Justice Alito defends private jet travel to luxury fishing trip
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of answering questions about his travels with a billionaire who often has Supreme Court cases hours before an article detailing their ties had even appeared.
In an extraordinary salvo on a favorite forum, Judge Alito defended himself in a preemptive article in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a 2008 luxury fishing trip.
His response comes as the judges are under increasing scrutiny of their ethical obligations to report donations and to withdraw from cases involving their benefactors.
The judges have taken different approaches to explain their actions and protect their institution. Judge Clarence Thomas has been largely silent in the face of revelations of gifts from Harlan Crow, a wealthy Republican donor. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. turned down an invitation to testify about the court’s ethical practices and made vague statements about its approach.
And Justice Alito has come out swinging.
The ProPublica article was about a trip Justice Alito made to a remote part of Alaska, where he arrived on the private jet of Paul singer, an immensely wealthy hedge fund manager and Republican donor. The flight would have cost more than $100,000 one way had the Justice Department chartered it itself, the outlet estimated, and its annual disclosures make no mention of the trip. Over the years following the trip, Mr. Singer’s companies were parties to a number of Supreme Court cases in which Judge Alito participated.
ProPublica had sought comment from the justice department, who instead turned to The Journal to make two important points: that he was under no obligation to withdraw from cases in which Mr. private jet.
Judge Alito said he had not spoken to Mr. Singer more than a few times, including twice when Mr. Singer introduced the judge to the speeches. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide impartially the issues at stake,” Judge Alito wrote.
He added that he was unaware of Mr Singer’s connection to the court cases, including one in which the court a 7 to 1 decision in favor of one of Mr. Singer’s companies, with Justice Alito in the majority.
But Mr. Singer’s connection to the case, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, was widely reported. A Forbes article covering the decision carried the headline “Supreme Court Gives Billionaire Paul Singer Victory Over Argentina.” An article in The New York Times noted that the parties to the case include “NML Capital, a subsidiary of Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by Paul Singer.”
Justice Alito said he was under no obligation to disclose the trip on Mr Singer’s private jet in “a seat that, to my knowledge, would otherwise have been empty”.
A federal law requires disclosure of gifts above a certain value, but makes exceptions for “personal hospitality of a person” in “that person’s or his family’s personal residence or on property or facilities owned by that person or his family.” Judge Alito wrote that a jet is such a facility and quoted from dictionary definitions.
The United States Judicial Conference, the policy-making body for the federal courts, had recently issued new guidelines requiring disclosure of private jet travel and stays at commercial properties such as resorts.
After ProPublica announced that Judge Thomas had taken luxury trips paid for by Mr. Crow, the judge said he would abide by the new guidelines. Justice Thomas justified accepting the trips because of what he said was his close friendship with Mr. Crow.
Justice Alito disputed the idea that the trip was particularly posh. “I stayed three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, a comfortable yet rustic facility,” he wrote. “As far as I remember, the meals were home-cooked. I don’t recall if the group at the lodge, about 20 people, were served wine, but if there was wine, it certainly wasn’t wine that cost $1,000.
Among the other guests was Leonard Leo, a longtime leader of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. In a statement to ProPublica, Mr. Leo, who ProPublica said had helped organize the trip, wrote that judges across the ideological spectrum had received similar hospitality from their own allies and that their judicial work had been unaffected.
“We should all be asking ourselves if this recent spate of ProPublica stories questioning the integrity of only conservative Supreme Court justices is bait to bring in more shady money from awakened billionaires who want to harm this Supreme Court and make it one who will ignore the law by stamping their disordered and deeply unpopular cultural affiliations,” said Mr. leo.
Justice Alito seems to have a good relationship with The Journal’s opinion pages, which have been published an extensive interview with him in April.
He said at the time that he was disappointed lawyers had not come to the defense of the court, which has come under increasing scrutiny for what critics say are serious ethical errors.
“This kind of joint attack on the court and on individual judges,” he said, “is new in my lifetime.”
He added: “The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticism, but if the courts are unfairly attacked, the organized bar will defend them.”
Instead, Judge Alito said, “They participated, at least to some degree, in these attacks.”
A few days before Politico published a leaked draft of Justice Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year, an editorial in The Journal hinted at court tensions that appeared to be based on insider information.
The author of the majority opinion was not yet publicly known. “Our guess,” the editorial said correctly, was that it would be Justice Alito.
The latest revelations will increase pressure on Congress or the Supreme Court to tighten ethical rules for judges.
Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, an advocacy group pushing for more openness at the Supreme Court, said it needed an ethics review. “The public may expect Supreme Court justices to be ethical examples of all people,” he said, “but the Nine have consistently shown themselves to fall short in this regard.”
In April, Chief Justice Roberts declined an invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the case, citing the separation of powers.
Last month, the chief justice said the court wanted to hear the case, even as he suggested Congress is powerless to act.
“I want to assure people that I am committed to ensuring that we as a court live up to the highest standards of conduct,” he said. “We continue to look at things we can do to practically deliver on that commitment.”