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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, caught on a secret recording, recently attacked ProPublica for its reporting on Supreme Court ethics. The nonprofit investigative news outlet has spearheaded coverage of possible conflicts of interest among judges on the nation’s top court, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who has accepted millions in gifts and trips from conservative billionaires. Alito told a filmmaker posing as a conservative activist that ProPublica “gets a lot of money” to dig up “any little thing they can find,” suggesting the reporting was politically motivated. That notion “is just wrong,” says Justin Elliott, one of the lead ProPublica journalists reporting on the Supreme Court. “We took a very hard look at the Democratic-appointed justices, and we simply haven’t found anything close to similar to what we found when it came to Justice Thomas and Justice Alito.” He also says the Senate Judiciary Committee has power it is not currently using to investigate the court amid the ongoing ethics scandal. “There’s really no reason to believe that we actually know all the facts about what these justices have gotten.”
The whole “politically motivated” complaint is such a brazenly dishonest diversion that it just astonishes me that people use it, much less get away with it.
How does that even matter?
The simple fact of the matter is that, whatever their motivations might be, people either are or are not going to find evidence of corruption, and the one and only thing that determines that is whether or not such evidence exists.
Alito, were he so inclined, could’ve very easily have made it so that nobody, no matter how determined or for what reason, could’ve uncovered evidence of his corruption. All he had to do was not be corrupt.
If there was no corruption there could be no evidence of corruption, and then even the most sinister and underhanded attempt to make him look bad would fail.
On the other hand, if there is evidence there to be found, then the motivations of the people who uncover it are entirely irrelevant - the ONLY thing that matters is what they uncovered.
Seriously, how does the assertion that something like this is “politically motivated” even have the illusion of credence? How is it met with anything other than a blank look and a “So what?”