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      in US Politics

      Oath Keeper sentenced to eight and a half years for role in Capitol attack

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      A member of the far-right Oath Keepers on Friday was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for her role in the deadly 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump who tried to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory over the Republican.Jessica Watkins was convicted in November by a federal jury in Washington of obstruction of an official proceeding for her role in the storming of the Capitol, which saw rioters battle police, smash windows and send lawmakers running for their lives.Watkins was also convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of officers during the riots.The US district judge Amit Mehta on Friday said it was “particularly hard” to issue a sentence for Watkins after she testified during trial about the struggles she faced with her transgender identity and her cooperation with law enforcement officials during their investigation of her conduct on January 6.But he said that “doesn’t wipe out” what she did during the attack. “Your role that day was more aggressive, more assaultive, more purposeful than perhaps others,” Mehta said.Kenneth Harrelson, another Oath Keeper convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding, was also found guilty of conspiring to prevent members of Congress from certifying Biden’s election win as well as tampering with documents and proceedings. He will be sentenced later on Friday.Watkins and Harrelson were acquitted of seditious conspiracy charges.Watkins told the judge: “My actions and my behavior that fateful day were wrong and, as I now understand, criminal,” she said.Friday’s court proceedings were taking place one day after Mehta sentenced the Oath Keepers’ founder, Stewart Rhodes, to 18 years in prison for crimes including seditious conspiracy, or using force to try to overthrow the federal government. That is the steepest penalty yet against those charged in the January 6 violence.Members of the Oath Keepers, founded by Rhodes in 2009, include current and retired US military personnel, law enforcement officers and first responders. More

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      in US Politics

      Conservative judges hear challenge to abortion pill access in controversial lawsuit

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      Three US appeals court judges who have previously favored abortion restrictions prepared to hear oral arguments on Wednesday on the future of the major abortion drug mifepristone.The case – which has landed before judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, James Ho and Cory Wilson – essentially calls on them to rule on whether the federal government should suspend or scale back the federal Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone in 2000, along with later actions that made the pill more widely accessible.Mifepristone has consistently been found to be safe and effective, and advocates argue that it is safer than the erectile dysfunction medication Viagra and low-level pain reliever Tylenol.But an emboldened anti-abortion movement set its sights on mifepristone after the US supreme court’s conservative majority last year eliminated federal abortion rights that had been established by the Roe v Wade decision in 1973.After a coalition of groups brought a lawsuit in November against the FDA’s approval of the drug, Texas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in April issued a ruling suspending the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Joe Biden’s administration appealed, sending it to the appellate court in New Orleans where Elrod, Ho and Wilson sit – and to the supreme court, which indefinitely blocked the suspension as the case proceeds.The plaintiffs in the dispute are an alliance of physician groups who generally argue they have standing to bring the case because they have members in Texas and elsewhere in the US who have treated women and girls experiencing complications after taking mifepristone for abortions. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro Life OB-GYNs, the American College of Pediatricians and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations contend that the complications – bleeding and pain – are dangerous, and have trotted out unproven arguments that women who have abortions are prone to suicide and depression.Studies have shown that 95% of women who had abortions reported five years later that it had been the right decision for them.Their effort to in essence ban mifepristone also hinges on a 150-year-old law known as the Comstock Act, which criminalizes the mailing or shipping of any “lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article”, along with anything that is “advertised or described in a manner … for producing abortion”.Interpreted widely enough, opponents of the plaintiffs say, the previously dormant Comstock Act could prohibit the legal mailing of any abortion instrument, even to states which have chosen to keep abortion legal since last year’s supreme court ruling, bringing the US one step closer to a national abortion ban that – according to polling – most Americans would not support.Meanwhile, the FDA’s efforts to rebuff the physician group has involved defending mifepristone’s approval process against claims that it was inadequate, along with characterizing the plaintiffs as lacking standing despite their contentions to the contrary.Jennifer Dalven, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, on Monday described the fifth circuit panel hearing the case as “one of the worst panels of judges that could have been assembled for those who believe mifepristone should remain on the market”.“This case should’ve been laughed out of court from the start – it has no basis in science, it has no basis in law, it’s been roundly criticized by experts from across the ideological spectrum,” Dalven said during a virtual briefing with reporters. “But we’re living in strange times, and some judges have shown that they’re willing to blatantly ignore the rule of law to achieve their own ideological goals.”Donald Trump nominated Ho and Wilson to their posts during his presidency. (He also nominated Kacsmaryk, whose ruling is the subject of Wednesday’s hearing.)Trump’s fellow Republican president George W Bush nominated Elrod.All three in 2021 upheld a Texas law which outlawed an abortion method commonly used to terminate pregnancies in their second trimester.A 2018 opinion from Ho called abortion “a moral tragedy”. And in 2019, though he concurred with an opinion which found that an abortion ban in Mississippi had to be struck down under legal precedent then in effect, he asserted: “Nothing in the text or original understanding of the constitution establishes a right to an abortion.”For her part, Elrod not only wrote the 2021 opinion addressing Texas’s ban of the second-trimester pregnancy abortion method, but also an opinion that same year which declined to order Louisiana state officials to issue a delayed license for a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in New Orleans. The opinion declared no one had the federal right to operate an abortion clinic.Either side could appeal any ruling from Elrod, Ho and Wilson to the supreme court, which could take a year or more to issue the final word on the matter.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      US supreme court pursuing rightwing agenda via ‘shadow docket’, book says

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      Conservative justices on the US supreme court consciously broke with decades-old congressional rules and norms to shift laws governing religious freedom sharply to the right through a series of shadowy unsigned and unexplained emergency orders, a new book reveals.Five of the six conservatives who now command the majority on the US’s most powerful court have rammed through some of their most contentious and extreme partisan decisions using the so-called “shadow docket” – unsigned orders issued frequently late at night, in literal and metaphorical darkness. The orders do not reveal who voted for them or why, often providing one-line explanations of the legal thinking behind them.The switch from openly argued cases, aired in public, to the unaccountability of the shadow docket was made purposefully during the pandemic in cases dealing with religious liberty, concludes Stephen Vladeck, an authority on the federal courts at the University of Texas law school. He warns that the trend is merging with the current ethics scandals surrounding the conservative justice Clarence Thomas to damage the legitimacy of the court and threaten a full-blown constitutional crisis.Vladeck exposes the largely unnoticed shift towards furtive justice in his new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. He shows how rightwing justices have abused the court’s emergency powers to run roughshod over the longstanding norm that shadow docket orders should be used sparingly and with extreme caution.Rightwing justices are now deploying such orders dozens of times each term. Over three terms alone, from 2019 to 2022, the court granted emergency relief in more than 60 cases: effectively overturning the considered decisions of lower courts through rushed, unexplained rulings.Among those orders were decisions that have had profound and nationwide impact over some of the most hotly disputed areas of public life, from abortion to immigration, voting rights, the death penalty and religious practices. Many appear to align more closely with Republican political priorities than with legal principles.One such order alone, the decision on the shadow docket to block the Biden administration’s January 2022 requirement that large employers mandate Covid vaccinations for their workforce, affected more than 83 million Americans – about a quarter of the US population.“The rise of the shadow docket reflects a power grab by a court that has, for better or worse, been insulated from any kind of legislative response,” Vladeck writes.The author chronicles how the most disturbing use of the shadow docket came with the rewriting of constitutional protections for religious liberty. The dramatic shift followed the death of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement in 2020 with a devout Catholic rightwinger, Amy Coney Barrett.The switch gave the conservative majority sufficient votes to overcome all resistance to ramping up use of the shadow docket, including from the chief justice, John Roberts, who though conservative has expressed mounting unease about the practice.The change in tactics could be seen almost immediately. Within weeks of taking her seat, Barrett joined four other rightwingers – Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – to drive through a major change in the constitutional understanding of religious liberty, blocking New York state Covid restrictions on the numbers of worshippers allowed to gather in churches.The order was unsigned and gave virtually no explanation for a decision that profoundly changed the law of the land, rolling back government regulations where they touched upon religious practices. It was issued at four minutes before midnight on the day before Thanksgiving – a moment that would guarantee minimal media attention.The ruling was all the more extraordinary as by then New York had scaled back its Covid restrictions and churches no longer had to limit congregation sizes. So the court’s change in the law was moot.The same five rightwing justices went on to impose their will on religious liberty laws with similar late-night one-sentence rulings knocking back state Covid restrictions in California, New Jersey and Colorado. In total, the majority issued emergency injunctions against state Covid rules on religious grounds six times in four months.The sudden spate of shadow docket orders that followed Barrett’s arrival on the court was not accidental, Vladeck says. The justices could have taken up several pending cases in full court that would have addressed the issue of religious freedoms in open hearings on the merits, yet they chose to go the obscure shadow docket route.“Here we have the court not just using emergency applications to change substantive legal principles, but doing so even as they are considering requests to make the same changes through merits decisions,” Vladeck told the Guardian.Vladeck links the rise of the shadow docket to the increasing isolation of the supreme court and its disconnection from public opinion. The growing use of the shadow docket also mirrors the polarisation and toxification of American politics.Vladeck warns that the growing trend towards jurisprudence produced in darkness is endangering the legitimacy of the nation’s most powerful court. Public confidence in the court is already at a historic low, compounded by the recent revelations that Thomas accepted lavish gifts from the Republican billionaire Harlan Crow.“The shadow docket is a symptom of a larger disease,” Vladeck said. “The disease is how unchecked and unaccountable the court is today, compared to any of its predecessors.” More

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      US ethics watchdog calls on Clarence Thomas to resign over undisclosed gifts

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      The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must resign, an ethics watchdog said on Tuesday, citing revelations about Thomas’s failure to declare lavish gifts and financial support from a Republican mega-donor, Harlan Crow.In an open letter to the scandal-hit Thomas, Noah Bookbinder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, cited a “grave crisis of institutional legitimacy currently facing the supreme court”.“For the sake of the court and for the sake of our democracy which depends on a judiciary that the public accepts as legitimate and free from corruption, we urge you to resign.”He added: “Your conduct has likely violated civil and criminal laws and has created the impression that access to and influence over supreme court justices is for sale.”Thomas has said he did not declare gifts from Crow including luxury travel and resort stays because he was advised not to do so, but will do so in future.He has not commented on reports that Crow bought from him property in which his mother still lives rent-free; that Crow paid for the private schooling for Thomas’s great-nephew, who the justice said he was raising like a son; and that the conservative activist Leonard Leo secretively arranged payment of tens of thousand dollars to Ginni Thomas, the justice’s rightwing activist wife.Leo and Crow deny wrongdoing.In the case of the school fees, Thomas did declare a gift from another donor for the same purpose. Critics say this shows he knew he should have declared gifts from Crow.Supreme court justices are notionally subject to ethics rules for federal justices but in practice govern themselves.Democrats in Congress have called for Thomas to be impeached and removed. That is a nonstarter, as Republicans hold the House, where impeachment would begin, and will protect the 6-3 conservative majority which has handed down major rulings including the removal of abortion rights. Democrats have also called for ethics reform.Senate Democrats sought to call the chief justice, John Roberts, to testify about ethics rules. Roberts refused. Democrats cannot use a subpoena to compel testimony – from Roberts, Thomas or any other justice – because without the ill and absent Dianne Feinstein of California they do not have the required majority.Last week the judiciary committee chair, Dick Durbin, urged Roberts to confront the Thomas issue, saying the chief justice “has the power in his hands to change this”.Durbin also said the “tangled web” around Thomas “just gets worse and worse by the day”.On Tuesday, Crow rebuffed a request from the Senate finance committee, citing tax concerns, for a list of gifts given to Thomas.An attorney for Crow, Michael Bopp, called the request “a component of a broader campaign against Justice Thomas and, now, Mr Crow, rather than an investigation that furthers a valid legislative purpose”.Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee sent Crow a similar letter.In his letter to Thomas, Bookbinder said: “It has become clear that over the last several decades you have engaged in a longstanding pattern of conduct to accept and conceal gifts and other benefits received from … a billionaire political activist, and have disregarded your ethical duty to recuse yourself from cases in which you have a personal or financial conflict of interest.”Crow insists he is simply good friends with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, with whom he refrains from discussing politics or business before the court.But outlets including the Guardian have shown that groups linked to Crow – a collector of historical memorabilia including paintings by Hitler – have had business before the court during the period of his friendship with Thomas.Bookbinder said reports about Thomas were “contributing to a catastrophic decline in public confidence that threatens to undermine the entire federal judiciary”.Public polling shows confidence in the court at historic lows.In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned from the supreme court, in part for accepting payment for outside activity. Fortas was paid $15,000 to teach summer school and took $20,000 from a foundation run by a convicted fraudster.Bookbinder told Thomas: “We know of no other modern justice who has engaged in such extreme misconduct.“Indeed, your receipt of consistent, lavish gifts and favors from a billionaire with an interest in the direction of the court is so far outside the experience of most of the American people, and so far beyond what most would consider acceptable, that it cannot help but further diminish the court’s credibility.”He also charged Thomas with failing to recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s “personal or financial interests”, notably after the 2020 election, in a case regarding whether to release documents related to Donald Trump’s attempt to stay in power.Thomas was the sole justice to say the documents should not be released. When they were, they showed Ginni Thomas’s extensive involvement in Trump’s election subversion.Bookbinder said: “It is increasingly difficult for people to trust that you are making decisions only based on the law and a commitment to justice.“… The judiciary is built entirely upon a foundation of public trust. If that falls away, the institution will fail. While we appreciate your many years of public service, your conduct has left you with only one way to continue faithfully serving our democracy.“For the sake of our judiciary and the sake of people’s faith in its legitimacy, you must resign.” More

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      in Elections

      Kentucky man gets record-setting 14 year sentence for role in Capitol attack

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      A Kentucky man with a long criminal record has been sentenced to a record-setting 14 years in prison for attacking police officers with pepper spray and a chair as he stormed the US Capitol with his wife.Peter Schwartz’s prison sentence is the longest so far among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The judge who sentenced Schwartz on Friday also handed down the previous longest sentence – 10 years – to a retired New York police department officer who assaulted a police officer outside the Capitol on 6 January.Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 24 years and 6 months for Schwartz, a welder.US district Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Schwartz to 14 years and two months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.Mehta said Schwartz was a “soldier against democracy” who participated in “the kind of mayhem, chaos that had never been seen in the country’s history.”“You are not a political prisoner,” the judge told hm. “You’re not somebody who is standing up against injustice or fighting against an autocratic regime.”Schwartz briefly addressed the judge before learning his sentence, saying, “I do sincerely regret the damage that January 6 has caused to so many people and their lives.”The judge said he didn’t believe Schwartz’s statement, noting his lack of remorse. “You took it upon yourself to try and injure multiple police officers that day,” Mehta said.Schwartz was armed with a wooden tire knocker when he and his then-wife, Shelly Stallings, joined other rioters in overwhelming a line of police officers on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace, where he threw a folding chair at officers.“By throwing that chair, Schwartz directly contributed to the fall of the police line that enabled rioters to flood forward and take over the entire terrace,” prosecutor Jocelyn Bond wrote in a court filing.Schwartz, 49, also armed himself with a police-issued “super soaker” canister of pepper spray and sprayed it at retreating officers. Advancing to a tunnel entrance, Schwartz coordinated with two other rioters, Markus Maly and Jeffrey Brown, to spray an orange liquid toward officers clashing with the mob.“While the stream of liquid did not directly hit any officer, its effect was to heighten the danger to the officers in that tunnel,” Bond wrote.Before leaving, Schwartz joined a “heave ho” push against police in the tunnel.Stallings pleaded guilty last year to riot-related charges and was sentenced last month to two years of incarceration.Schwartz was tried with co-defendants Maly and Brown. In December, a jury convicted all three of assault charges and other felony offenses.Schwartz’s attorneys requested a prison sentence of four years and six months, saying his actions were motivated by a “misunderstanding” about the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump and his allies spread baseless conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the election from the Republican incumbent.“There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being among the most prominent. Mr Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong,” his defense lawyers wrote.Prosecutors said Schwartz has bragged about his participation in the riot, shown no remorse and claimed that his prosecution was politically motivated. He referred to the Capitol attack as the “opening of a war” in a Facebook post a day after the riot.Schwartz has raised more than $71,000 from an online campaign titled Patriot Pete Political Prisoner in DC. Prosecutors asked Mehta to order Schwartz to pay a fine equaling the amount raised by his campaign, arguing that he shouldn’t profit from participating in the riot.Schwartz was on probation when he joined the riot and his criminal record includes a “jaw-dropping” 38 prior convictions since 1991, “several of which involved assaulting or threatening officers or other authority figures”, Bond wrote.More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to January 6. Nearly 500 of them have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment. More

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      in US Politics

      Mar-a-Lago employee aids investigation into whether Trump hid documents

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      Federal prosecutors have gained the cooperation of a person who worked at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, the New York Times reported, as they seek a more complete picture of whether the former US president took steps to remove classified documents from a storage room in response to a subpoena for their return.The identity of the cooperating witness and the extent of the information divulged remains unknown, but the person was reported as having turned over a picture of the storage room where the vast majority of the classified documents at the property had been located.The development comes as the special counsel Jack Smith has renewed efforts to focus on whether the failure by Trump to fully comply with a subpoena last year demanding the return of any classified documents was a deliberate act of obstruction, multiple people familiar with the matter said.Last June, the Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran helped draft a sworn statement attesting to a “diligent search” for any classified documents. Corcoran returned some papers to the justice department, but his search was proved to be incomplete when the FBI later seized 101 classified documents.To understand whether Trump decided to hide classified documents after receiving the subpoena, investigators have been examining Trump’s handling of any classified documents, how and where they were stored, why the subpoena was not fully complied with, and gaps in surveillance footage.The special counsel recently issued more subpoenas to Mar-a-Lago employees – including the chefs in the kitchen and a housekeeper who has been called in at least twice – to the point that nearly everyone who works at the property has been quizzed, the people said.To resolve the issue about the gaps in the surveillance footage, the special counsel last week subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief who became its chief operating officer, and his son Matthew Calamari Jr, the director of corporate security.Both Calamaris testified to the federal grand jury in Washington on Thursday, and were questioned in part on a text message that Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, had sent them around the time that the justice department last year asked for the surveillance footage, one of the people said.The text message is understood to involve Nauta asking Matthew Calamari Sr to call him back about the justice department’s request, one of the people said – initially a point of confusion for the justice department, which appears to have thought the text was to Calamari Jr.But Nauta has emerged as a central player in the incomplete subpoena response, after he was seen on the surveillance footage going in and out of the storage room to collect and return boxes both before and after the subpoena was issued to Trump in May of last year.The scrutiny around Nauta has long been focused on whether Trump enlisted his help to remove classified documents from the storage room and take them to his office or elsewhere before Trump’s lawyers searched the room when they completed their incomplete subpoena response.Nauta himself has turned into a dead-end for investigators when, last fall, the justice department threatened to charge him with obstruction or making false statements to the FBI after he gave differing accounts to investigators in an effort to scare him into cooperation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the move backfired. Nauta’s lawyer informed the justice department that his client would never again talk to investigators unless he was charged or unless he was offered an immunity deal like what was offered to Trump adviser Kash Patel, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.In a statement, a Trump spokesman said of the investigation: “This is nothing more than a targeted, politically motivated witch-hunt against President Trump that is concocted to meddle in an election and prevent the American people from returning him to the White House.”The special counsel had not made a decision either way as of Friday, one of the people said, and the threat of charges was the last interaction that Nauta has had with investigators. Likewise, Patel’s last interaction was when he testified to the grand jury pursuant to his immunity deal.Some people inside the justice department believe that threatening Nauta with prosecution so early on in the investigation was a mistake, and that they could have taken a lighter approach that could have led to answers for issues that have since cropped up, one of the people said.After losing Nauta, investigators have turned to other witnesses who could shed light on his role. In recent interviews, they have asked whether Nauta removed boxes containing classified documents when he was in the storage room at the time of the subpoena, and where he went with them. More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans thwart Democrats’ push to stiffen supreme court ethics rules

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      Arguing that the US supreme court has “the lowest ethical standards” of a court in the country, Senate Democrats on Tuesday demanded tighter rules on the nine justices but ran into resistance from Republicans who accused them of being bitter over recent conservative rulings.Democrats had convened a hearing of the Senate judiciary committee after a series of media reports on entanglements between two of the court’s conservative justices and parties with interests in its cases. These includes Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of luxury travel and a real estate deal from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, and Neil Gorsuch’s sale of a property to a law firm executive with business before the court. Both were interactions the two justices did not fully disclose.The committee’s Democratic chair Dick Durbin, a senator from Illinois, said: “We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman. It falls short of the ethical standards we expect of any public servant in America. And yet the supreme court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.“Ethics cannot simply be left to the discretion of the nation’s highest court. The court should have a code of conduct with clear and enforceable rules so justices and the American people know when conduct crosses the line. The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.”But to Republicans, the Democrats’ calls for Thomas to be investigated and for the court to accept more stringent ethics rules represent nothing more than sour grapes. Last year, the supreme court’s six conservative justices handed down decisions that upended American life by overturning the precedent established by Roe v Wade to allow states to ban abortion, expanding the ability for Americans to carry concealed weapons without a permit, and reducing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions.Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the panel, alluded to these rulings to argue Democrats were simply trying to undermine the court’s conservative majority.“This assault on justice Thomas is well beyond ethics. It is about trying to delegitimize a conservative court that was appointed through the traditional process,” Graham, a senator from South Carolina, said.Durbin had invited supreme court chief justice John Roberts to the hearing, but he declined to attend, citing the need to keep the court separate and free from congressional interference, while sending along a “statement on ethics principles and practices” signed by all of the court’s nine justices. Federal law requires judges, including supreme court justices, recuse themselves from any matter “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned”, but unlike other judges and federal employees, the court has no formal ethics code.Democrats say the nine highest judges in the country do not have ethics rules comparable to other judges or even many federal employees, and have introduced two pieces of legislation to impose a code of conduct and other requirements. Neither measure appears to have much of a chance in this Congress, where Republicans control the House of Representatives and could use the filibuster to block any legislation in the Senate.Before the hearing began, the Democrats’ push won an endorsement from J Michael Luttig, a former appeals court judge and noted conservative legal thinker who said Congress does have the authority to establish such standards.He wrote in a letter to the committee: “There should never come the day when the Congress of the United States is obligated to enact laws prescribing the ethical standards applicable to the non-judicial conduct and activities of the supreme court of the United States, even though it indisputably has the power under the constitution to do so, but paradoxically, does not have the power to require the court to prescribe such standards for itself.”Luttig was joined by progressive scholar Laurence Tribe, who wrote to the committee: “I regard legislation to impose ethical norms in a binding way on the justices as eminently sensible. Put simply, I see such legislation as a necessary though probably not sufficient response to the current situation.”Neither men opted to testify. Instead, Democrats heard from invited legal scholars who generally agreed that Congress had the power to implement a code of conduct on the supreme court, should they choose to do so. Experts invited by the Republican minority, meanwhile, said Congress did not have the power to impose a code of conduct on the supreme court, and downplayed the severity of the reports about the court’s ethics.Michael Mukasey, a former attorney general under George W Bush, said in the hearing, said: “It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the public is being asked to hallucinate misconduct, so as to undermine the authority of justices who issue rulings with which the critics disagree, and thus to undermine the authority of the rulings themselves.” More

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      in US Politics

      Leaked abortion draft made us ‘targets of assassination’, Samuel Alito says

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      Samuel Alito said the decision he wrote removing the federal right to abortion made him and other US supreme court justices “targets of assassination” but denied claims he was responsible for its leak in draft form.“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Friday.“It was rational for people to believe they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”Alito wrote the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson, the Mississippi case that overturned Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973.Alito’s draft ruling was leaked to Politico on 2 May last year, to uproar and protest nationwide. The final ruling was issued on 24 June.On 8 June, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh, with Alito one of six conservatives on the nine-justice court. Charged with attempted murder of a United States judge, the man pleaded not guilty.The conservative chief justice, John Roberts, voted against overturning Roe, but the three rightwingers installed by Republicans under Donald Trump ensured it fell regardless.Progressives charged that a conservative, perhaps the hardline Alito, might have orchestrated the leak in an attempt to lock in a majority for such a momentous decision.Alito said: “That’s infuriating to me. Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”The leak was investigated by the supreme court marshal, without establishing a perpetrator.Saying the marshal “did a good job with the resources that were available”, Alito said he had “a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody”.Alito said the leak “was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside, as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”He also said the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust”. The justices “worked through it”, he said, “and last year we got our work done … but it was damaging”.Last November, after a bombshell New York Times report, Alito denied leaking information about a decision in a 2014 case about contraception and religious rights.His Wall Street Journal interview seemed bound to further anger Democrats and progressives. Justices regularly claim not to be politically motivated, but even with a Democrat in the White House the court has made other momentous conservative rulings, notably including a loosening of gun-control laws.Joe Biden’s administration has shied from calls for reform, including the idea justices should be added to establish balance or give liberals a majority, reflecting Democratic control of the White House and Senate.Alito told the Journal he did not “feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection”. He also said he was “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force”.Complaining that criticism also stoked by corruption allegations against two more conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, were “new during my lifetime”, Alito said: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances.“And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organised bar will come to their defense.”Alito said legal authorities had, “if anything … participated to some degree in these attacks”.He declined to comment on reporting by ProPublica about Thomas’s friendship with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor who has bestowed gifts and purchases which Thomas largely did not disclose.But Alito did complain about how Kavanaugh was treated when allegations of sexual assault surfaced during his confirmation process.“After Justice Kavanaugh was accused of being a rapist … he made an impassioned speech, made an impassioned scene, and he was criticised because it was supposedly not judicious, not the proper behavior for a judge to speak in those terms.“I don’t know – if somebody calls you a rapist?”Accusations against Kavanaugh included attempted rape while a high school student. On Friday, the Guardian reported that new information showed serious omissions in a Senate investigation of the allegations, mounted when Republicans controlled the chamber.Polling shows that public trust in the supreme court has reached historic lows.“We’re being bombarded,” Alito complained, “and then those who are attacking us say: ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’“Well, yeah, what do you expect when … day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”Such attacks, he said, “undermine confidence in the government [as] it’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution”.With some court-watchers, the interview landed heavily.Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an independent watchdog, said: “There is no depth to the pity [justices] – and Alito in particular – feel for themselves when they face public criticism.” More