In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court
Members of the SCOTUS are crooked and on the take.
impeach and remove. or we should just stop listening to them. they don’t have an army to enforce their rulings. not that any left leaning president* would have the balls to do so, but it would be the moral thing to do at this point.
Alito said that he was invited to fly on Singer’s plane shortly before the trip and that the seat “would have otherwise been vacant.” He defended his failure to report the trip to the public, writing that justices “commonly interpreted” the disclosure requirements to not include “accommodations and transportation for social events.”
This is such an insane defense. Yeah, this casual acquaintance of yours just got you a $100k personal flight for the giggles.
When the Thomas bribery story came out, Elie Mystal said something like, “You’re telling us that this justice can handle the most complex legal cases but doesn’t understand ethics laws?” Same applies here. They didn’t think they would get caught.
Alito did put out his own statement. Unfortunately it’s on WSJ and thoroughly paywalled: https://www.wsj.com/articles/propublica-misleads-its-readers-alito-gifts-disclosure-alaska-singer-23b51eda
He didn’t just “put out his own statement”. Propublica reached out to him for comment on this article, he didn’t respond and then he scrambled to have an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal hours later (always worth saying that that is a Rupert Murdoch owned company). It was a poor attempt at damage control by a weasel trying to get ahead on spinning the narrative.
That is quite a thorough and damning article. It’s infuriating how openly corrupt some members of the supreme court are. Even more infuriating that they get away with it, and that almost certainly won’t change because the wealthy own this country.
