Samuel Alito Has Exposed Himself to Felony Bribery Charges Under New Jersey Law. I’m Filing for His Disbarment and Submitting a Criminal Referral.

Note from the author: This article consists first of an executive summary that walks through the entire case in about ten minutes of reading, covering the recusal mechanism, what Alito did, what is being filed, and what you can do this week. If you want the bottom line, the executive summary contains all of it.The second part is a deep dive for readers who want to see the case in the depth the receiving offices will expect, walking through each count with its strongest defense and rebuttal, the criminal referral doctrine, the federal-judge contrast, and the full call to action.Read the summary if you want the case. Read the deep dive if you want to defend the case in a conversation with someone who disagrees with you, or if you work for Snopes.In October 2026, the Supreme Court will hear a case called Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, and Justice Samuel Alito is on track to vote in it. The lead petitioner is a company in which Paul Singer’s hedge fund holds a stake worth roughly 1.97 billion dollars. Singer is the same billionaire who flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet in 2008, in a gift Alito never reported, before Singer’s fund won a case in front of Alito that delivered it 2.4 billion dollars. The Court heard an earlier version of this same Suncor case in 2023, and Alito recused. The case has come back on the same question with the same parties, and this time he has not stepped aside.That recusal in 2023 and the refusal to recuse now turn on a rule most folks intuitively understand. Recusal is the rule that keeps a gift from becoming a bribe. A judge who takes something of value from a person and then rules on that person’s case has turned the gift into something that looks like payment for the ruling. Recusal is how a judge prevents that: they step aside and never vote, and the gift stays a gift.Samuel Alito has refused to step aside at least three times in cases tied to the people who gave him things of substantial value, or to the operative who arranged the giving.Here is the first, and it is the one that built the relationship.

In July 2008, Alito flew to a fishing lodge in Alaska on Paul Singer’s private jet, a seat that would have cost more than 100,000 dollars to charter. Leonard Leo arranged the trip. Leo is the operative who ran the campaign to confirm Alito to the Court and who has spent his career connecting wealthy conservative donors to conservative judges. Alito did not report the trip on his 2008 financial disclosure form or on any form afterward, until ProPublica exposed it in 2023. Six years after the trip, Singer’s hedge fund had a case before the Court, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital. Justice Sotomayor recused. Alito did not. He voted with the majority for Singer’s side, and within two years Singer’s fund collected approximately 2.4 billion dollars from Argentina.Here is the second. In 2023, Alito sat for two long private interviews with attorney David Rivkin inside his chambers at the Court. At the time, Rivkin was the lawyer of record for the petitioners in a case called Moore v. United States, which the Court agreed to hear in the weeks between the two interviews. Rivkin was also Leonard Leo’s personal lawyer, defending Leo against the Senate subpoenas that grew out of the Alaska trip investigation. Alito refused to step aside from Moore, calling Rivkin a journalist rather than a litigant during those chambers visits. The Court ruled for Rivkin’s clients in June 2024, with Alito in the majority.The third is Suncor, the vote that is still ahead. Alito owns shares in seven energy companies and a fund that holds ExxonMobil, which is one of the petitioners in the case. He recused from the identical case in 2023 and has not recused now, and Singer’s 1.97 billion dollar position in the lead petitioner ties this vote back to the man who paid for the 2008 trip. One episode looks like a lapse. Three, with the same operative and the same donor running through them, look like a practice.The thread connecting all three is Leonard Leo. He ran the confirmation, arranged the trip, served as the lawyer in the second episode, and built the donor relationships that reach the third.

The case is not that one billionaire bought one vote in a back room. The case is that a single operative built a standing relationship between a justice and the donors whose interests keep arriving at the Court, and the justice continues to weigh in on cases where they should be recusing.Two filings follow from this, and they rest on different ground, so it is worth being plain about which is stronger.The bar grievance is the solid one. New Jersey, where Alito is admitted to practice law, holds its lawyers to Rule 8.4(d), which forbids conduct that damages the administration of justice. The test the New Jersey courts apply asks whether a reasonable person, knowing the facts, would doubt the judge’s impartiality. A six-figure undisclosed gift followed by a vote worth billions to the giver creates that doubt, and it does so no matter who arranged the seat on the plane or what was said on it. The appearance is the violation. The grievance covers all three episodes.The criminal referral is the more difficult one, and I will not pretend otherwise. New Jersey’s bribery statute, 2C:27–2, makes it a felony for any person to accept a benefit as consideration for a vote in a judicial proceeding, and the New Jersey Supreme Court confirmed in 2023 that the statute reaches anyone who meets its elements, with no exemption for federal officers. Proving consideration is the demanding part, because it requires showing that Alito understood, when he accepted the benefit, that it was tied to his conduct on the bench. That is why the referral is built around Suncor and made conditional. If Alito steps aside before the vote, the referral falls away. If he sits and votes on a case where Singer holds a near two billion dollar stake, after taking Singer’s gift and ruling for Singer once before, while the conflict sits under public scrutiny, he cannot credibly claim ignorance, and the conduct becomes present and provable rather than a matter of reconstructing what he was thinking in 2008.Now the question a fair reader will ask. Why is this falling to a state bar and a state prosecutor rather than the federal system built to handle it? Because the federal system has declined to act, and in Alito’s case much of it cannot.Picture any other federal judge doing what Alito did, whether a district judge in Newark or a circuit judge in Philadelphia.

The accountability that would reach that judge does not reach Alito, and the reason is not that his conduct is more defensible; it is that the Supreme Court sits outside the rules that bind every court below it. Federal law requires every judge, including every justice, to report gifts of travel, because the exemption for personal hospitality covers a meal or a place to stay and has never covered a private jet flight. A district judge who left a six-figure jet trip off his disclosure form would face a misconduct complaint that any citizen can file, and the system is built to hear it.The Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in December 2024 that Alito’s nondisclosure violated that same federal law, and the one committee that could refer him for it has had eighteen months and has done nothing.The chambers interviews work the same way. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges forbids a judge from holding private conversations about a pending case with one side’s lawyer, and a district judge who did what Alito did would face a complaint under that code. The code binds every federal judge in the country except the nine justices, who wrote themselves a separate version in 2023 with no enforcement mechanism. And a lower judge who wrongly refused to step aside could be reversed by the court above him, while Alito has no court above him, so his refusal is reviewed by no one.That is why the filing goes to the states. The conduct fits a New Jersey crime, and New Jersey can apply its own law to a lawyer it admitted. No state has brought a bar grievance or a criminal referral against a sitting justice before, and nothing forbids it. It has not been done because, until the federal system stopped working, it did not have to be. It is the path that remains open, and it is the one that keeps these nine people from standing above the law.If you wait for elections to exercise justice then you give both a runway of lawlessness and an incentive for bad actors to ensure free and fair elections are impossible. Sure sounds like what is happening now, right?So today I am filing three documents with three state offices.The first is a verified grievance with the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics, asking that office to investigate Alito for violating Rule 8.4(d). The grievance contains the three episodes described above.

The second is a conditional criminal referral to the New Jersey Attorney General under 2C:27–2, asking that office to investigate and, if Alito sits on Suncor and votes, to prosecute.The third is a charities referral to the New York Attorney General, asking that office to investigate the network of New York-registered nonprofits that Leonard Leo built and runs. The same office dissolved the Trump Foundation in 2018 and won its case against the NRA in 2020, and the money moving through the Leo network dwarfs both.I am filing in the states because the federal authorities have refused to. The Senate made its finding in December 2024. Eighteen months have passed. The Judicial Conference committee chaired by Chief Justice Roberts has not referred Alito to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department has not opened a case. The Acting Attorney General is Todd Blanche, who was Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer in the New York trial that ended in Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, and who now runs the department that would have to prosecute the justice whose votes have shielded the president he defended. The people at the top of the federal track owe their positions to the man Alito’s votes protect. State authority is what’s left.Here is what you can do about this situation, to influence the outcome. Write a short letter, in your own words, to the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics, and ask them to investigate the grievance against Samuel Alito like any other complaint. Tell them why you care. Tell them why it matters to you that a Supreme Court justice answers to the same rules as everyone else, that the most powerful court in the country is not above consequence. It does not need to be long, and it should not copy mine; a state office pays attention to letters written in a real person’s voice, not to identical form copies.Office of Attorney Ethics, Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex, P.O. Box 963, Trenton, New Jersey 08625-0963.If you found this article of use, and want to keep this activist lawfare, legislation, and investigative journalism machine running and destroying fascism, then you should know that we need 10 new subscribers EVERY ARTICLE. We don’t always hit that number. In fact, we didn’t yesterday.