Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote a piece in Wall Street Journal on Tuesday defending his decisions not to disclose a paid Alaska trip in 2008 and not to recuse on a Court case in 2014, related to the person who paid for the transportation. Alito’s article came hours before the publication of a news article on that issue from ProPublica.
ProPublica published a piece on Wednesday with details about the 2008 fishing trip to Alaska, for which Justice Alito flew with a private jet, on a flight that could cost $100,000 if Alito chartered the plane himself, according to the article. The flight was paid by billionaire entrepreneur Paul Singer. Alito then received hospitality at King Salmon Lodge for three nights, a hotel that today charges from $400 to $1000 per day, according to its website.
The ProPublica article says that Alito did not recuse himself from a court case involving a company connected to Singer.
“Neither charge is valid,” Alito said in his Wall Street Journal commentary, titled, “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
Alito did not disclose the trip in his 2008 Financial Disclose Report and not disclosing it was the “standard practice” in cases like this, he said.
“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 in the Wall Street Journal piece, regarding the non-disclosure of the trip to Alaska.
The man who paid for the Alaska flight, Paul Singer, is a billionaire hedge fund owner. Singer said he did not organize the trip. ProPublica said, according to an anonymous source “familiar with the trip,” that Federalist Society head Leonard Leo helped organize the trip and invited Singer.
Regarding the flight, Alito wrote that Singer had “allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat.”
The ProPublica article mentions that King Salmon charges $1,000 per day and it is a luxury lodge. Alito called the portrayal “misleading” and said he stayed in a “modest one-room unit.”
King Salmon’s website provides one photograph of a room.
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, the policymaking body for the broader federal judiciary, recently tightened its regulations related to that exemption, including requiring transport by private jet to be disclosed.
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.”
ProPublica says that the company connected to Singer asked the Supreme Court to litigate its case in 2007 and in 2009, but the court declined. The Supreme Court finally agreed to take one part of the case in 2014.
The case was related to a purchase of Argentinian government debt by the company connected to Singer, ProPublica reported.
Alito did not recuse himself and voted, and the case finally had a 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The company connected to Singer was ultimately paid $2.4 billion, according to ProPublica.
ProPublica’s chair of the board is Paul Sagan, director of VMware Inc. and the pharmaceutical Moderna Inc., known for its mRNA vaccine, as well as several private businesses, according to ProPublica’s website.
Supreme Court Controversies
The court has been embroiled in mounting ethics controversies—in particular revelations about ties between conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and a Texas billionaire. Opinion polls have revealed a sharp drop in public confidence in the top U.S. judicial body.
“This just keeps getting worse,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has long pressed for Supreme Court ethics reform, wrote on Twitter.
ProPublica reported in April that Thomas for decades has accepted luxury trips from billionaire Texas businessman and Republican donor Harlan Crow, including on a private jet and superyacht, without publicly disclosing them. It also detailed real estate transactions involving Thomas and Crow.
Separately, the news outlet Politico has reported that conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch failed to disclose the buyer of a Colorado property in which he had a stake—the chief executive of a major law firm whose attorneys have been involved in numerous Supreme Court cases.
Thomas and Alito this month received extensions to file their mandatory annual financial disclosure forms that report outside income and gifts.
Reuters contributed to this report.
