Chris “Law Dork” Geidner has developed a strong following covering the Supreme Court and other legal matters through Substack. Geidner, like many other legal commentators, was dumbfounded by reports that in the days after the January 6th riot at the Capitol, Justice Samuel Alito‘s Virginia home flew an inverted American flag on its flagpole.
The inverted flag had become a symbol of the “stop the steal” movement fomented by the defeated president, Donald Trump, in the wake of the November 2020 election — a movement that saw Trump refuse to accept the election results and refuse to attend election winner Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Another no-show at the inauguration was Justice Alito, who was — according to newly published material at the Washington Post — home with his wife at the time. That’s now known because the Post revealed that its now-retired longtime Supreme Court reporter, Robert Barnes, visited the Alito home that day on a tip about the inverted flag and encountered the Justice and his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, outside the house, where he confronted the couple about the flag.
What happened next was that Mrs. Alito, who her husband subsequently said had raised the flag, told Barnes that day she had done so in response to a dispute with the neighbors, calling the upside-down Old Glory a signal of “distress.”
OK. A lot happened over the long weekend, if you were blessedly off with a job of beach or something similar.
First up, The Washington Post acknowledged that it knew about the (first) Alito flag story since Jan 2021, and I had some questions. https://t.co/D5Jgk9a2yE
— Chris “Law Dork” Geidner (@chrisgeidner) May 28, 2024
What struck Geidner most, in what he called a “bombshell,” was that the Washington Post — perhaps the nation’s second most trusted and important newspaper, the storied home of Woodward and Bernstein when they tackled Watergate, Nixon, and All The President’s Men — had held this flag story for three years.
In other words, the Post knew that Alito flew the inverted flag and failed to tell the American public that one of its nine all-powerful Supreme Court justices had expressed, or at least condoned the expression of, anti-American political sentiment that landed far afield of the SCOTUS’s official position of impartiality.
Geidner slammed “the explanation given by the Post for failing to report the story in 2021 — in the days after the insurrection” as “unacceptably vague and woefully inadequate for a paper whose motto is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness.’” The Post claimed that because the flag was purportedly raised by Mrs. Alito and alleged to be part of a “neighborhood conflict,” it was deemed unclear that it was “rooted in politics.”
Questions about burying the story at first and later withholding the details when they again seemed relevant — as during reporting on Ginni Thomas, wife of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas, and her unmitigated attempts to overturn the election — are part of a shocking Alito media protection truth bomb dropped on the American public, blowing up the perception — already much-maligned — that the mainstream or prestige media is working on a different, higher standard than that which informs the reportage of less eminent news outlets.
The Post‘s decision to protect Alito from the consequences of his political actions is a dereliction of duty and a disastrous breach of journalistic ethics, Geidner and others assert.
Ending, for the present, his list of problems with the Post‘s repeated silence, Geidner points out that the Supreme Court decision to overturn Colorado’s ruling to use the 14th amendment to remove the “insurrectionist” Trump from the ballot was 5-4, with Alito — his predilection easily predicted by his flag — voting to return Trump to the ballot.