This new detail, the exchange between Barnes and the Alitos, emerged over the weekend. Barnes wrote the January 2021 Post story about the justices who didn’t attend the inauguration, including the spokeswoman’s quote. But when he arrived at their home in Northern Virginia, the Alitos were leaving the house and getting into their car. Martha-Ann Alito, the judge’s wife, asked Barnes to leave her property before being informed why she was there.
The flag, she exclaimed, was “an international distress signal.” For his part, Alito “denied that the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it resulted from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had flown it,” our recent report explained. This is in line with what Alito told the New York Times when it sought comment on his original report on the inverted flag.
Flying a flag upside down is actually a symbol of distress. And this was common knowledge in January 2021, as the inverted flag had become a symbol of resistance to the incoming Biden presidency and was carried by some who watched the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
A second Times report detailed the dispute with these neighbors. After the riot at the Capitol, reporter Jodi Kantor revealed, a house on Alitos Street placed homemade signs on the lawn reading “Trump is a fascist” and “You are an accomplice.” The latter wasn’t meant to target the Alitos, neighbor Emily Baden told Kantor, but rather Republicans in general.
Perhaps. But the street both houses are on is a dead end, with the Baden house situated closer to the entrance. To get to their house, several houses away on the same block, the Alitos would have to drive by. One can see how the Alitos might have felt targeted.
But this raises another question. If the flag was intended to serve as a rejoinder to the Badens, it would not be effective, as there would be no reason for the Badens to continue driving on their dead-end street. In fact, Emily Baden told Kantor that she never saw the flag.
On Wednesday, Alito sent a letter to Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) stating that he saw no need to recuse himself from decisions related to Donald Trump’s efforts to maintain power after lose the 2020 mandate. election.
“I am confident,” he wrote, “that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or the desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events recounted above do not meet the applicable standard for recusal. ”
These narrated events centered on the flag – for which he offered no direct explanation.
“My wife’s reasons for flying the flag are not relevant for present purposes,” he wrote in the letter, “but I note that she was very distressed at the time due, in large part, to a very unpleasant neighborhood dispute in which I I had no involvement.” Among other elements, he wrote, the dispute involved a man who used “the most vile epithet that can be directed at a woman” when addressing his wife.
The Times reports that this exchange did not occur before the inauguration – explaining why the flag was seen outside his home at that time – but rather in mid-February. This version of events, conveyed by Emily Baden, was corroborated by a call she made to the police.
There had been more than one encounter with the Badens before Barnes’ arrival, according to this report. One was the day after the Capitol riot, on Jan. 7 — 10 days before the flag was photographed outside Alito’s home. The Alitos and the Badens also clashed sometime on January 20, before Barnes’ visit – an encounter that would have been recalled when Barnes asked Alito if the flag had any political significance.
In his letter, Alito again insisted that he had nothing to do with the flag.
“I didn’t even notice the inverted flag until it caught my eye. As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to remove it, but for several days she refused,” he wrote. He described this effort in surprisingly legalistic terms: Because she co-owns the house, he continued, his wife “therefore has the legal right to use the property as she sees fit, and there were no additional steps I could have taken to have the flag be withdrawal more quickly.”
This is a surprising claim: that he apparently believed the flag should be taken down, but that his efforts to make it happen were thwarted by Martha-Ann Alito’s property rights. You will also note that his letter does not suggest that the flag was a response to the Badens, but rather that it was coincidentally raised at a time when his wife was “very distressed” by her neighbors.
The reason the flag was raised is “not relevant for present purposes,” he says — although the point of the letter was to establish that the flag was not an indication of his opinion of Trump’s efforts to maintain power.
What we’re left with is that Alito didn’t raise the flag, but he also didn’t do much to take it down. He flew in a few days after an encounter with his neighbors, although not those that involved more aggression. And if it was intended to be a sign to these neighbors, they almost certainly wouldn’t have seen it.
We also know that Alito’s concern about the coronavirus was too significant to allow him to participate in Biden’s inauguration, but not significant enough to keep him home when the Post reporter showed up that day. And we know that, in Alito’s opinion, none of this should cause any objective observer to have any doubts about his views on the former or current president.
