A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has sparked fierce criticism from Democrats after The New York Times first reported an upside-down American flag affiliated with the “Stop the Steal” movement was displayed outside his home in Alexandria, Virginia, shortly after the Capitol attack. The justice has since said the flag was hung by his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, during a dispute with neighbors.
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The Times published another report a week later after discovering a second flag affiliated with insurrectionists was flown outside the Alito’s beach house in New Jersey in mid-2023. That symbol, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, is affiliated with the Christian nationalist movement and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
The twin reports prompted many Democrats in Congress to call on Alito to recuse himself from several cases, including former President Donald Trump’s claims of absolute presidential immunity that would likely free him from two of his criminal indictments.
Alito has rejected those calls.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
