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Trump and Alito, two men who disdain ethical constraints, chatted on Tuesday
The next day, Trump asked the Supreme Court to stop his New York criminal sentencing — and to give presidents-elect complete immunity.
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Donald Trump is a former president who is set to become president again on January 20 despite having faced four felony prosecutions from three different prosecutors — one of which led to conviction — relating to actions he took when seeking the presidency, while president, and after leaving the presidency.
Sam Alito is a justice who, in addition to his flag issues, held private interviews with two conservative figures for glowing narrative-setting opinion columns — including with a lawyer who had a key case before the court — in which they wrote that it is Alito’s view that Congress has no authority to pass legislation relating to judicial ethics.
Now, they’ve teamed up for everyone’s favorite new nihilistic buddy comedy, sketched out by Alito himself on Wednesday, as first reported by ABC News:
William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position. I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon. We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today, and indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed. We also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President-elect.
I sat here tonight reading this, thinking it couldn’t possibly be true.
But, of course it is fact. This is not a buddy comedy.
It is, instead, the world Chief Justice John Roberts has given us — helped along by a lack of sufficient action to counter it from congressional and executive leaders.
If no one in charge cares about people who break ethical laws, rules, and norms, then people who don’t care about ethical laws, rules, and norms are going to simply ignore them.
Or, as Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth put it succinctly, “[T]hey don’t care because they know no one in Congress or the judiciary will hold them accountable for ethics violations.”
And yet, if Alito keeps acting like this, people like me and Roth are going to keep criticizing him — despite Roberts’s New Year’s Eve reprimand to court critics.
Roth also noted that Levi’s father is former federal judge David Levi and his grandfather is former attorney general Edward Levi — the person who ran the Justice Department during the Ford administration in the aftermath of Watergate.
The grandson, to be clear, is a full-grown adult — a Sidley Austin partner who was Bill Barr’s chief of staff and previously worked for Sen. Mike Lee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as Alito and Judge Anthony Scirica of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Per Alito, William Levi asked a sitting justice, Alito, to take a call from an incoming president, Trump, in the middle of two ongoing legal fights about issues relating to three of those prosecutions — both of which could have ended up at the Supreme Court and one of which did the day after the call happened.
All of this because Trump allegedly needed Alito’s thoughts on Levi’s “qualifications” for a legal job in his new administration in their Tuesday call.
Then, when Trump’s lawyers did go to the Supreme Court the next day, they argued on Wednesday that a president-elect should be given the complete immunity from prosecution that a sitting president gets — particularly “after his electoral win his [sic] been certified,” which happened on Monday.
If nothing else, this capsule moment lays bare just how difficult tracking ethical questions is going to be in the coming years — and how important it is that those of us covering government continue to speak out.
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