New Senate Report Decries Conflicts and Corruption at Supreme Court

A new 20-month Senate investigation into ethical conflicts and legal violations at the Supreme Court has uncovered and underscored a raft of dubious behavior by justices both living — and dead.

The new 95-page report reveals that deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — who expired in 2016 on a “free” quail hunting trip, paid for by a benefactor — was a conflicted mess, and effectively patient zero for the corruption now dogging the court. The arch conservative justice accepted “at least 258 subsidized trips” from wealthy patrons, including “several dozen hunting and fishing trips with prominent Republican donors.” Scalia accepted more such gifts “than any other justice,” the report states, and failed to properly disclose them “in violation of federal law.”

The report, issued by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also excoriates current conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for violations of federal law over undisclosed travel, including luxury fishing and yacht vacations. It targets Thomas in particular for having “accepted lavish gifts from billionaires with business before the court for almost his entire tenure as a justice,” adding that “the number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history.”

The report stands as a shocking compendium of judicial lapses and ethical failings. Decrying a well-funded right-wing ecosystem of influence peddling surrounding the court, the report calls out Leonard Leo in particular, for refusing to comply with a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena. (Given that Republicans won the Senate and kept control of the House, the Leo subpoena is almost certainly now dead.) The report calls out Leo for playing an “outsize role” in the selection of Republican justices; steering cash to “organizations led by Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas”; and having “facilitated or participated in several undisclosed trips taken by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.”
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The report is being published at a time when public trust in the judiciary has collapsed — as partisanship and corruption have turned the high court into a laughing stock. “The Supreme Court is mired in an ethical crisis of its own making,” said Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) unveiling the report. Durbin underscored that “justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.” 

The report calls out the Supreme Court’s “inability or unwillingness to police its own… conduct.” Durbin added that “the highest court in the land can’t have the lowest ethical standards,” and he declared that Congress “must push for a legislative solution to this crisis to restore trust in the highest court.” This is unlikely to happen any time soon; with Trump as president, conservatives will have a governing trifecta in Washington to pair with the hard-right Supreme Court supermajority.

The report centers on twin scandals of justices failing to disclose luxury gifts and failing to recuse themselves from cases where they have conflicts of interest. 

In an extended meditation on Scalia’s ethical lapses, the report cites as an example that the Federalist Society, an arch-conservative legal group, paid for Scalia to attend the 2007 annual retreat for Charles and David Koch’s “political network” at a time “when Koch was bankrolling several litigants with cases before the Supreme Court.” The justice did not list the trip in his disclosures for that year.

The report covers many well-known scandals including Justice Alito’s infamous 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, and Thomas’ myriad financial entanglements with billionaire patron Harlan Crow. 
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In the former case, Leo arranged for Alito’s seat on a private flight to Alaska; the jet was paid for by billionaire hedge fund chief Paul Singer, who had business before the court. Crow provided numerous free private jet and superyacht trips to Thomas and his wife; bought a house from Thomas and allowed his mother to live there for free; and paid for at least two years of boarding school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew.

The report highlights conflicts of interest arising from Alito and Thomas’ politically active spouses. It concludes that Justice Thomas had “a clear conflict of interest” in cases of public interest where his wife Ginni had inserted herself, notably the “Stop the Steal” movement seeking to reinstall Trump as president in 2020.

It also cites the infamous flag-flying by Martha-Ann Alito, insisting that “two well-established ‘Stop the Steal’ symbols at two of the Alitos’ properties” created a conflict of interest for Justice Alito, who was bound to recuse himself from cases involving efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection, the report argues.
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Many of the details in the report are familiar to readers of ProPublica which has doggedly exposed ethical lapses and conflicts of interest by Alito and Thomas. The report also cites reporting by Rolling Stone in discussing the opportunities for influence peddling at events by the Supreme Court Historical Society.

“In 2023 and 2024, Lauren Windsor, a left-wing political activist, provided a clear demonstration of how one could use SCHS events to ingratiate themselves with willing justices,” it writes, citing Rolling Stone’s role in helping Windsor publish her undercover recordings. “During SCHS events, Windsor was able to engage Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito in extended, one-on-one conversations”

In the department of you can’t make this up, a federal judge was just upbraided this week for the ethical violation of writing critically of Alito’s ethical problems.