Justice for not reporting the travel in his financial disclosure forms.
Alito said his acceptance of the trip was not improper and reporting it was not required under a “personal hospitality” exception. But the story, along with disclosures fellow justice Clarence Thomas had similarly failed to report travel and gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow, led Senate Democrats to push for tightening the court’s ethics rules.
Advertisement
Alito’s statement did not address Durbin’s objections related to Leo but said if there were recusals in all the cases involving former colleagues, clerks or acquaintances of justices, the court’s work would be disrupted.
“In all the instances mentioned above, we are required to put favorable or unfavorable comments and any personal connections with an attorney out of our minds and judge the cases based solely on the law and the facts. And that is what we do,” Alito wrote.
“When Mr. Rivkin participated in the interviews and co-authored the articles, he did so as a journalist, not an advocate.”
– U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito
A request for comment from Rivkin was not immediately answered.
In the July article, Rivkin and his co-author James Taranto wrote Alito sat for a combined four hours of interviews, including one in Alito’s Supreme Court office, and that he answered questions “with a candor that is refreshing and can be startling.”
The pair wrote the court’s critics weren’t interested in more transparency, as they claimed.
“Their hostile reactions to our April interview and his June op-ed suggest — no surprise — that they’re really after ideologically congenial rulings, not to mention conformist press coverage,” Rivkin and Taranto wrote.
Advertisement
