Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was caught on tape by undercover Rolling Stone reportter Lauren Windsor, while she posed as a conservative activist, saying that it's "difficult" for him to "live together peacefully" with his political enemies — an overtly ideological statement that has added fresh outrage on top of recent reporting that the property owned by the justice displayed explicitly pro-Trump symbols at a moment he was considering whether to take a case challenging the legitimacy of Trump's 2020 loss in Pennsylvania.
What made Alito's remarks here all the more striking, Windsor told MSNBC's Joy Reid on Monday, is that just one year ago she also struck up the same kind of undercover conversation with the justice — and on that occasion, he was much more guarded with his response.
"Were you surprised at how candid he was about saying 'one side or the other is going to win, it's not like we can split the difference?'" asked Reid. "He's essentially saying he's agreeing, yes, we need to win this culture war."
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"Yes, of course," said Windsor.
"When the first interaction happened, I was like, okay, well, it's very hard to get a judge, a justice, even lower-level judges to talk about politics, anything that might imply politics to give any sort of hint or signal as to what their own opinions may be," Windsor continued. "And so after that first interaction, I didn't publish it because it wasn't very newsworthy. Interesting but not newsworthy. But I felt like in the course of the last year, because that was before the spotlight was on him with ProPublica, I felt that grievance was more piqued over the past year with his own experience. I wanted to see if he had a different reaction."
Windsor was referring to reporting last year that Alito took a luxury fishing trip in Alaska with a billionaire who had business before the Court.
Watch the video below or at the link here.
Lauren Windsor discusses undercover Alito tapes www.youtube.com
