have spent a fortune investigating Clarence Thomas, for example. You know, everything he’s ever done in his entire life.”
“And they’ve done some of that to me, too. They look for any little thing they can find, and they try to make something out of it,” he added.
ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its reporting on the court and the gifts and travel opportunities afforded to the justices by a number of billionaires.
“ProPublica exposes abuses of power no matter which party is in charge and our newsroom operates with fierce independence,” a spokesperson for the outlet told The Independent. “No donors are made aware of stories before they are published, nor do they have a say as to which stories reporters pursue. More than 55,000 donors of every stripe actively fund our investigative, nonpartisan journalism.”
Last year, ProPublica reported on the lavish trips gifted to Justice Clarence Thomas by billionaire Harlan Crow, who also bought a house from Thomas’ mom and paid for his grandnephew’s tuition.
The outlet also revealed that Alito flew on the private jet of financier Paul Singer in 2008 during a vacation to Alaska.
Before the story was published, Alito wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal defending his decision not to report the Alaska trip on ethics forms.
“The fact that Clarence Thomas amended his past filings to formally disclose trips that were paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow speaks for itself,” ProPublica added to The Independent. “Those gifts, and Justice Alito’s fishing trip to Alaska with a person whose hedge fund later had a case decided by the Supreme Court, would not have been publicly known without our reporting.”
The reporting by ProPublica led to the court adopting a new code of conduct in November last year. The court said the document is a “codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”
Windsor has provided two further recordings to Rolling Stone, in which Alito said the left and right cannot be expected to coexist “peacefully” because of their “differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”
He added that he agreed with the notion that those who believe in god should work to “return our country to a place of godliness.”
In another recording, Windsor spoke to the justice’s wife Martha-Ann Alito, who expressed dissatisfaction at having to “to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.”
Windsor told Rolling Stone that Alito’s statements regarding ProPublica reveal “the sort of grievance that he carries — or this sort of thumbing his nose at ethical standards he thinks he should not be subjected to.”
Justice Alito and his wife have recently faced criticism for flying flags at their homes used during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
