There was lots of pouting on The Story with Martha MacCallum over Lauren Windsor’s secret recording of Justice Samuel Alito. But one thing was never said: that the recording was inaccurate.
As you probably know by now, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, smack in the middle of his two flag scandals, was secretly recorded by activist Lauren Windsor. Posing as a like-minded conservative, she got Alito to express his bias against the left and for returning “our country to a place of godliness.”
Let me say Windsor’s tactics here made me queasy. NPR reported yesterday that “The ethics of secret recordings are murky.” In the same article, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik noted that Windsor has not released the full transcripts or unedited audio. “’I think more credibility comes when you post the full transcripts, the full audio,’ Folkenflik told NPR’s Ari Shapiro.” Still, the article said, Folkenflik believes “there is some utility to what [Windsor] did, but it’s hard to see the whole picture.”
But as far as we know, Alito’s sentiments were accurately reported. Otherwise, you can best believe Fox would have been trumpeting the denial(s). “The court is not officially commenting on what happened,” guest Shannon Bream told viewers. However, Bream said she had talked to “several people involved with this story off the record.”
Bream said her “sense” was that people didn’t want to comment publicly “because they don’t want to feel like they’re feeding the narrative or the stories that keep happening.” To put it another way, nobody is denying the accuracy.
“People fear that this is the kind of stuff that will make justices even less transparent, even less accessible to people,” Bream said pointedly. Then, sounding as though she may have gotten some talking points directly from Alito or someone in his camp she said, “if you're somebody who follows Justice Alito at all, including a recent graduation speech he gave, none of this will be surprising to you because this is the kind of stuff he says publicly.”
Not surprisingly, neither MacCallum nor Bream said anything about the fact that Windsor had a similar conversation with Justice John Roberts and that he had firmly disagreed that it’s a judge’s job to be “putting the nation on a more moral path” or a more Christian one. Nor did MacCallum note that Alito’s comments to Windsor, combined with the pro-coup flags flying at two of his houses, adds up to one very biased justice.
Instead, after playing a clip of The View host Sunny Hostin criticizing the recording, MacCallum claimed that Windsor’s recording with Alito’s wife confirmed his claim “that he isn't responsible for whatever flags have flown at his home.”
Well, that’s one interpretation. In her recording, Martha-Ann Alito talked about wanting to put up an anti-pride flag but “deferred” to her husband who asked her not to. So, another way of looking at the situation is that he did not have a problem with the “Stop the Steal” flags she put up. There’s also the matter that it seems very much like the Alitos lied when they blamed one of the flags on their neighbor.
Really, the important point is that Alito should but refuses to recuse himself from still-pending Jan. 6-related cases. Regardless of who put up the “Stop the Steal” flags, having them flying at a Supreme Court justice’s home gives a strong appearance of impropriety.
Not in MacCallum and Bream’s eyes, natch. “People can have their opinions and their thoughts on things, but they're nominated to the Supreme Court for their ability to put that aside and to make decisions based on the law,” MacCallum said. Bream added, I guess as evidence, that in 2020, Alito didn’t try to overturn the election.
But then Bream likened Windsor’s recordings to the undercover recordings of anti-abortionist David Daleiden – and used that as an opportunity to take a swipe at liberals. “When he spoke to people who worked for Planned Parenthood, … the left was furious about that. They did not like that those things they said were edited, were taken out of context, that the people that he spoke with didn't have a fair and accurate representation of the conversation he was having with them. I don't see that same kind of outrage this time around.”
Um, that’s probably because there are no allegations that Windsor did not fairly or accurately represent her conversations. Daleiden, on the other hand, was criminally charged, over his shenanigans. Planned Parenthood was awarded $2.4 million in damages as the result of his deceit.
You can watch “ultimate journalist” MacCallum spin for Alito below, from the June 12, 2024 The Story with Martha MacCallum.
To be clear, this approach (secretly recording people with whom one disagrees in order to get them on tape saying embarrassing things) was started by liberal Michael Moore in several of his films. But Moore never went to the lengths that we see today. He would content himself by recording himself trying to talk to the gate person at a plant in Flint on the day it was closing, and showing how petty that person was acting. This got pushed a little farther with groups like The Yes Men impersonating CEOs and getting Right Wingers to drop their usual defensive postures. And Sasha Baron Cohen made a cottage industry for himself in posing as Borat and other personalities and getting rooms full of people on tape saying and doing embarassing things (including Rudy Giuliani later on).
But it was Andrew Breitbart who then began pulling the notion of trying to find embarassing video of non-Right Wingers, usually editing any exculpatory material out so that the video could provide maximum outrage and hopefully get his target humiliated and fired. James O’Keefe pushed Breitbart’s tactics even farther with his Far Right outlet Project Veritas, which in turn inspired many other Angry Right Wing propagandists to copycat him.
Windsor is clearly taking a page from O’Keefe’s book here, and yes, it’s cringe-inducing. At the same time, it’s instructive. Alito has no problem coming out as solidly Far Right and openly divisive. At the same time, Roberts comes across as desperately trying to protect his integrity and that of the Supreme Court, even as he regularly rules from the Far Right anyway. But Roberts’ objections to Windor’s Rght Wing premises are still notable.
The more important stories about Alito and Clarence Thomas have already been public for some time. Both men are badly compromised and should have been impeached off of the Supreme Court long ago. Thomas obviously has serious conflicts of interest and serious bias problems. And Alito is an open leaker, having happily blabbed about the infamous Hobby Lobby decision. It is almost certain that either Alito or Thomas or Ginny Thomas leaked the unfortunate Dobbs decision in 2022 as a way to lock in the votes of Kavanaugh and Barrett.
If Abe Fortas needed to resign from the Supreme Court in 1969 and thus instantly give Dick Nixon not one but two appointments and radically swing the SC to the Right, then both Alito and Thomas should step down today. The difference, sadly, is that neither Alito nor Thomas has the sense of morality, ethics or general propriety that Fortas had. And the problem here is that Angry Right Wingers are frantically clinging to the idea that somehow those values don’t apply to the Right Wing.
