Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said he doesn’t think Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did himself any favors with his lengthy prebuttal to ethics questions raised in a report about a freebie luxury fishing trip.
“It’s a real mess, and the excuses, I think, made it worse,” Whitehouse told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart of the scandal.
Earlier this week, Alito issued a bizarre, preemptive rebuttal in The Wall Street Journal, defending himself against ethics allegations hours before they were published by ProPublica.
The nonprofit outlet reported the conservative justice took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 aboard a private jet chartered by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who went on to ask the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in multiple business disputes. The flight was arranged by Leonard Leo, a prominent conservative figure who was head of the Federalist Society at the time.
Alito failed to report the trip on his financial disclosure forms and didn’t recuse himself from cases involving Singer’s businesses.
“The excuses that Alito made are so preposterous that they’re almost incriminating themselves,” Whitehouse said. “This business ― ‘an airplane is a facility’ ― I mean, Jonathan, how many times have we traveled on planes and has anybody ever called it a facility?”
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Alito argued that he needn’t have disclosed the trip because it was “personal hospitality,” which he said is technically defined as including “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization ... on property or facilities owned by [a] person.”
Alito argued that the term “facilities” encompasses “means of transportation” (such as a private plane), providing a lengthy paragraph of definitions of the term.
“By looking at a plane as a facility ... he steered everybody away from the actual text of the actual ‘personal hospitality’ rule, which limits it to food, lodging and entertainment,” Whitehouse said. “That’s pretty dispositive. It’s not allowed to count jet travel as personal hospitality, even if you call a jet a facility.”
Whitehouse said investigators would “get to the bottom of” ethics bombshells involving Alito and his fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, but also highlighted the need to scrutinize “this creepy group of right-wing billionaires who are meddling in the Supreme Court.”
“The role of these right-wing billionaires extends throughout the judicial selection process to the judicial nomination process, the actual argument in the courtroom and now what you find out [about] these appalling undisclosed, repeated gifts,” Whitehouse said.
Watch the interview on MSNBC below.