Alito urged to recuse himself from Trump cases over reports of upside-down US flag outside his house – live | US supreme court

Here’s more information on allegations surrounding Eastman’s charges, the Associated Press reported:

The Arizona indictment said Eastman encouraged the GOP electors to cast their votes in December 2020, unsuccessfully pressured state lawmakers to change the election’s outcome in Arizona and told then-Vice President Mike Pence that he could reject Democratic electors in the counting of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump himself was not charged in the Arizona case but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Charges have not yet been made public against Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump-aligned attorney, but he was readily identifiable based on descriptions of the defendants in the indictment. No arraignment date has been scheduled for Giuliani. Arizona authorities say they have been unable to serve Giuliani with the notice of the charges …

Last year, Eastman was indicted on racketeering, conspiracy and other charges in a scheme to overturn the 2020 president election in Georgia. He has pleaded not guilty to the Georgia charges. Eastman also is named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the sprawling federal indictment filed in Washington against Trump for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

Read the full article here.

Attorney John Eastman pleaded not guilty to fraud, conspiracy and forgery charges for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in favor of Donald Trump, the Associated Press reported.

Eastman is the first person in Arizona’s fake elector case to be arraigned. Eastman was charged after he attempted to create a plan to get Congress not to certify the 2020 election.

“I had zero communications with the electors in Arizona [and] zero involvement in any of the election litigation in Arizona or legislative hearings. And I am confident that with the laws faithfully applied, I will be fully be exonerated at the end of this process,” Eastman said in a brief statement outside the courthouse.

The day so far

The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, weighed in on the kerfuffle in the House oversight committee last night, saying the sparring between Democratic and GOP lawmakers was “not a good look”.

From the Daily Beast:

Here’s video of the moment last night when an exchange between the far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the progressive Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett sparked a quarrel that ground the House oversight committee’s business to a halt:

It escalated from there:

A bout of cross-chamber Democratic infighting has broken out after the Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman attempted to make light of the argument that ensued late last night in the House oversight committee:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat from New York who was a part of yesterday’s rhetorical melee, did not take kindly to her ostensible ally’s comment:

Hawaii senator says reported Alito flag incident ‘a wild, radical thing’ to do

On X, Alicia Bannon, the director of the judiciary program at the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, warned that Samuel Alito’s display of a flag associated with Donald Trump’s election lies was “a five-alarm fire”:

Alito says wife hung upside-down American flag at home after argument with neighbor following January 6 – report

Senate judiciary committee chair calls for Samuel Alito to recuse himself from Trump cases

In other news, the House oversight committee last night advanced a resolution to hold the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt after he refused to release audio of Joe Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated his possession of classified documents. But the vote only took place after a messy verbal clash between lawmakers at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:

The two most famous sets of initials in US politics clashed in a chaotic House hearing on Thursday, as the progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, objected fiercely to an attack on another Democrat by the far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, or MTG.

The oversight committee hearing concerned Republican attempts to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt, for refusing to release tapes of interviews between Joe Biden and the special counsel Robert Hur.

Things went wrong when MTG made a partisan point, trying to tie Democrats to the judge in Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money case – which, by drawing a number of Republicans to the New York courtroom to support Trump, was responsible for the hearing starting late in the day.

In answer to MTG, Jasmine Crockett of Texas said: “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland … Do you know what we’re here for? You know we’re here about AG Garland?”

In response to the New York Times’s reporting, Samuel Alito acknowledged that the flag was raised outside his house, but said it was due to a dispute with a neighbor:

I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The Alitos live in Alexandria, Virginia, a pleasant city across the Potomac river from Washington DC, where some of their neighbors do not like them, the Times reports:

In recent years, the quiet sanctuary of his street, with residents who are Republicans and Democrats, has tensed with conflict, neighbors said. Around the 2020 election, a family on the block displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive. It apparently offended Mrs. Alito and led to an escalating clash between her and the family, according to interviews.

Some residents have also bridled at the noise and intrusion brought by protesters, who started showing up outside the Alito residence in 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion. Other neighbors have joined the demonstrators, whose intent was “to bring the protest to their personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives,” said Heather-Ann Irons, who came to the street to protest.

The half-dozen neighbors who saw the flag, or knew of it, requested anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal. Last Saturday, May 11, protesters returned to the street, waving flags of their own (“Don’t Tread on My Uterus”) and using a megaphone to broadcast expletives at Justice Alito, who was in Ohio giving a commencement address. Mrs. Alito appeared in a window, complaining to the Supreme Court security detail outside.

As you can see in the below tweet from the New York Times, the flag flown outside the conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s house was simply an upside-down American flag:

But as their story notes, flying the flag that way had, by early 2021, become a symbol of support for Donald Trump’s false claims that his loss in the November 2020 election had occurred due to fraud:

Turning the American flag upside down is a symbol of emergency and distress, first used as a military S.O.S., historians said in interviews. In recent decades, it has increasingly been used as a political protest symbol — a controversial one, because the flag code and military tradition require the paramount symbol of the United States to be treated with respect.

Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.

During Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the gesture took off as never before, becoming “really established as a symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign,” according to Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down.

“If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag upside down!!!!”

In an appearance on MSNBC this morning, Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator who serves on the judiciary committee, said the revelation that a pro-Trump flag flew outside Samuel Alito’s house further undermines the supreme court’s credibility.

Polls indicate public approval of the supreme court has declined over the past two decades, which Blumenthal blames on the conflicts of interest that have developed among its conservative justices. He called on Chief Justice John Roberts to order Alito and Clarence Thomas, a fellow conservative whose wife was involved in efforts to stop Joe Biden from taking office, to recuse themselves:

Blumenthal has been among the Democratic lawmakers that have pressured Roberts and the justices to tighten their ethics following reports of their connections with wealthy conservatives:

Alito among conservative justices critical of government’s arguments in Trump immunity case

Republicans on defense, Democrats outraged after report of Alito flying Trump-supporting flag