Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ troubled Washington Post decided to pass on a damning story about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and an upside-down American flag three years ago, RadarOnline.com has learned.
In a sudden development to come more than three years after an “improper” American flag was seen waving outside Justice Alito and his wife’s Fairfax County, Virginia home in January 2021, it was revealed that the Washington Post almost reported on the incident at the time.
The troubled outlet held off on their reporting until this weekend when the New York Times published a similar story regarding the upside-down American flag controversy.
According to the Post, then-Supreme Court reporter Bob Barnes visited Justice Alito’s home on January 20, 2021 – the same day as President Joe Biden’s inauguration – to inquire about the upside-down flag waving outside the Alito couple’s home.
Barnes reportedly “encountered the couple coming out of the house” and ultimately held a front-yard interview with Justice Alito about the matter.
Justice Alito explained that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, raised the upside-down flag as an “international signal of distress” after neighbors placed yard signs about the couple throughout the neighborhood.
“The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest,” the Post reported on Sunday, “saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.”
The Post also explained why the outlet chose not to report the story back in January 2021 and only released the piece after the New York Times published its own story over the weekend.
"The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors,” a spokesperson explained.
“It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics,” they added.
Cameron Barr, who served as then-senior managing editor for the Post at the time of the flag incident, also told Semafor's Ben Smith that he took full responsibility for the decision not to publish the story more than three years ago.
"I agreed with Bob Barnes and others that we should not do a single-slice story about the flag, because it seemed like the story was about Martha-Ann Alito and not her husband," Barr admitted this week.
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"In retrospect, I should have pushed harder for that story,” he also acknowledged.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Justice Alito faced significant backlash after it was revealed that an upside-down American flag was hung outside his home back in January 2021.
The incident was especially concerning because the upside-down flag was raised just days after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Several pro-Donald Trump insurrectionists used the upside-down American flag as a symbol of their Stop the Steal movement at the time.
Justice Alito later dismissed the controversy and insisted that he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” in a statement to the New York Times.
The Supreme Court justice also repeated that his wife had "briefly placed" the upside-down flag on the flagpole "in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Nonetheless, the incident created serious ethics questions. It was also revealed that the Alito couple once flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside their vacation home in New Jersey last summer.
The “Appeal to Heaven” banner has since come to symbolize sympathies with the Christian nationalist movement, as well as the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
