XPost: alt.politics.trump, sac.politics, alt.politics.usa.republican   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns   
   From: nowomr@protonmail.com   
      
   Justice Alito's op-ed is a confession of corruption   
      
   On Tuesday afternoon, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was gifted op-ed   
   space in The Wall Street Journal, in which he attempted to make a   
   preemptive strike on a ProPublica article reporting on evidence of his   
   accepting gifts from someone with business before the court. Even though   
   the ProPublica article had not appeared at the time the op-ed ran, Alito   
   was shockingly accurate about what it would say.   
      
   But then, it’s always easy to predict the evidence of guilt when you’re   
   the one who is guilty. In fact, it’s easy to read Alito’s op-ed for what   
   it really is: a confession.   
      
      
      
   Alito took a huge gift from someone who has had business before the court   
   not once, but at least 10 times. And all Alito can provide as   
   justification is that he really didn’t remember a once-in-a-lifetime trip   
   with a six-figure price tag, and didn’t manage to put together that the   
   hedge fund he was ruling on was connected to the person who gave him that   
   trip. Who was a hedge fund manager.   
      
   In other words, ignorance is his only excuse. According to Alito, that’s   
   just fine.   
      
   What the ProPublica article shows is that Alito took a very expensive   
   fishing trip in 2008. That included being flown to a remote location in   
   Alaska on a private jet, and being put up in a room at an exclusive lodge   
   where he was wined, dined, and guided to catch some very large king   
   salmon. His flight, his fishing, his meals, wine, and room were covered by   
   hedge fund manager Paul Singer.   
      
   Alito never reported this gift. Because, he says, he only had a “modest   
   room” and “if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.”   
   Which skips right past the fact that the room, no matter if it wasn’t up   
   to Alito’s high standards, cost $1,000 a night all on its own—enough that   
   a single night there should have made the trip subject to reporting.   
      
   When it comes to his flight on a private jet, Alito has a Very Good Reason   
   why he didn’t have to report that.   
      
       As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements   
   to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was   
   asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am   
   aware, would have otherwise been vacant. It was my understanding that this   
   would not impose any extra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken commercial   
   flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on   
   the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons   
   to assist me.   
      
   There’s the minor problem that every seat on a scheduled flight, private   
   or commercial, would be “have otherwise been vacant” if someone didn’t put   
   their butt in it. That doesn’t make the value of these seats in any sense   
   free. He might want to try walking up to the gate at any airline and   
   telling them he wants to use one of those empty seats, just to check.   
      
   When it comes to the U.S. Marshals service, deputy marshals do generally   
   provide protection for federal judges, but Alito seems to be saying that   
   he would need their protection if flying with the general public, but not   
   in the company of these wealthy men who he had never met before. It’s   
   almost as if he’s saying that because they were rich, they were treated   
   differently.   
      
   Singer’s hedge fund was party to at least 10 cases before the Supreme   
   Court. These aren’t complex relationships, in which Singer contributed to   
   an organization, or was a partial owner of some entity through a nest of   
   overlapping corporations. Singer was a hedge fund manager. That hedge fund   
   was party to a case. But Alito has a firm response to why he couldn’t   
   possibly draw the connection.   
      
       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.   
      
   It would be utterly impossible … Except that the case was in 2014 and even   
   if Alito’s memory of Singer’s fund was faulty, it was an answer that could   
   have been returned in three seconds by any search engine. This is a   
   Supreme Court justice asking to be forgiven for failing to do the level of   
   research that would be required of a high school freshman turning in a   
   history paper. And, as might be obvious, ProPublica had no trouble making   
   this “impossible” connection.   
      
   In “Chinatown,” corruption is a complex web of connections tying city   
   officials to a wealthy land developer who is using a manufactured drought   
   to buy up land cheaply. In “The Godfather,” it’s cops being paid under the   
   table by both sides in a competing mob war. In many films and television   
   shows, corruption happens in the shadows, with the exchange of a briefcase   
   filled with cash, or the promise of a little somethin’ somethin’ directed   
   to an offshore account.   
      
   As is being vividly demonstrated here, that’s not what real corruption   
   looks like at all. What real corruption looks like is a billionaire   
   “friend” buying up your childhood home at far above the market value,   
   fixing it up, and letting your mom live there gratis. It looks like   
   expensive private school tuition for a family member being paid by a pal.   
   It looks like millions of dollars in business being directed to your   
   wife’s business—the business that was “accidentally” left off income   
   disclosure forms for 20 years.   
      
   And maybe more than anything else, it looks like trips, gifts, and   
   experiences that would be utterly unavailable to the average person—and   
   whose acceptance would be absolutely forbidden to any federal employee who   
   was not a Supreme Court justice. The reason articles keep appearing about   
   this kind of trip being enjoyed by justices and not other officials, or   
   judges at other levels of the courts, is because the Supreme Court has   
   written themselves an out. They are not just the judges of everyone else,   
   they’re also the only judges over their own behavior.   
      
   Who watches the watchmen? Why, the watchmen, of course. What could go   
   wrong?   
      
   The excuses in the cases of both Thomas and Alito keep coming back to the   
   same things. Either it was acceptable to take a gift because someone was   
   “a good friend” or it was acceptable to rule on a case related to that   
   person because there was no relationship. As one law professor put it in   
   that ProPublic article:   
      
       “If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case? And   
   if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?”   
      
   Alito wants to have it both ways. He’s saying that Singer was a nonentity   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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