US Supreme Court’s Alito Defends Private Jet Trip to Alaska – Conservative Justice Samuel Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court has admitted to using a private jet to travel to Alaska for a luxurious fishing trip in 2008. However, he justified his decision not to disclose the flight, which was provided by a billionaire hedge fund manager with business interests that have been brought before the court.
Alito recently wrote a commentary in the Wall Street Journal, published late on Tuesday, in which he defended his actions. This came just hours before the news outlet ProPublica published an article raising concerns about the justice’s failure to report the trip on mandatory financial disclosure forms or recuse himself from cases involving the hedge fund manager, Paul Singer.
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“Neither charge is valid,” Alito said in his commentary, titled, “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.” The U.S. Supreme Court has been entangled in a growing number of ethics-related controversies, notably involving conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and his connections to a Texas billionaire. Public opinion polls indicate a significant decline in the public’s trust and confidence in the highest judicial institution of the United States.
“This just keeps getting worse,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has long pressed for Supreme Court ethics reform, wrote on Twitter. According to ProPublica’s article, it was highlighted that if Justice Alito had personally chartered the private jet, the one-way cost would have exceeded $100,000.
The fishing trip was organized with the assistance of Leonard Leo, a longstanding conservative legal activist who played a crucial role in compiling former President Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees, as reported by ProPublica. Regarding the flight, Alito wrote that Singer had “allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat.”
Alito stayed at the King Salmon Lodge, which ProPublica said charged more than $1,000 a day. Alito called the portrayal “misleading” and said he stayed in a “modest one-room unit.” Alito said the justices commonly interpreted financial disclosure requirements to mean that “accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”
The Judicial Conference, which serves as the governing body for the wider federal judiciary, has recently implemented stricter regulations regarding the exemption. These regulations now include the requirement to disclose any transportation via private jet.
“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 wrote. Alito also said he had “no obligation” to recuse in any case connected to Singer, with whom he said he has spoken to a handful of times.
In one case that the Supreme Court heard in 2014 involving a unit of Singer’s Elliott Management, Alito said: “I was unaware of his connection with any of the listed entities, and I had no good reason to be aware of that.”
In April, ProPublica disclosed that Justice Thomas has been accepting lavish trips from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Texas businessman and Republican donor, for several decades. These trips, which included travel on a private jet and a superyacht, were not publicly disclosed by Thomas.
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ProPublica also highlighted real estate transactions involving Thomas and Crow. Furthermore, Politico reported that Justice Gorsuch, another conservative member of the Supreme Court, failed to disclose the buyer of a property in Colorado in which he had a stake.
The buyer was identified as the CEO of a prominent law firm whose attorneys have been involved in numerous Supreme Court cases. Recently, both Thomas and Alito were granted extensions to submit their annual financial disclosure forms, which are mandatory and require the reporting of outside income and gifts.
