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In unusual move, Alito writes angry op-ed in WSJ as prebuttal to report on his ties to billionaire [1]

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Date: 2023-06-20

In an unusual move, the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday evening published an op-ed piece by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito angrily rebutting a story by ProPublica that hadn’t been published yet that raised issues about his ties with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.

The opinion piece was headlined: “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”

ProPublica is the independent, non-profit news website that broke the story about the decades-long relationship between Alito’s fellow conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Texas real-estate billionaire Harlan Crow that included lavish gifts, paid vacation trips and property deals.It raised calls by Democratic lawmakers for tightening Supreme Court ethics rules.

Just hours after the WSJ published Alito’s prebuttal, ProPublica published its story on the conservative Supreme Court justice. ProPublica pointed out that Alito was “attacking as unfair a story that he hadn’t read.”

x Read the full story here:https://t.co/yt86t05lTo — ProPublica (@propublica) June 21, 2023

As a veteran journalist, I can’t stress how unusual it is for a newspaper to publish a rebuttal op-ed as a preemptive strike in response to a story that another news outlet had not published yet. And for a Supreme Court justice to do this makes it even stranger. .

In an editor’s note, the WSJ said two reporters from ProPublica had emailed Alito on Friday “with a series of questions and asked him to respond by noon EDT Tuesday.” The newspaper’s opinion page then offered Alito’s response.

Alito wrote:

“ProPublica has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report. Neither charge is valid.”

Alito went on to say that he “had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites.”

“First, even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate. ProPublica suggests that my failure to recuse in these cases created an appearance of impropriety, but that is incorrect.”

Alito said that he had spoken to Singer “on no more than a handful of occasions,” and never discussed any cases before the Supreme Court.

But he did mention going on a fishing trip with Singer in 2008, saying that Singer allowed him to occupy “what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska.”

Alito said he reviewed the cases in question regarding whether recusal was required, and said he was not aware and had no good reason to be aware that Mr. Singer had an interest in any party.”

“Mr. Singer was not listed as a party to any of the cases listed by ProPublica,” Alito wrote.

He added that “the entities that ProPublica claims are connected to Mr. Singer all appear to be either limited liability corporations or limited liability partnerships.

He wrote:

“It would be utterly impossible for my staff or any other Supreme Court employees to search filings with the SEC or other government bodies to find the names of all individuals with a financial interest in every such entity named as a party in the thousands of cases that are brought to us each year.”

Alito did mention one case in which review was granted by the high court, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, Ltd. The 2014 case involving Argentine debt was decided by a 7-1 majority. Alito said Singer’s name did not appear in either the certiorari petition, the brief in opposition, or the merits briefs. Forbes noted in a capsule profile of Singer that the founder of the hedge fund firm, Elliott Management, “famously spent 15 years warring with the government of Argentina over bond payments, which resulted in a $2.4 billion payout to his firm in 2016.’ Alito then went into a very technical legal explanation in which he concluded that personal hospitality “need not be reported” on Financial Disclosure reports. “The flight to Alaska was the only occasion when I have accepted transportation for a purely social event, and in doing so I followed what I understood to be standard practice.” Alito said. Alito provided details about his fishing trip to Alaska, saying that he stayed “in a modest one-room unit at the “comfortable but rustic” King Salmon Lodge. He described the meals as “homestyle fare” and couldn’t recall whether the guests were served wine, but emphasized that “it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.” The Huffington Post noted: Alito’s ethics have been scrutinized in the past. He was previously accused of leaking the outcome of the 2014 Hobby Lobby case, which involved the company’s religious objections to covering the cost of some contraceptives for female employees. Here are some of the reactions to Alito’s rebuttal to an unpublished story. Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the “weird pre-buttal” raised even more questions, including whether Alito got help from a PR firm, and, if so, who paid? x Oh, my, the questions:



First, who orchestrated this weird pre-buttal with the infamous WSJ Polluter Page, and did Alito get help from a PR firm?



If so, who paid?https://t.co/vPRbOgfsRC — Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) June 21, 2023 From Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser: “I encourage Mr. Alito to continue publishing his most bitter, paranoid ramblings in the Wall Street Journal.” x As a frequent critic of the Supreme Court, who has spent much of his career trying to convince people that Samuel Alito is uniquely unsuited for the task of being a judge, I encourage Mr. Alito to continue publishing his most bitter, paranoid ramblings in the Wall Street Journal. — Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) June 20, 2023

(Updates with ProPublica publishing story on Alito.)

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/20/2176628/-In-unusual-move-Alito-writes-angry-op-ed-in-WSJ-to-rebut-unpublished-report-on-ties-to-billionaire

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