https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/samuel-alito-has-exposed-himself?
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A billionaire gave him a gift, then won billions in his courtroom. The federal system that should have stopped it has refused. Three state offices still can.
Note from the author: This article consists first of an executive summary that walks through the entire case in about ten minutes of reading, covering the recusal mechanism, what Alito did, what is being filed, and what you can do this week. If you want the bottom line, the executive summary contains all of it. The second part is a deep dive for readers who want to see the case in the depth the receiving offices will expect, walking through each count with its strongest defense and rebuttal, the criminal referral doctrine, the federal-judge contrast, and the full call to action. Read the summary if you want the case. Read the deep dive if you want to defend the case in a conversation with someone who disagrees with you, or if you work for Snopes. THE CASE IN BRIEFIn October 2026, the Supreme Court will hear a case called Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, and Justice Samuel Alito is on track to vote in it. The lead petitioner is a company in which Paul Singer’s hedge fund holds a stake worth roughly 1.97 billion dollars. Singer is the same billionaire who flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet in 2008, in a gift Alito never reported, before Singer’s fund won a case in front of Alito that delivered it 2.4 billion dollars. The Court heard an earlier version of this same Suncor case in 2023, and Alito recused. The case has come back on the same question with the same parties, and this time he has not stepped aside. That recusal in 2023 and the refusal to recuse now turn on a rule most folks intuitively understand. Recusal is the rule that keeps a gift from becoming a bribe. A judge who takes something of value from a person and then rules on that person’s case has turned the gift into something that looks like payment for the ruling. Recusal is how a judge prevents that: they step aside and never vote, and the gift stays a gift. Samuel Alito has refused to step aside at least three times in cases tied to the people who gave him things of substantial value, or to the operative who arranged the giving. Here is the first, and it is the one that built the relationship. In July 2008, Alito flew to a fishing lodge in Alaska on Paul Singer’s private jet, a seat that would have cost more than 100,000 dollars to charter. Leonard Leo arranged the trip. Leo is the operative who ran the campaign to confirm Alito to the Court and who has spent his career connecting wealthy conservative donors to conservative judges. Alito did not report the trip on his 2008 financial disclosure form or on any form afterward, until ProPublica exposed it in 2023. Six years after the trip, Singer’s hedge fund had a case before the Court, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital. Justice Sotomayor recused. Alito did not. He voted with the majority for Singer’s side, and within two years Singer’s fund collected approximately 2.4 billion dollars from Argentina. Here is the second. In 2023, Alito sat for two long private interviews with attorney David Rivkin inside his chambers at the Court. At the time, Rivkin was the lawyer of record for the petitioners in a case called Moore v. United States, which the Court agreed to hear in the weeks between the two interviews. Rivkin was also Leonard Leo’s personal lawyer, defending Leo against the Senate subpoenas that grew out of the Alaska trip investigation. Alito refused to step aside from Moore, calling Rivkin a journalist rather than a litigant during those chambers visits. The Court ruled for Rivkin’s clients in June 2024, with Alito in the majority. The third is Suncor, the vote that is still ahead. Alito owns shares in seven energy companies and a fund that holds ExxonMobil, which is one of the petitioners in the case. He recused from the identical case in 2023 and has not recused now, and Singer’s 1.97 billion dollar position in the lead petitioner ties this vote back to the man who paid for the 2008 trip. One episode looks like a lapse. Three, with the same operative and the same donor running through them, look like a practice. The thread connecting all three is Leonard Leo. He ran the confirmation, arranged the trip, served as the lawyer in the second episode, and built the donor relationships that reach the third. The case is not that one billionaire bought one vote in a back room. The case is that a single operative built a standing relationship between a justice and the donors whose interests keep arriving at the Court, and the justice continues to weigh in on cases where they should be recusing. Two filings follow from this, and they rest on different ground, so it is worth being plain about which is stronger. The bar grievance is the solid one. New Jersey, where Alito is admitted to practice law, holds its lawyers to Rule 8.4(d), which forbids conduct that damages the administration of justice. The test the New Jersey courts apply asks whether a reasonable person, knowing the facts, would doubt the judge’s impartiality. A six-figure undisclosed gift followed by a vote worth billions to the giver creates that doubt, and it does so no matter who arranged the seat on the plane or what was said on it. The appearance is the violation. The grievance covers all three episodes. The criminal referral is the more difficult one, and I will not pretend otherwise. New Jersey’s bribery statute, 2C:27–2, makes it a felony for any person to accept a benefit as consideration for a vote in a judicial proceeding, and the New Jersey Supreme Court confirmed in 2023 that the statute reaches anyone who meets its elements, with no exemption for federal officers. Proving consideration is the demanding part, because it requires showing that Alito understood, when he accepted the benefit, that it was tied to his conduct on the bench. That is why the referral is built around Suncor and made conditional. If Alito steps aside before the vote, the referral falls away. If he sits and votes on a case where Singer holds a near two billion dollar stake, after taking Singer’s gift and ruling for Singer once before, while the conflict sits under public scrutiny, he cannot credibly claim ignorance, and the conduct becomes present and provable rather than a matter of reconstructing what he was thinking in 2008. Now the question a fair reader will ask. Why is this falling to a state bar and a state prosecutor rather than the federal system built to handle it? Because the federal system has declined to act, and in Alito’s case much of it cannot. Picture any other federal judge doing what Alito did, whether a district judge in Newark or a circuit judge in Philadelphia. The accountability that would reach that judge does not reach Alito, and the reason is not that his conduct is more defensible; it is that the Supreme Court sits outside the rules that bind every court below it. Federal law requires every judge, including every justice, to report gifts of travel, because the exemption for personal hospitality covers a meal or a place to stay and has never covered a private jet flight. A district judge who left a six-figure jet trip off his disclosure form would face a misconduct complaint that any citizen can file, and the system is built to hear it. The Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in December 2024 that Alito’s nondisclosure violated that same federal law, and the one committee that could refer him for it has had eighteen months and has done nothing. The chambers interviews work the same way. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges forbids a judge from holding private conversations about a pending case with one side’s lawyer, and a district judge who did what Alito did would face a complaint under that code. The code binds every federal judge in the country except the nine justices, who wrote themselves a separate version in 2023 with no enforcement mechanism. And a lower judge who wrongly refused to step aside could be reversed by the court above him, while Alito has no court above him, so his refusal is reviewed by no one. That is why the filing goes to the states. The conduct fits a New Jersey crime, and New Jersey can apply its own law to a lawyer it admitted. No state has brought a bar grievance or a criminal referral against a sitting justice before, and nothing forbids it. It has not been done because, until the federal system stopped working, it did not have to be. It is the path that remains open, and it is the one that keeps these nine people from standing above the law. If you wait for elections to exercise justice then you give both a runway of lawlessness and an incentive for bad actors to ensure free and fair elections are impossible. Sure sounds like what is happening now, right? So today I am filing three documents with three state offices. The first is a verified grievance with the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics, asking that office to investigate Alito for violating Rule 8.4(d). The grievance contains the three episodes described above. The second is a conditional criminal referral to the New Jersey Attorney General under 2C:27–2, asking that office to investigate and, if Alito sits on Suncor and votes, to prosecute. The third is a charities referral to the New York Attorney General, asking that office to investigate the network of New York-registered nonprofits that Leonard Leo built and runs. The same office dissolved the Trump Foundation in 2018 and won its case against the NRA in 2020, and the money moving through the Leo network dwarfs both. I am filing in the states because the federal authorities have refused to. The Senate made its finding in December 2024. Eighteen months have passed. The Judicial Conference committee chaired by Chief Justice Roberts has not referred Alito to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department has not opened a case. The Acting Attorney General is Todd Blanche, who was Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer in the New York trial that ended in Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, and who now runs the department that would have to prosecute the justice whose votes have shielded the president he defended. The people at the top of the federal track owe their positions to the man Alito’s votes protect. State authority is what’s left. Here is what you can do about this situation, to influence the outcome. Write a short letter, in your own words, to the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics, and ask them to investigate the grievance against Samuel Alito like any other complaint. Tell them why you care. Tell them why it matters to you that a Supreme Court justice answers to the same rules as everyone else, that the most powerful court in the country is not above consequence. It does not need to be long, and it should not copy mine; a state office pays attention to letters written in a real person’s voice, not to identical form copies. Office of Attorney Ethics, Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex, P.O. Box 963, Trenton, New Jersey 08625-0963. The Deep DiveThe summary made the case. This is the proof, at the depth the receiving offices will expect, and it rests entirely on documents anyone can read: the Senate Judiciary Committee’s findings, the Court’s own order lists, the Wall Street Journal’s published interviews, the opinion in Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, and the cert grant in Suncor. Nothing here depends on a leaked memo, an anonymous source, or a contested reading of events. The record is in the open. In July 2008, Samuel Alito flew on a private jet to a fishing lodge in King Salmon, Alaska. The jet belonged to Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire who runs Elliott Management. ProPublica later valued the one-way charter at more than 100,000 dollars.¹ Alito stayed at a private lodge owned by Robin Arkley II, fished with a guide, and paid for none of it. Leonard Leo, then co-chairman of the Federalist Society, organized the trip and asked Singer for the seat on the jet.² Alito did not report the trip on his 2008 financial disclosure form, and it did not appear on any form he filed afterward, until ProPublica exposed it in June 2023, fifteen years later.¹ Six years after the trip, in 2014, the Supreme Court heard Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital. NML Capital was a subsidiary of Singer’s hedge fund.³ The Court ruled 7–1 in NML’s favor. Sotomayor recused, but Alito did not, and he voted with the majority. Within two years, Singer’s fund collected approximately 2.4 billion dollars from Argentina.⁴ The bar rule is RPC 8.4(d), which prohibits New Jersey lawyers from conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. The Supreme Court of New Jersey, in DeNike v. Cupo, applies a specific test: would a reasonable, fully informed person doubt the judge’s impartiality?⁵ The rule does not ask about bribery or quid pro quo. It asks about appearance. A reasonable observer looks at a six-figure undisclosed gift from a hedge fund owner followed by a vote in that same hedge fund’s favor producing a multibillion-dollar recovery, and the observer doubts the judge was impartial. A reasonable person doubting the judge’s impartiality is what the rule calls a violation. Alito’s defense, repeated by his apologists, is the personal hospitality exemption. He has argued that Singer and Arkley were friends, and that gifts of personal hospitality from friends did not require disclosure under the rules in place in 2008. That is not what friendship looks like in the world the rest of us live in. Friends invite friends to dinner. Friends do not charter private aircraft worth more than most American families earn in a year. The people who wrote the disclosure rules in 2008 understood the difference, which is why the exemption was written narrowly. The Senate Judiciary Committee, in its December 2024 majority-staff report, formally rejected Alito’s reading and concluded that the nondisclosure violated federal law.⁶ The personal hospitality exemption never covered a private jet flight or a commercial fishing lodge, and the committee with jurisdiction over the federal disclosure regime has said so on the record. The deeper problem is that the disclosure question and the bar question are different. The bar rule asks about impartiality, not paperwork. Even if every disclosure rule had been followed perfectly, a six-figure gift followed by a billion-dollar vote looks exactly like a payoff, and that is the question the bar rule is asking. The Supreme Court of New Jersey has vacated trials over a judge’s single conversation about a hypothetical future job. Alito’s conduct is several orders of magnitude beyond that line. The first count was about a gift and a vote separated by six years. The second count is about a lawyer who came into Alito’s chambers while his own case was pending before the Court. His name is David B. Rivkin Jr., a partner at BakerHostetler in Washington, D.C. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal published two long chambers interviews with Justice Alito.⁷ Rivkin arranged the access. Rivkin sat in the room. The first piece ran on April 28, 2023. The second ran on July 28, 2023. Each presented Alito’s voice at length, defending himself against the ethics reporting that had broken earlier that year. Three things were true at the same time. Rivkin was counsel of record for the petitioners in Moore v. United States, a case the Supreme Court agreed to hear on June 26, 2023, between the two chambers interviews. Rivkin was personal counsel to Leonard Leo, defending Leo against the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenas arising from the Alaska trip. Rivkin was interviewing Alito about the ethics scandal that Leo and Alito were both implicated in. One lawyer holding three simultaneous roles, and the chambers interviews happened anyway. On September 8, 2023, Alito issued a written statement refusing to recuse from Moore, arguing that Rivkin had been acting as a journalist, not as a litigant.⁸ The Court heard Moore on December 5, 2023. Alito participated. The Court decided 7–2 in June 2024 with Alito in the majority. Rivkin had gotten his Supreme Court argument and two extended sit-downs with a justice while the case was pending. The bar rule is the same RPC 8.4(d) and the DeNike appearance standard that governed Count One. A reasonable observer knows that Rivkin was counsel of record in Moore, that the chambers interviews lasted hours, that no transcript was released, and that everything said in those rooms except what Rivkin chose to publish remains private. The observer doubts that Alito could have been impartial. A reasonable person doubting the judge’s impartiality is what the rule calls a violation. Alito’s defense is the journalist-not-litigant framing. The bar rule does not recognize hat-changing. The lawyer’s identity does not change at the threshold of chambers. If the journalist role really were separate from the lawyer role, Rivkin could have asked another lawyer at his firm to handle Moore while he conducted the interviews. He chose to keep both roles instead. The Supreme Court of New Jersey, in State v. McCabe, required recusal in a DWI case because the municipal judge and the defendant’s attorney were adversaries in an unrelated probate case still pending in another court.⁹ The standard the court applied was appearance, not actual bias. The first two counts are about completed conduct. The third count is unfolding right now, on a case the Court will hear in the first week of October. This is also the count that connects directly to the criminal referral. The case is Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, docket number 25–170. The Court granted certiorari on February 23, 2026.¹⁰ The petitioners include Suncor, ExxonMobil, and several other oil companies. The respondents are Boulder County and the City of Boulder, Colorado. At issue is whether municipalities can sue oil companies in state court for the local effects of climate change, or whether those suits must be heard in federal court. The case is one of dozens like it filed by cities and counties around the country, and the outcome will shape the legal landscape for all of them. What turns this case into a count under the bar rules, and a potential criminal predicate, is what the Court did three years ago. In 2023, the same case came before the Court with the same parties and the same question, and the Court denied certiorari on April 24, 2023. The order list that day noted Justice Alito’s recusal.¹¹ Three years later, when the Court took the case, the February 23, 2026 order list reflected no recusal by Alito at all. Same case, same parties, same conflict, two different decisions about whether the justice would sit. The facts that have not changed are visible in his disclosure forms. Alito owns shares in seven energy companies, including ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Woodside Energy, AES, BHP, Black Hills, and OGE Energy, plus a Vanguard ETF holding ExxonMobil.¹² ExxonMobil is a named petitioner. Those holdings existed in 2023, when he recused, and they exist in 2026, when he did not. There is a further fact about Suncor that connects this count directly back to Count One. Paul Singer’s Elliott Investment Management holds a multi-billion-dollar stake in Suncor Energy, the lead petitioner in the case. As of Elliott’s most recent public 13F filing, that stake was approximately 1.97 billion dollars and constituted roughly 11 percent of Elliott’s portfolio.¹³ Elliott is not a passive shareholder. Elliott drove the activist campaign that reshaped Suncor’s corporate strategy and installed the company’s current CEO. Paul Singer is the same billionaire who flew Justice Alito to Alaska on his private jet in 2008 and the same billionaire whose hedge fund collected 2.4 billion dollars from Argentina after the NML Capital vote Alito cast in 2014. He is now the lead activist investor in the company asking the Supreme Court to insulate itself from climate liability. Justice Alito has refused to recuse. The bar rule is RPC 8.4(d), and the DeNike standard asks whether a reasonable observer would doubt the judge’s impartiality. The reasonable observer looks at a judge who recused in 2023 and did not recuse in 2026 on a case where nothing material has changed, and where one of the largest activist stakeholders in the lead petitioner is the same billionaire who gave the judge an undisclosed six-figure gift in 2008 and reaped a multibillion-dollar return on a 2014 vote. The observer doubts. Alito’s defense, drawn from his pattern of statements on prior recusal challenges, runs along three lines. Recusal is a personal decision for each justice, and when no sound reason exists, the duty is to sit. A holding in a parent company or a diversified fund does not necessarily produce a financial interest in a named party. And a justice’s prior recusal in an earlier petition does not bind that justice when the case returns on a different procedural posture. Alito himself made each of these arguments in his September 2023 statement refusing to recuse from Moore. None of those arguments answer the appearance question the bar rule asks. The reasonable observer sees the same case, the same parties, the same disclosed holdings, and one different decision about whether to sit. The bar rule does not require Alito’s defense to be wrong on its merits. It requires only that a reasonable observer doubt the judge’s impartiality. That doubt is on the record the day Alito chose not to recuse. Count Three is conditional. If Alito recuses before oral argument, the count drops. If he sits on the case, the count matures and joins the first two as completed conduct under RPC 8.4(d). Imagine the same three counts, but the judge is not on the Supreme Court. The judge is a federal district judge in Newark. Or a circuit judge in Philadelphia. Or a bankruptcy judge in Trenton. The conduct is identical. That judge does not get to do what Alito did, because three working enforcement mechanisms apply to every federal judge except the nine on the Supreme Court. The first is the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which binds every lower federal judge in the country and requires them to avoid impropriety, disqualify themselves when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned, and comply with the financial disclosure requirements. The Code does not apply to Supreme Court justices. The Court adopted its own separate Code of Conduct in November 2023, after the public reporting on Alito and Thomas, and by the Court’s own admission that Code has no enforcement mechanism.¹⁴ The second is the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980, which allows any person to file a complaint alleging that a federal judge has engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of the courts.¹⁵ The judicial council can reprimand the judge, bar new cases, or refer the matter for impeachment. The Act explicitly identifies knowingly violating financial disclosure requirements as misconduct. The Act does not apply to Supreme Court justices. The third is the Ethics in Government Act referral mechanism. The Judicial Conference’s Committee on Financial Disclosure can refer to the Attorney General any judicial officer the committee has reasonable cause to believe willfully failed to file required information. The federal disclosure statute underlying this mechanism is 18 U.S.C. 1001, which carries up to five years per count for federal employees who knowingly file false statements. The Department of Justice has prosecuted federal employees for not disclosing private jet flights on financial disclosure forms. This mechanism technically applies to Supreme Court justices. The committee has never made the referral. The December 2024 Senate Judiciary Committee finding that Alito’s Singer nondisclosure violated federal law supplied exactly the reasonable cause the Committee on Financial Disclosure would need. The committee has had eighteen months. It has done nothing. A federal district judge who accepted an undisclosed private jet trip from a hedge fund billionaire and then voted to deliver that billionaire billions of dollars would face a judicial complaint within weeks, a special committee investigation, public reprimand at minimum, and likely a referral for impeachment. The same judge giving two private chambers interviews to a lawyer with a pending case would lose the case on a disqualification motion from his own circuit. The same judge recusing in 2023 and refusing to recuse in 2026 on identical facts would draw reversal from his own circuit and a judicial complaint no honest review could dismiss. Every lower federal judge in the country answers to these mechanisms. The nine justices of the Supreme Court answer to none of them. The Court wrote itself out of every accountability rule that applies to every other federal judge, defended writing itself out, and in November 2023 made the arrangement formal by issuing its own Code with no enforcement behind it. That is why the New Jersey bar matters. That is why the New Jersey bribery statute matters. Here is where the criminal referral enters. New Jersey’s bribery statute is N.J.S.A. 2C:27–2. It says, in plain language, that a person is guilty of bribery if he solicits or accepts any benefit as consideration for a decision or vote in a judicial proceeding.¹⁶ The statute does not say public servant. The statute says any person. The New Jersey Supreme Court confirmed in 2023 that the statute is broader than its federal counterpart and applies to anyone who meets the elements. The statute does not exempt federal officers. It does not exempt judges. It does not exempt Supreme Court justices. The statutory elements map onto the conduct in three steps. Step one, Alito is a person, so the statute reaches him. Step two, the benefit is the 2008 Alaska trip from Paul Singer, valued by ProPublica’s investigation at over 100,000 dollars in jet charter alone before the lodge, the guide, and the rest, and never disclosed on Alito’s financial disclosure form. The statute defines “benefit as consideration” as any benefit not authorized by law, and a six-figure undisclosed personal benefit to a sitting federal judge is not authorized by law. Step three, the consideration element is what the prosecution would develop through investigation. Consideration in bribery law does not require a written agreement or an explicit quid-pro-quo conversation. It can be proven through circumstantial evidence. The closest analogous case is United States v. Schaffer, 183 F.3d 833 (D.C. Cir. 1999), involving Tyson Foods’ gifts to Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.¹⁷ The D.C. Circuit treated the legal question as whether the recipient knew, at the time of the gift, about the future official acts the gift was meant to influence. Long gaps between the gift and the later act do not by themselves defeat a prosecution. The case turns on what the recipient knew at the time he accepted. The contemporaneous knowledge the statute asks about runs through Leonard Leo more than through Singer. Singer says he did not arrange the trip and did not know Alito would be aboard, and 2008 was the first time the two men met, so the case is not that Singer handed over a plane seat in exchange for a future vote. The case is that Leo, whose work is connecting conservative donors to conservative judges, built the relationship and arranged the trip, and that Elliott Management’s business is built on federal litigation that predictably reaches the courts. A justice who accepts a six-figure benefit assembled by that operative, from that donor, understands the relationship will create a conflict whenever those interests arrive at the Court. The prosecution does not need Alito to have foreseen the specific case. It needs him to have understood the relationship, and the people who built it made that hard to miss. The non-disclosure is part of that evidence. Federal law required the gift of transportation to be reported, and the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in December 2024 that leaving it off violated that law. A justice who treated the trip as ordinary, reportable hospitality would have listed it. Omitting it from the 2008 form and every form afterward is consistent with a justice who understood the relationship would draw scrutiny if it were known, and the standard-practice defense he later offered does not answer why the gift went unreported once the rules plainly reached it. The subsequent conduct confirms the inference. Alito did not recuse from NML Capital in 2014. He voted with the majority. Singer’s fund collected 2.4 billion dollars from Argentina. Alito gave private chambers interviews to Leo’s personal lawyer in 2023 while that lawyer had a case pending before the Court. He refused to recuse from Suncor in 2026 after recusing from the same case in 2023 on the same facts. That is the case. Now the defenses, in the strongest form a top-dollar conservative defense team would raise them, with our responses. The first defense is that Schaffer actually helps the defense, not the prosecution, because the D.C. Circuit ended up letting Schaffer off on the gratuities count. That misreads the case. The court let Schaffer off because the prosecution could not prove Schaffer knew, at the time of the gift, about the specific government decisions Tyson Foods wanted influenced. The court did not say cases with long gaps between gift and decision cannot win; it said you have to show the recipient knew at the time of the gift what was coming. Schaffer’s prosecution did not have that proof. Ours does. Singer was a documented major federal litigant in 2008, Leo’s role coordinating donor-judge relationships was documented and admitted at the time, and Alito’s non-disclosure is evidence he understood the trip would compromise his judicial role. The framework Schaffer set up is the framework we win under. The second defense is that the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Snyder v. United States narrowed bribery law to require an explicit agreement before the official act, and any state prosecution would lose under the same logic.¹⁸ Snyder construed a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. 666, that uses specific language about being “rewarded” versus “influenced.” New Jersey’s bribery statute uses different language. It reaches “consideration” for a vote, which under New Jersey law has always covered ongoing understandings, not just explicit agreements, and the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the state statute is broader than the federal one. New Jersey courts interpret New Jersey law, and the Supreme Court’s federal ruling does not change what New Jersey law says. The defense will quote Snyder. The state will quote the New Jersey statute and the New Jersey Supreme Court. Snyder makes the case harder. It does not make the case lose. The third defense is that the contemporaneous knowledge argument is speculation, that Alito could not have anticipated Singer’s specific case in 2014, and that treating ordinary social interactions with prominent people as bribery would criminalize normal life for justices. We are not arguing Alito had a crystal ball. We are arguing Alito accepted a six-figure gift from a man whose entire business depends on federal court outcomes, organized by an operative whose admitted job is connecting conservative donors to conservative judges. A justice in that situation does not need to anticipate the specific case; he knows the relationship creates a problem when any of Singer’s interests arrive at the Court. That is what recusal is for. He should have stayed away from the trip or recused when Singer’s case arrived, and he did neither. We are not saying justices cannot have friendships. We are saying that when a justice accepts a major benefit from someone whose business is federal litigation, organized by someone whose business is judicial influence, the relationship is not an ordinary friendship and recusal is not optional. The fourth defense is that the non-disclosure was standard practice in 2008, that the personal hospitality exemption was widely understood to cover trips like this, that Thomas did it and Scalia did it and Alito followed the standard practice. That defense fails for a specific reason. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the federal disclosure rules, looked at the 2008 rules in detail and concluded the rules never permitted what Alito did. The personal hospitality exemption never covered private jet flights or commercial fishing lodges, and a widespread practice does not become a legal practice through repetition. The committee with the authority to interpret the rules said the rules required disclosure. The personal hospitality reading Alito and his apologists rely on is something his lawyers worked up after the trip was exposed, not something that was in the rules at the time. The fifth defense is that the 7–1 vote in NML Capital cannot prove corruption, because six other justices voted the same way without bribes. This confuses two different things. The bar violation comes from failing to recuse, not from how Alito voted, and the bribery question is whether Alito accepted a benefit and then failed to step aside from his benefactor’s case. What other justices did is irrelevant. What Alito personally did is the question. Sotomayor recused from NML Capital, which is the standard response when a justice has a conflict, and she stepped aside on weaker facts. The fact that the case would have been decided the same way without Alito actually makes things worse. He did not have to participate, the Court did not need his vote, and he chose to sit on a case involving someone who had given him a six-figure gift when he easily could have stepped aside. The choice itself is the conduct. The sixth defense is that the bribery referral is about a vote that has not happened yet, which makes it premature. The referral is conditional. If Alito recuses before voting, the referral drops, and that is exactly what we want to happen. Filing now gives him the chance to step aside, and filing after the vote would be too late. The conditional structure is the strongest part of the design, because it preserves the off-ramp the rules created for exactly this situation. Prosecutors routinely receive referrals about ongoing conduct, particularly when the conduct is about to become final and there is still time to prevent it. The referral functions as a notice to the New Jersey Attorney General that the conduct is being tracked and that prosecution becomes appropriate if the vote happens. The seventh defense is that no state has ever prosecuted a sitting Supreme Court justice, and there is a reason for that. The Supremacy Clause and separation of powers raise serious questions about whether a state can criminally prosecute a federal officer. The dual sovereignty doctrine answers most of it. Established by the Supreme Court in Heath v. Alabama in 1985 and reaffirmed in Gamble v. United States in 2019, the doctrine holds that state and federal governments are separate sovereigns and each may prosecute conduct that violates its own laws.¹⁹,²⁰ If Alito were stopped for drunk driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, no one would argue New Jersey lacked the authority to charge him, and the same logic applies to bribery. The federal officer immunity from In re Neagle in 1890 protects federal officers performing acts necessary to their federal duties.²¹ A U.S. Marshal protecting a Supreme Court justice falls within Neagle’s protection. A justice accepting an undisclosed benefit and then failing to recuse from his benefactor’s case falls outside it, because accepting a bribe sits outside the discharge of any federal duty. The absence of prior state prosecutions of sitting justices reflects political reality, not legal prohibition. The Constitution does not exempt Supreme Court justices from state criminal jurisdiction, and Alito’s New Jersey bar membership is itself his acceptance of New Jersey’s authority over his conduct as a New Jersey lawyer. If he sits and votes, the conduct fits the statutory elements on its face. Whether the prosecution would ultimately prevail at trial is a question for the Attorney General to investigate. The referral is asking the Attorney General to investigate. The criminal referral is conditional. If Alito recuses from Suncor before voting, the referral drops along with Count Three of the bar grievance. If he sits and votes, both mature, and the conduct moves from bar discipline territory into felony bribery exposure under 2C:27–2, which New Jersey classifies as a crime of the second degree. If we waited until October to file, the case would already have been argued. Filing today preserves Alito’s opportunity to step aside before the conduct becomes final. It also puts the New Jersey Attorney General on notice that the conduct is being tracked. The limits of these filings are honest. Disbarment by the New Jersey bar will not remove Alito from the Supreme Court, because the Constitution puts removal in the Senate’s hands through impeachment. Whether a state bar can strip a federal officer of his license while he holds federal office is unresolved, and most analysts expect any final discipline to be stayed until Alito leaves the bench. The criminal referral runs into the same kind of question. No state has prosecuted a sitting Supreme Court justice in the history of the country. We do not know what would happen because nobody has tried. What the bar process and the criminal referral together will produce is a public record the country does not have yet: an investigation, sworn testimony, document discovery, and findings of fact about a sitting justice’s conduct, made by authorities that exist for exactly that purpose and answer to a state supreme court and a state attorney general, not to the Supreme Court. The Office of Attorney Ethics will docket a properly filed grievance. The Attorney General will receive a properly filed referral. Neither office can make the paperwork disappear because the lawyer in question is famous. The same logic that puts the bar grievance in New Jersey and the criminal referral in New Jersey puts the third filing in New York. Leonard Leo’s network of nonprofits is registered in New York. The Federalist Society is a New York not-for-profit corporation. The Manhattan Institute, chaired by Paul Singer, is a New York not-for-profit corporation. Both are registered with the New York Charities Bureau, the office of the New York Attorney General that supervises tax-exempt entities operating in the state. The New York Attorney General has used New York charities law twice in the last decade against politically connected nonprofits operating outside the rules. In 2018, the office forced the Trump Foundation to dissolve under judicial supervision, and in November 2019 a court ordered Donald Trump to pay 2 million dollars in damages for breaching his fiduciary duty. In 2020, the office sued the National Rifle Association under the same law, and a 2024 verdict found senior NRA officers personally liable for self-dealing.²²,²³ The standard the Attorney General applied to the Trump Foundation and the NRA is the standard that applies to the Leo network, and the dollar flows in the Leo apparatus dwarf both prior matters. Marble Freedom Trust received 1.6 billion dollars from a single donor through a 2021 sale of Tripp Lite to Eaton Corporation, with Leo serving as chairman and receiving 350,000 dollars a year for an estimated 25 hours of work per week.²⁴ Seven Leo-linked nonprofits paid his for-profit firms, including CRC Advisors, which Leo chairs, more than 73 million dollars over the six years from 2016 through 2021, according to a watchdog complaint asking the IRS to investigate the arrangement for self-dealing.²⁵ The referral I am filing asks the Charities Bureau to investigate self-dealing under Not-for-Profit Corporation Law sections 715 and 717, registration and reporting under Executive Law section 172, and the charitable trust obligations under the Estates Powers and Trusts Law. The defense will be that this is a political prosecution targeting conservative organizations. The Trump Foundation and the NRA were also conservative-aligned. The standard applies to nonprofits operating outside the rules regardless of where they sit on the political map. If the standard does not apply to the Leo network, the standard was never the standard. The institutions act when people ask them to act, and the authority to make them act has been sitting in plain view the whole time. New Jersey can hold a New Jersey lawyer to the rules of New Jersey. New Jersey can charge a person whose conduct fits a New Jersey crime. New York can apply New York’s law to nonprofits chartered in New York. None of it waits on Congress, on the Justice Department, or on the Court’s permission. The bar grievance, the criminal referral, and the charities referral ask three offices to do the ordinary work they do every day, with one lawyer who happens to wear a federal robe. Either they apply the rules and create a record of the conduct, or they decline and create a record of the refusal. The country has neither record today, and it is owed one. Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download |
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