Samuel Alito Trashes ProPublica In New Secret Recording
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Non-profit newsroom ProPublica defended the “fierce independence” of its “non-partisan” reporting after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was caught blasting the publication as part of a well-funded ideological campaign against the Supreme Court in a new secretly recorded conversation.
The recording was made by liberal documentary maker Lauren Windsor with her colleague Ally Sammarco, who attended a dinner hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society on June 3.
Presenting herself as a religious conservative, she secretly recorded Alito making several contentious remarks during their conversation. Earlier this week, Windsor released a different recording clip from the same event.
Flattering Alito as an “American hero” the pair asks the justice why the Supreme Court was “being so attacked and being so targeted by the media these days.”
Alito said: “They don’t like our decisions, and they don’t like how they anticipate we may decide some cases that are coming up. That’s the beginning of the end of it. There are groups that are very well-funded by ideological groups that have spearheaded these attacks. That’s what it is.”
Asked to identify the “ideological groups” he mentioned, Alito immediately called out ProPublica.
He replied: “ProPublica gets a lot of money, and they have spent a fortune investigating Clarence Thomas, for example. You know, everything he’s ever done in his entire life… And they’ve done some of that to me, too. They look for any little thing they can find, and they try to make something out of it.”
Interestingly, Alito’s remarks come in the wake of ProPublica’s extensive Pulitzer Prize-winning 2023 Friends of the Court investigations into several justices, including Alito himself, focusing on the acceptance of gifts from billionaire donors.
In its defense, ProPublica issued the following statement to CNN Oliver Darcy for the Reliable Sources newsletter: “ProPublica exposes abuses of power no matter which party is in charge, and our newsroom operates with fierce independence. No donors are made aware of stories before they are published, nor do they have a say regarding which stories reporters pursue. More than 55,000 donors of every stripe actively fund our investigative, nonpartisan journalism.”
