As Legal Insurrection has documented, Democrats, their billionaire-backed special interest allies, and the mainstream media have engaged in an all-hands-on-deck coordinated attack to delegitimize the Supreme Court and distract from Joe Biden’s numerous failures ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
In the latest instance, conservative Justice Samuel Alito has been the target of hit pieces from the NY Times and the Washington Post related to flag-flying at his Virginia home and New Jersey beach house. The pieces claim without evidence that the flags are “symbols of January 6th” and “Christian nationalism” and cite purported experts who say they represent clear conflicts of interest for Alito.
In turn, fauxfended Democrat “leaders” in the House and Senate including Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have used the information to write angrygrams to Chief Justice John Roberts demanding he urge Alito to recuse himself from Trump/J6-related cases.
On Wednesday, Alito responded in two letters – one addressed to Durbin and Whitehouse and the other addressed to the Democrat House members who had expressed similar concerns. Both letters contained the same message, stating that in both flag instances, one involving an inverted flag flown for a short time in 2021 at his home and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that flew at his beach house in 2023, they were flown by his wife, Martha-Ann.
Mrs. Alito, the Justice wrote, was a flag-flying aficionado, but he said he was not. He said he had no knowledge of any correlation between the “Appeal to Heaven” flag and the “Stop the Steal” movement and noted that he assumed when his wife flew it that she did so in order “to express a religious and patriotic message”:
Alito told lawmakers the incidents were not in any way his doing. He revealed that in the case of the upside-down American flag — which he said was raised by his wife Martha-Ann Alito during a “nasty neighborhood dispute” — he actually told his wife to take it down and that she refused for several days.
“My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not,” he wrote. “My wife was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years.”
Alito said his wife is an “independently minded private citizen” who possesses First Amendment rights like “every other American.”
“She makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so,” he wrote. “She has made many sacrifices to accommodate my service on the Supreme Court, including the insult of having to endure numerous, loud, obscene, and personally insulting protests in front of our home that continue to this day and now threaten to escalate.”
Alito pointed out that the beach home, in particular, is in Mrs. Alito’s name and that she did not fly the “Appeal to Heaven” flag there “to associate herself with [Stop the Steal] or any other group.” He also correctly observed that the “use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings.”
Neither instance, Alito wrote, constituted grounds for “disqualifying” himself under the relevant Supreme Court Code of Conduct provision, and accordingly, he announced that he would not be recusing himself:
“A reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude this event does not meet the applicable standard for recusal. I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request.”
Full letter below:
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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