Alito Had Call With Trump on Same Day President-Elect Submitted Brief to SCOTUS

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged on Wednesday that he and president-elect Donald Trump spoke over the phone earlier this week, discussing the possibility of a former clerk of the sitting justice joining the incoming administration.

The conversation, which took place on Tuesday, happened the same day Trump submitted a legal brief to the Supreme Court, demanding that a sentencing hearing in a New York state-based court be indefinitely delayed, prompting many critics to question Alito’s ethics in speaking directly with the soon-to-be president.

Alito claims the two did not discuss the matter, nor any other legal issue that relates to Trump that may come to the court in the immediate future — including the president-elect’s demand that a ban on TikTok be delayed until he takes office, and his attempts to stop a special counsel report on his classified documents case from being made public, which could make its way to the High Court in the coming days.

“I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed,” Alito claimed in a statement acknowledging the conversation, referring to the New York state case.

Allegedly, Trump sought to speak with Alito to discuss the hiring of William Levi, a former law clerk of the justice’s who worked in his office from 2011-2012. Levi also worked within the Trump administration during Trump’s first term in office, serving as chief of staff to former Attorney General William Barr, which calls into question whether the recommendation from Alito was really necessary, observers have noted.

Critics assailed the justice, who hasn’t exactly hidden his preference for Trump or his dubious legal theories in and outside of the court. Alito also raised concerns over conflicts of interest relating to Trump when reports were made of him hanging two flags with right-wing political significance, including an upside-down U.S. flag, outside two of his properties at varying moments of Trump’s presidency, in apparent support of the former president.

“Alito doesn’t exactly have a deep reservoir of credibility he can turn to in response to his latest controversy,” MSNBC producer Steve Benen said, adding:

We are, after all, talking about a sitting justice who has earned a reputation as the Supreme Court’s most unyielding ideologue, who has delivered a series of overtly political speeches, who’s issued public endorsements of a conservative advocacy group’s work, who thought it’d be a good idea to defend the Supreme Court’s integrity at a pro-Trump organization exactly two weeks before the 2022 midterm elections, who’s appeared a bit too cozy with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and who’s declared his indifference to congressional oversight in ways that were panned as ‘stunningly wrong.’

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, who is now a law professor at the University of Alabama, also questioned Alito’s claim that he was unaware of an impending brief regarding Trump’s attempts to halt a sentencing hearing in New York.

“Alito said he didn’t know Trump was headed to SCOTUS, which is really odd, because the whole rest of the legal world knew it was coming,” Vance wrote in a Substack post.

Law Dork’s Chris Geidner also chimed in on the matter, noting that it will compound existing problems relating to the court’s credibility — specifically, Alito’s — moving forward.

“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,” Geidner said.