Justice Samuel Alito Defends Flying on a Billionaire’s Private Jet to a Luxe Fishing Trip

Another Supreme Court justice is in the hot seat for potential ethics violations.

This week, it came to light that Justice Samuel Alito took a private jet during a luxury fishing trip in 2008, according to ProPublica reporting. Before that outlet could even publish its piece, however, Alito preemptively defended his behavior and lack of disclosures in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

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The ProPublica article outlines Alito’s trip to Alaska, where he arrived on the private jet of Paul Singer, a hedge-funder and Republican donor. If Alito had chartered the flight himself, it would have cost more than $100,000, the outlet estimated. The justice’s annual disclosures don’t mention the trip, despite Singer being involved in a number of Supreme Court cases that came before Alito.

For his part, Alito wrote that he did not need to disclose the private-jet travel or recuse himself from the cases involving Singer. He notes that until recently, “personal hospitality need not be reported,” including “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose … on property or facilities owned by [a] person.” And he says that he knew Singer only tangentially, and had no knowledge of the billionaire’s connection to the Supreme Court cases.

In rebutting the overall luxe nature of the trip, Alito wrote in the Journal, “I stayed for three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a comfortable but rustic facility. As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.”

The Alito news comes on the heels of reports detailing his colleague Justice Clarence Thomas’s relationship with the Republican donor Harlan Crow. ProPublica similarly reported that Thomas had taken upscale trips paid for by Crow, which the justice defended by saying that he was personally close with the billionaire real-estate developer.

In response to these revelations, many have called for the Supreme Court to overhaul its ethics rules. Gabe Roth, the executive director of the advocacy group Fix the Court, told The New York Times that “the public should expect Supreme Court justices of all people to be ethical exemplars … yet the nine have consistently been shown to be deficient in this regard.”

Alito, however, doesn’t seem to see a problem with his Alaska vacation.

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