Dems Take Action Against “Shameless” Samuel Alito Over Jan. 6 Flag

A Tennessee Democrat is taking formal action against “shameless” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after revelations that an upside-down American flag flew at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.

Representative Steve Cohen introduced a resolution Tuesday to censure Alito for “knowingly violating the Federal recusal statute and binding ethics standards and calling the impartiality of the Supreme Court of the United States into question.”

“Beyond poor judgment, Justice Alito’s misuse of the American flag is a knowing and shameless demonstration of his political bias,” Cohen said in a statement. “He literally flew a flag in front of his house showing the world he supported the January 6th insurrectionists. What’s more, he continues to participate in litigation directly related to the 2020 election and the Insurrection, in direct violation of the federal recusal statute and the Supreme Court’s own ethics rules.”

“There must be accountability to protect the integrity and impartiality of the High Court,” Cohen continued. “We must protect the Constitutional rights to fair and impartial proceedings. Justice Alito should be censured for flagrant breaches of the law and court rules, and he must recuse himself from all other 2020 election and January 6th related litigation.”

The New York Times revealed on Friday that the upside-down flag was spotted in Alito’s yard on January 17, 2021. In the weeks and months after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, many of his supporters flew the flag upside down in protest of what they wrongly believed to be a stolen election. Alito, like a true gentleman, blamed it on his wife, claiming that she had hung it upside down to protest a neighbor’s yard signs.

As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote earlier this week, “The revelation casts doubt on whether Alito can ethically decide cases related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Multiple such cases are pending before the court, including one on whether Donald Trump himself is immune from prosecution for his role in the coup attempt.”

Cohen’s statement echoes that of a conservative member in the upper chamber, Senator Lindsey Graham, who said the flag choice was “not good judgment.” But not all GOP lawmakers felt similarly. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell brushed off a question about Alito’s behavior, telling reporters that the country needs to “leave the Supreme Court alone.”

No doubt Alito feels the same. “Alito doesn’t care,” Ford wrote. “He abides by judicial ethics requirements, and the general principle that judges should appear to be impartial and nonpartisan, only to the degree that they suit his own preferences.”

All nine tribal nations of South Dakota have officially banned the state’s Republican governor (and puppy murderer) Kristi Noem from their lands.

The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe moved to ban the governor following a meeting on Tuesday as an act of solidarity with eight Oceti Sakowin tribes that had done the same in response to inflammatory comments Noem has made about Indigenous communities since January, ICT News reported.

Noem has repeatedly accused South Dakota’s tribes of “personally benefiting” from Mexican drug cartels, falsely alleging “the cartels are using our reservations to facilitate the spread of drugs throughout the Midwest” in March. Noem also lashed out at Indigenous families, claiming systemic poverty is a matter of parental failure—a tired conservative talking point long used to justify inequality they create. “Their kids don’t have any hope,” Noem said without evidence in March. “They don’t have parents who show up and help them.”

Peter Lengkeek, chairman of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe that banned Noem last week, stated: “We do not have cartels on the reservations. We have cartel products, like guns and drugs. But they pass over state highways getting to the reservation. So, putting us all together like that and saying that all tribes are involved in this really shows the ignorance of the governor’s office.”

The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe repeatedly met with representatives for Noem ahead of its vote on Tuesday, according to ICT News. In a press release announcing its decision, the tribe indicated Noem’s administration is drastically underinformed:

The Executive Committee calls on the governor to reconsider the effectiveness of the liaisons she has appointed and whether or not they truly have an understanding of the issues affecting tribal nations as well as their ability to foster a cooperative relationship between the Tribes and the State of South Dakota.

On Friday, as the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe met with representatives of Noem’s office, Noem held a press conference to address her being banned from the eight Oceti tribal lands and reiterated her cartel conspiracy.

“I ask them right back, ‘Why have they not banished the cartels? Why have they not banished the cartel affiliates?’” Noem said. “Why have they only focused their attention on me, who has offered them help, and not gone after those who are perpetuating violence?”

A vast majority of illicit drugs that enter the United States come from legal ports of entry—and not with migrants as Republicans insist—yet Noem has refused to give up the goat, instead throwing communities systematically oppressed by U.S. colonialism for 500 years under the bus for cheap political points.

The tribes have requested Noem apologize for her remarks and cease making future inflammatory statements against them. Until then, Noem is banned from visiting over five million acres of South Dakota—more than 10 percent of the state.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis won her primary election in Georgia Tuesday night and immediately sent a message to the man her office is prosecuting, Donald Trump.

“I am just so humbled and so grateful to the citizens of Fulton County who made this possible. Tonight, they delivered a strong and powerful message: They want a district attorney who believes everyone deserves to be safe and everyone is entitled to some dignity,” Willis said in her victory speech.

“And it’s a message that’s pissin’ folks off, but there is no one above the law in this country, nor is there anyone beneath it,” Willis added in a pointed jab at the former president.

Willis’s victory in the solidly Democratic county is good news in the face of Republican efforts to thwart her prosecution of Trump and his allies for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Willis was accused of appointing former special prosecutor Nathan Wade, with whom she had a personal relationship, to the case for financial gain—and the Trump campaign sought to have her thrown off the entire case. A Georgia judge ultimately ruled in her favor, provided that she replace Wade.

The rest of Willis’s speech didn’t focus on the case against Trump, instead highlighting her efforts to lower crime and thanking her supporters and local law enforcement. But she did allude to the attacks against her both in Georgia and the U.S. at large.

“All the attacks in the world can’t stop us. And they will not stop us. This is a fight for safety. It’s a fight for justice. But most, it’s a fight for the rule of law. And we are just at the beginning of this fight,” Willis said.

“Nobody is supporting me but the people of Fulton County,” Willis added.

Right now, however, the case against Trump and his more than a dozen co-defendants is in limbo, as the Georgia Court of Appeals reviews an appeal seeking to overturn the order keeping Willis on the case. Similarly, federal charges against the Republican presidential nominee are also stalled in Washington, D.C., and Florida, thanks to the efforts of a Trump-appointed judge and the Supreme Court’s decision to review the issue of presidential immunity. It seems that Trump’s ongoing hush-money trial may be the only sure avenue to see him face some kind of accountability.

Recently unsealed court documents suggest that prosecutors in Donald Trump’s classified documents case have even more damning evidence that he tried to obstruct the government’s attempts to retrieve the documents.

According to supporting documentation for a motion filed by Trump’s legal team, the government subpoena for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage seemingly led Trump to try to cover up the relocation of the classified documents. Trump was notified of the subpoena in a June 2022 call with one of his attorneys, which probably prompted Trump to tell staffers to evade security cameras when moving boxes thereafter—or so concluded the district judge who oversaw the grand jury in the case.

“The government has provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the June 24, 2022 phone call may have furthered the former president’s efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation,” Judge Beryl Howell wrote in a 2023.

The damning detail is just one of many revelations that have come out of hundreds of pages of court documents that were unsealed Tuesday. Howell’s opinion also described how four more documents with classified markings were discovered on Trump’s property, stashed away in his bedroom, even months after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Howell also found that prosecutors provided sufficient evidence that Trump had “intentionally concealed the existence of additional documents” in order to mislead the government and impede the FBI’s investigation.

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to illegally retaining national security documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge overseeing the case has been dragging her feet for months. Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely delayed the trial earlier this month, purportedly over issues about how to handle classified evidence. Legal analysts worry that these delays could be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.

After the defense rested in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial on Tuesday, Trump took to the cameras to denigrate the judge presiding over his case, issuing a blatantly racist dog whistle as a desperate last line of defense before closing remarks next Tuesday.

“The judge hates Donald Trump,” Trump said, creepily referring to himself in the third person. “Just take a look. Take a look at him. Take a look at where he comes from.”

Trump was obviously noting that Judge Juan Merchan was born in Colombia, a claim that bears little weight outside the minds of racists hunting for a reason to oppose Merchan’s pretty lax efforts to deter Trump from using his platform to launch harassment and threats at jurors, key witnesses, and family members of those involved in the trial.

Merchan immigrated to the United States from Colombia when he was 6 years old and grew up in the same borough as the bloviating former president—albeit on opposite sides of the wealth spectrum. Trump was raised in the affluent suburban neighborhood of Jamaica Estates, while Merchan grew up in Jackson Heights, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City. Merchan—who is roughly sixteen years Trump’s junior—immigrated to Queens when Trump was about 22 years old.

The comments echoed past attacks on another judge—Gonzalo Curiel—who in 2016 Trump claimed couldn’t be impartial in overseeing a federal fraud case against Trump University (remember that?) because the Indiana-born judge was “of Mexican heritage.” Trump’s 2016 comments were clearly understood to be racist, with conservatives widely criticizing them at the time. Former Ohio Governor John Kasich, who in 2016 ran against Trump, denounced the attack, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “Attacking judges based on their race &/or religion is another tactic that divides our country. [Donald Trump] should apologize to Judge Curiel & try to unite this country.”

“I couldn’t disagree more with what he had to say,” Mitch McConnell said at the time of Trump’s attacks against Curiel. “I don’t agree with what he had to say. This is a man who was born in Indiana. All of us came here from somewhere else.”

Eight years of racist bloviating and winks to white supremacists later, Republicans are silent on Trump’s dog whistles against another “certified Trump hater” judge, focusing instead on dressing like Trump to help him violate his gag order.

Donald Trump is falsely claiming that President Biden was prepared to kill him during the FBI’s search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—a nefarious lie given that Trump wasn’t even at the residence on the day of the search.

In a Truth Social post on Tuesday evening, the former president said that after his hush-money trial adjourned for the day, he learned that “Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”

A former president claiming their successor tried to kill them is unprecedented, according to The Washington Post. It’s no secret that law enforcement will come armed when enforcing a search warrant. But the FBI has already testified that it chose to search Mar-a-Lago on a day that Trump would not be there in order to prevent any conflict.

So why make such a post? The former president is probably trying to distract from the news Tuesday from an unsealed legal opinion that classified documents were found in his bedroom at Mar-a-Lago four months after the FBI’s initial search.

Trump faces 42 felony charges in his classified documents case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge in the case, Trump appointee Aileen Cannon, seems to be stalling the trial on purpose. Earlier this month, she ordered a stay on Trump’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed—but offered no expiration date for the reprieve.

Cannon faces a growing backlash due to her handling of the case, with online petitions calling for her removal or recusal from the case. Even some of her clerks have quit because of her conduct, as well as for creating a hostile work environment. At least one potential witness, former Mar-a-Lago worker Brian Butler, has publicly come forward and criticized Cannon’s handling of the case.

Trump’s federal cases have already been delayed thanks to the Supreme Court, which is currently deciding whether Trump, as a former president, enjoys legal immunity. Some believe that state-level charges against the Republican presidential nominee, whether in New York or Georgia, are the only prospects for him facing real justice.

The results are in from Tuesday’s presidential primary in Kentucky, with a big warning sign for both the Republican and Democratic presumptive nominees.

Donald Trump, who easily won Kentucky in 2020 and scooped up over 370,000 votes in the primary that year, saw a slump in the Bluegrass State, with his primary numbers nearly cut in half and collecting just 214,000 votes.

Nikki Haley, who suspended her presidential campaign in March, pulled 6.4 percent of Republican primary voters away from Trump, as her zombie campaign continues to make an impact.

Incumbent Joe Biden, who in 2020 picked up 36 percent of the vote and who won the primary that year with an impressive 365,000 votes, walked away Tuesday night with an abysmal 131,000. Protest votes for “uncommitted” picked up a whopping 32,905 votes—nearly 18 percent.

Eighteen percent is comparably massive: In 2020, “uncommitted” votes in Kentucky received just 10 percent of the Democratic vote, with Bernie Sanders’s suspended campaign picking up 12.1 percent. In 2016, “uncommitted” received just 5.3 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Kentucky. “Uncommitted” votes for Democratic primaries this year have been used as a protest against Biden’s support for Israel as it continues to decimate Gaza and as Biden insists Israel is not committing a genocide, something people who are not aiding a genocide don’t need to say.

Four months after an FBI raid recovered thousands of sensitive documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president’s attorneys discovered even more classified pages—this time in his bedroom.

In a newly unsealed 2023 opinion, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell described how four more documents with classified markings were discovered on Trump’s property, stashed away in his bedroom, even months after the FBI search.

“Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Howell wrote.

“Instead, the government has provided evidence to demonstrate that the full arc of the criminal violation had already concluded more than six months before this search of Mar-a-Lago, when the evidence demonstrates that the former president intentionally failed to provide all of the classified documents in his possession to the government with the June 3, 2022 Certification,” she continued, adding that Trump’s office’s decision to turn the box over with the four records in January 2023 did not undermine that fact that he withheld them after a subpoena and a federal investigation.

Howell also found that prosecutors provided sufficient evidence that Trump had “intentionally concealed the existence of additional documents” in order to mislead the government and impede the FBI’s investigation.

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge actually overseeing the former president’s classified documents case seems to have no motivation to move forward with the trial. Earlier this month, Judge Aileen Cannon ordered a stay on Trump’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed—but offered no expiration date for the theoretically temporary reprieve.

Legal analysts have worried that a strategy of continual delays could be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.

Meanwhile, Trump has practically confessed that he took the sensitive records. In an interview on Newsmax, Trump claimed point blank that he actually did take the classified documents, describing the process of shamelessly packing them away while leaving office.

“I took ’em very legally,” Trump told the far-right media network in March. “And I wasn’t hiding them.”

Ultimately, Cannon’s extended time allowance for the GOP presidential nominee just presents another roadblock to actually trying Trump for any of his alleged misconduct. And if he wins the election in November, Trump could potentially pardon himself since all of the alleged crimes are federal charges.

At the Senate Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to contend with protesters upset over the Biden administration’s support for Israel during its brutal war on Gaza. Screams of “war criminal” and “butcher of Gaza” broke out on the Senate floor before protesters were forcibly removed.

Blinken was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a review of the State Department’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year, and later the Senate appropriations subcommittee. While Blinken was speaking during the first hearing, protesters who had red paint on their hands stood up and called him “bloody Blinken,” shouting that “the blood of 40,000 Palestinians” is on his hands.

“Blinken, you will be remembered as the butcher of Gaza!” one protester yelled as Capitol Police officers removed him from the hearing. “You will be remembered for murdering innocent Palestinians.”

The antiwar organization Code Pink posted video of the interruption to X (formerly Twitter) and also posted video of one protester being picked up and carried outside of the room by police.

In a brief moment of levity, Senator Lindsey Graham warned in the hearing that if the ICC followed through on pursuing warrants for Israeli officials, “we’re next.” His statement drew applause from protesters, who welcomed the news.

“You can clap all you want to,” Graham said. “They tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan but reason prevailed.… What I hope to happen is that we level sanctions against the ICC for this outrage.”

Blinken, Graham, and many other Biden officials and politicians from both parties have been confronted by protesters calling for a cease-fire in the war in Gaza. On Tuesday, though, Blinken seemed relatively unfazed, saying the administration is willing to work with “a profoundly wrong-headed decision” regarding possible warrants for Israeli leaders issued by the International Criminal Court.

Meanwhile, Israel’s war has killed over 35,000 people, including at least 15,000 children. Israel has clamped down on press coverage of the war, including briefly shutting down an Associated Press camera on Tuesday. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees has had to shut down food distribution in the city of Rafah, where many Gazans have been displaced, due to the security situation and a lack of supplies. The Biden administration, after briefly pausing one weapons shipment to Israel, continues to send weapons to Israel, instead of listening to protesters and taking steps to end the war by stopping the flow of arms altogether.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently has no issue with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s decision to fly a symbol of the insurrection shortly after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Images published on Friday revealed that the conservative justice had flown the upside-down flag—a symbol of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results—at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The photographic evidence has since sparked questions about Alito’s impartiality on the nation’s highest court—but none of that seemed to bother McConnell, who appeared to suggest Tuesday that examining the court’s ethics was an unnecessary “attack” on the judiciary.

“It seems to me there are nonstop attacks on the Supreme Court, week after week after week, so I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” McConnell said, responding to a direct question on the issue from CNN’s Manu Raju.

“We need to leave the Supreme Court alone, protect them from people who went into their neighborhoods and tried to do them harm, look out for the Supreme Court—that’s part of the job of the administration,” McConnell added.

But that’s not the position McConnell took in the months following January 6. McConnell has privately and publicly criticized Trump for his role in the riots, including denying that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and saying that the mob was “provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

Meanwhile, other conservative leaders in the upper chamber have had no problem shutting down Alito’s symbolic declaration, including Senator Lindsey Graham, who described the flag choice as “not good judgment.”

“He said his wife was insulted and got mad—assume that to be true—but he’s still a supreme court justice,” Graham told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic on Monday. “And, you know, people have to realize that moments like that, to think it through.”