In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.
Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.
Little Sammy denies that there's an ethics problem. Because, after all, everybody has billionaires willing to fly them away on six-figure junkets. Singer and his hedge fund have had case after case in front of the Supreme Court; Little Sammy has voted on all of them. He hasn't disclosed the trips (until now), which suggests to me that he likely knew that it stunk and he'd rather not air that pile of dirty laundry.
Alito isn't the only justice that these clowns have given expensive trips to. They also treated Scalia, but he's dead, so there's not much point in throwing more dirt on his grave.
Any local politician, official or judge who did anything remotely similar would have been subject to rather uncomfortable questioning by the FBI, if not an indictment. But the rules are different for the none demigods on the Court.
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