Earlier this week, ProPublica, which had previously exposed the bottomless corruption of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, scored another big hit on Justice Samuel Alito, who is best known for citing a medieval witch-burner as a legal authority in his Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The report recounts how Alito allegedly broke the law and violated all manner of judicial ethics by accepting a gift of a fancy fishing trip to Alaska from right-wing billionaire Paul Singer. The 2008 trip included a seat on a private jet, valued at $100,000, accommodations at a fancy hotel, $1,000 bottles of wine and "multicourse meals of Alaskan king crab legs or Kobe filet."
The details are infuriating, but not surprising because Alito tried to get ahead of the story by writing a "prebuttal" for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which ended up reading as a confession to deep and long-standing corruption. The justice tried to write the whole thing off as a minor excursion, dishonestly downplaying how fancy the trip was.
