Progressive activist Lauren Windsor dropped a clip of her secretly-recorded Sam Alito on Monday in which he shared his opinion that he can't compromise with the political left.
Speaking to Ryan Grim on The Intercept podcast "Deconstructed," Windsor revealed how careful she was in crafting the questions she intended to ask to ensure she could garner a genuine response.
Windsor runs The Undercurrent, a project under American Family Voices, on which she gets several officials into confessing their true thoughts.
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She posed as a Christian conservative at the Historical Society's annual dinner, and secretly recorded a conversation with Alito in which he said it was impossible for him to compromise with the American left.
"Just for greater context and the framing of this: asking questions of judges, these are the most discreet people in public life," Windsor told Grim. "There's a huge amount of secrecy around the Supreme Court decisions around justices. I've talked to lower-level judges before, and, you know, bringing up the issue of abortion, and [I] get shut down immediately."
She explained that it was a long process to figure out how to ask the right question that would "trigger him."
"But it's obvious that he's been aggrieved for some time," she explained. "It's obvious that he believes very strongly in his Catholic faith. And I think that framing the conversation in terms of morality and religion was an easier pathway than framing it in partisan terms. Because if I brought up Trump, for instance, I feel like he would have shut down pretty quickly. If I had said ‘Democrat or Republican, ’ I think he would have shut down pretty quickly."
When asking Alito's question, Windsor specifically mentioned "the Left," which she called a deliberate decision.
"And when he said that ‘one side was going to win,’ I was like ‘gotcha!’" she continued. "This is exactly where I wanted him to go, and you never know where someone's going to go beforehand, right? I can only go and have a conversation with someone. I can't put words in their mouth."
Her goal, she described, was "to expose true intent" in a world where Supreme Court justices have ignored requests by the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about .
"And given that none of the justices will go to Congress, will, you know, make their views more publicly known, I feel that it's of intense public interest to find out whether their decisions are guided by personal religious convictions that really have no place in our public life," she said.
Windsor has an upcoming documentary called "Gonzo for Democracy" that will be released this fall.
