At an evident press conference this week, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House’s top Democrat, lambasted U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Yet another scandal emerged this week ensnaring Alito with media reports that yet another flag associated with the Capitol riot had shown up at a residence of the judge’s.
“Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are totally out of control,” Jeffries said. “These individuals continue to detonate the credibility of the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Samuel Alito, he definitively needs to recuse himself from any matter pending before the United States Supreme Court that has to do with the January 6 violent insurrection. He should have no part of it.”
The first reported flag at an Alito residence was an upside down American flag that the judge blamed on his wife, who Alito claimed put up the imagery amid a dispute with a neighbor over signage displayed by the latter. And now, a report revealed that a flag proclaiming “An Appeal to Heaven” was flown at a different, New Jersey residence associated with the leading judge. It’s a historical flag with the text and a green tree image on a white background, and it was present in the crowds of Trump supporters who descended on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Presently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court is an appeal in which former President Donald Trump is claiming that he holds wide-ranging legal protections by mere virtue of his time in office that supposedly should shut down a criminal case that he is facing. The case concerns actions after the 2020 presidential election, when Trump and others — including the Capitol rioters, some of whom touted this flag imagery — targeted the outcome. And we’re supposed to trust Alito to rule impartially here?
