Alito Made Millions on Fossil Fuels But Won’t Recuse From Exxon Case
https://newrepublic.com/post/214210/samuel-alito-supreme-court-fossil-fuels-recuse-exxon
Alito Made Millions on Fossil Fuels But Won’t Recuse From Exxon Case
The Supreme Court is hearing a case involving the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon.
You see how this looks, right?
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has reportedly gained as much as $2.9 million from his fossil fuel interests since being tapped to join the high court.
Alito’s reported assets—excluding his home and other personal property—grew from $1.1 million in 2005 to between $3.4 million and $8.4 million in 2024, according to federal financial disclosures. During that period, his oil and gas holdings have made him between $390,000 and $2.9 million, according to an analysis by Court Accountability, The Guardian reported Tuesday.*
And as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a fossil fuels-related case, that brings Alito’s ability to be impartial into question, Court Accountability co-founder Lisa Graves warned.
“You might have real appreciation for how that industry has helped make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second home on the water, or live a [certain] lifestyle,” said Graves, who put together the analysis.
Alito, who is the only Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies, has refused to step back from the upcoming petition brought by fossil fuel giants Suncor and ExxonMobil. He previously recused himself from a petition from the same companies in 2023,. The new case will determine whether municipal and state governments can seek damages for decades of Big Oil deception regarding the climate harms these companies knew their fossil fuel products would cause—a make or break decision for Alito’s second stream of income.
Most of Alito’s financial gains came from property in Grady County, Oklahoma, in which his wife, Martha Ann, holds a mineral interest. Alito has reported the value of the plot between $100,000 and $250,000, but Graves noted that one of Alito’s family members had sold an adjacent plot for $800,000, suggesting that the jurist could be underreporting the land’s value.
In 2022, Alito’s wife agreed to lease the plot of land to Citizen Energy, a private oil and gas company. No reporting or public documents indicate that a well has been drilled on this property, but a lease agreement shows that the owners would have received three-sixteenths of the profit from any extracted oil.
“It raises concerns because you have a sitting justice who is hoping to get richer based on oil exploration of this land,” said Graves.
Citizen Energy was later purchased by Validus Energy, in which Elliott Investment Management holds a major stake. Alito previously landed in hot water after he failed to disclose a free plane ride he took from Elliott Investment Management’s founder. The firm also owns more than 52 million shares of Suncor, which are worth more than $3.2 billion, according to Court Accountability.
Alito has major investments in Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF, a high dividend yield fund in which Exxon is the third-largest holding. In 2004, Alito inherited between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Exxon—which he has since sold.
“My view is that you shouldn’t be able to sell a stock just so you can sit on a case, even though that company’s profits have benefited you,” said Graves.
In May, a coalition of watchdog groups—including environmental, civil liberties, and good government organizations—sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for an investigation into whether Alito’s refusal to recuse in this case violates federal law.
The court is expected to hear oral arguments on October 5.
* This article originally misstated the amount Alito has made from his oil and gas holdings.
Lindsey Graham’s Sister Insists She Isn’t a Nepo Senator
Darline Graham Nordone, who was appointed to her seat, claimed she isn’t being “handed” the seat.
Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline doesn’t think she was handed her late brother’s Senate seat, even though she was literally appointed by South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster.
On Tuesday, NewsNation’s Ryan Noble asked what Graham would say to people who think that.
“I don’t see it that way, I’m not being handed this seat. I realize that I have to earn voters, so I’m working hard to do that. Like I said, I want to spend the next two weeks getting out to as many places as I can. You know, Lindsey was amazing, I will never fill his shoes. No one can ever fill his shoes, and I don’t just expect it to be handed to me,” Graham said.
The interview came on the same day that South Carolina is holding a special primary election to replace Lindsey Graham as the Republican candidate. His sister was expected to fill a caretaker role instead of running for a full term. Last month, MAGA personalities raged at her decision to run, calling her “idiotic” and one of the “worst congressional creatures.”
President Donald Trump has decided to back Graham, but conservatives say she doesn’t have the credentials or a history of being involved in right-wing causes. Her only political donation on record happens to be to a South Carolina state senator that helped kill an abortion ban, and she neither voted in the 2024 presidential primary nor the 2016 general election.
For once, Trump’s endorsement hasn’t led to the state’s Republicans coalescing behind Graham. None of the candidates in the special election are expected to get 50 percent of the vote, according to The Washington Post, making a runoff election likely. Turnout is also expected to be low, drawing only the most politically engaged voters, and that doesn’t bode well for Graham.
Trump Issues Dumbest Criticism of Congestion Pricing Yet
The president thinks charging a small fee to drive in a small part of New York City is terrorism.
President Trump thinks that supporters of New York City’s congestion pricing policy are “Radical Left Jihadists.”
The president unloaded this cartoonishly bigoted insult in a Tuesday morning post criticizing NYC’s “Pied-a-Terre Tax”—a fee on second properties valued at $1 million or more. He called it a “dangerous political ‘experiment’” and falsely claimed that the policy would drive people out of the city “by the tens of thousands,” which has not occurred at all so far. Then he got to the congestion pricing.
“It’s hard, as President of the United States of America, to sit back and watch it happen, especially to a place I once loved. Financial, and then Social, RUIN, is a 100% certainty - And then the Radical Left Jihadists charge Congestion Pricing on top of everything else,” Trump wrote. “This doesn’t work in America, and must be stopped, NOW!”
He went on to proclaim that his administration would explore whether “the Federal Government has any legal right to avert this disaster, before it is too late, for the millions of people who cherish New York and want to see it thrive, as opposed to becoming a filthy, crime ridden, decrepit place of mockery and scorn.”
Trump’s post came just a day after a Staten Island judge temporarily paused the tax law. The pause was blocked that same day.
Trump Hit With New Legal Trouble for Defying Supreme Court
Plaintiffs from two of the challenges to Donald Trump’s initial attempt to end birthright citizenship are back in court.
President Donald Trump’s new executive orders restricting birthright citizenship have been hit with court challenges from the same groups who successfully challenged his earlier attempt.
CASA, Inc. and Barbara (the pseudonym of an anonymous pregnant immigrant) each filed motions in federal court against the Trump administration Tuesday, seeking to halt Trump’s August 6 executive orders targeting “birth tourism” and limiting the Forteenth Amendment’s application.
CASA was supported by the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Barbara is supported by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, Democracy Defenders, and Asian Law Caucus, who argue that the Supreme Court’s June ruling against Trump’s previous attack on birthright citizenship prevented any “revisions” regarding legal exceptions.
“If the President issues 100 orders seeking to create new exceptions to the sacred guarantee of the Citizenship Clause, all 100 will be equally illegal,” Barbara’s lawsuit states. “And nothing requires this Court to countenance the continued assault on this foundational constitutional principle or issue an endless string of EO-specific injunctions.”
The new order restricting the Fourteenth Amendment tells government agencies not to “issue documents recognizing United States citizenship” to diplomats in the U.S., the children of alleged members of “terrorist organizations,” people who are completing a “commercial transaction” to ensure a child is born on U.S. soil, and certain people born in U.S. territories.
The executive orders were already long shots to survive legal challenges, considering that they’re using many of the same legal arguments that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
In a statement Tuesday, Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, said the White House “is just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.”
“Immigrant communities know that our rights are on the line, especially when the government uses us as scapegoats,” Kohli said. “The Trump administration already lost once, and it will lose again.”
Trump Goes Over Jeanine Pirro’s Head on Reflecting Pool Lawsuit
Donald Trump simply cannot accept that his Reflecting Pool lawsuits were a total bust.
President Donald Trump isn’t done with his ludicrous allegations of vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
White House officials have directed the Department of Justice to consider launching another lawsuit against former U.S. Olympian David Hearn, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The request comes after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to drop the cases against Hearn and three other alleged vandals, after her office discovered evidence that the pool’s loose lining was caused by a “rushed and flawed installation process.”
Even after Pirro walked the president through her trove of exculpatory evidence, Trump has continued to rave about supposedly damning witness testimony and video footage. But the DOJ has been clear: It can’t prove a thing.
A federal judge dropped the charges against Hearn, but said he would wait to decide whether the case was dismissed “without prejudice,” which would mean the Trump administration couldn’t prosecute Hearn for the same crime going forward.
This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.
Trump Blames Biden For Firing the U.S.’s Missile Stockpile at Iran
The U.S. is running dangerously low on munitions, thanks to Trump’s disastrous Iran war. Of course he’s blaming Biden.
President Trump thinks that a decision Joe Biden made two years ago is the reason for the U.S. munitions shortage—not his costly and unpopular war on Iran.
“They talk about munitions—and we’re fine with munitions, we’re fine. But the reason it would be lower—and we’re building them like crazy—but the reason it’s low is [Joe Biden] gave three hundred billion dollars worth to Ukraine,” Trump said on the Real America’s Voice network Tuesday morning.
“They never mention that. They never like to mention that. Now I’d like to give to Ukraine also, but they have to pay—meaning the European Union ... I give it to the European Union—they have money, and they pay top dollar, they pay full dollar.”
The U.S. is currently short on long-range missiles and interceptors because the Trump administration has been shooting them at Iran for the past six months, not because Biden gave some Tomahawks to Ukraine in 2024. Trump has been insisting that he inherited a depleted munitions stock while also insisting that we do not have a munitions shortage.
This back and forth continues all while the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated that “the United States has enough missiles to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario.”
It’s laughable that a country which spends as much on the military as the U.S. does would be short on weapons after six months of war with Iran, and it’s even more laughable that Trump thinks blaming Biden for problems we’re watching him cause will fly in 2026.
Trump Openly Mulls Dystopian Plan for Stealing the Midterm Elections
Donald Trump didn’t rule out declaring a national security emergency.
President Donald Trump is openly hinting at taking over the midterm elections by declaring a national emergency.
Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root interviewed Trump just after midnight Tuesday morning, and said that Trump had the right to declare a national security emergency next month, forcing through photo identification, proof of citizenship, limits on mail-in ballots, and other heavy voting restrictions. Trump seemed to like that suggestion, but didn’t want to tip his hand.
“Let me just say stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that,” Trump said.
Trump is afraid of massive Republican losses in November’s midterms, and has been unsuccessfully pushing his allies in Congress to pass the draconian SAVE Act. With that appearing more unlikely each day, Democrats and other Trump critics are raising concerns that he may take drastic action, such as declaring a national emergency and maybe deploying legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the polls.
In fact, Democrats have been trying for close to a year to get documents from the Department of Homeland Security regarding its policies and memos on sending ICE agents to polls. Agents were seen at polling places in Texas during its May primaries and in California in June, but when Democrats used the Freedom of Information Act to investigate, they were sent useless press clippings.
If Trump tries to invoke national security to take over federal elections, it would shatter precedent and could set off lawsuits and protests across the country. His repeated, disproven claims about voter fraud and rigged elections suggest that he’ll make the same excuses in November. The question is how to ensure a fair and accurate result that can stand up to his attacks.
Surprise! Todd Blanche Immediately Breaks His Promises to GOP Senators
Hours after being sworn in as attorney general, Blanche gave Donald Trump even more protections.
It’s been less than 24 hours, and freshly sworn-in Attorney General Todd Blanche has already issued entirely new legal protections for President Donald Trump.
In a memo published Monday evening, just hours after Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel argued that the president could claim executive privilege over communication between him and his “private advisers,” provided that the communications were confidential and related to his presidential “decisionmaking.”
The memo also seemed to expand executive privilege to apply to communications between the president’s “direct advisers” and civilians.
If the Democrats take back the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, this memo could have major implications for any investigation into the president and other top administration officials. Clearly, the Trump administration is preparing to stonewall Congress.
Blanche’s latest move reflects poorly on all of the Republicans who voted to confirm him—but especially Senators Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Tom Tillis, who bought into the attorney general’s promises to limit the scope of a different immunity for the president. Blanche has demonstrated that he isn’t the least bit interested in holding the president accountable for anything—let alone preserving transparency in government. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
In a statement Tuesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the memo revealed that Trump was “petrified of the questions a Democratic Congress will demand answers to.”
FIFA Peace Prize Recipient Sticks Up For FIFA Peace Prize Inventor
Of course Donald Trump is backing Gianni Infantino.
President Trump—one of the most corrupt U.S. presidents ever—thinks that it would be a “terrible mistake” for FIFA to push out Gianni Infantino, the organization’s embattled president.
“FIFA would be making a terrible mistake if, for any reason, they even considered replacing President Gianni Infantino. He is fantastic, having just presided over the most successful World Cup, by four times, ever presented,” Trump wrote Monday night on Truth Social. “If he is gone, it will never be as successful or profitable again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Much of the soccer world sees Infantino’s tenure much differently. After a secret plan concocted by Infantino to sell a substantial stake of the World Cup to private investors leaked, the soccer confederations that lead Europe, Asia, and North and Central America and the Carribean turned on the FIFA chief. UEFA, which governs European football, is currently boycotting all FIFA competitions until Infantino leaves office; earlier this week, the three confederations accused Infantino of a “fundamental breach of trust” and “deception” in an open letter and announced that they would hold their own competitions if he remained in power.
“Leadership in football is not a possession. It is not about holding—or demanding— power to be held. It is a duty of service to the football family that entrusts it,” the letter reads. “When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”
Even still, Trump’s support for Infantino makes sense. The two have been closely linked since Trump returned to the White House; last December, Infantino awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize—a pitiful sham of an award that was given solely to curry favor with Trump while he continued to mope about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Trump is returning the favor, sort of. An unhinged post on social media, after all, is probably his equivalent of a made-up prize.
Trump Sneaks Far-Right Goon Into Job Overseeing Reflecting Pool Probe
Project 2025 author Dennis Kirk has joined a crucial office.
If President Trump’s disastrous renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool gets investigated, a Project 2025 operative will be overseeing it.
Trump nominated Dennis Kirk, an author of the conservative manifesto and former adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, as the Department of the Interior’s inspector general. Kirk, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management in Trump’s first term, would oversee any probes into alleged malfeasance or corruption within the Cabinet department.
Kirk created a training video for Project 2025 and wrote an essay warning against “progressive ideology” in the federal workforce. As inspector general, he’d be in charge of ethics investigations in the Interior Department, as well as closer looks at Trump’s pet building projects in Washington, D.C., including the $16 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool.
The move immediately drew backlash from Democrats. Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, called Kirk a “fake and fraudulent watchdog” in a statement last week.
“[The inspector general’s office] is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration. It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump’s cronies still have reason to fear,” Huffman said.
The Reflecting Pool project is a disaster, with a peeling and tattered “American flag blue” paint job ruined by hydrogen peroxide that was added to kill algae. Trump pushed an unfounded vandalism allegation and had the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro try to prosecute people who simply got close to or touched the pool and its peeling paint. Those charges all fell through.
David Hearn, an ex-Olympian who faced spurious vandalism charges that were later dropped, is exploring legal options against the federal government, and Democrats are looking to investigate the project and botched prosecutions by seeking documents from the Interior and Justice Departments. That effort could run into Kirk, a conservative operative and Trump loyalist.
A previous Interior Department inspector general, Mark Lee Greenblatt, doesn’t have confidence in Kirk’s ability to carry out the job, saying to The Hill last week that “the chilling effect on whistleblowers is real.”
“Who would jeopardize their careers by submitting a complaint about an administration official to an I.G. who is avowedly aligned with the administration?” Greenblatt said.
No comments:
Post a Comment