U.S. News

Alito Weighed Environmental Cases While Wife Struck Oil Deal: Report

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM HILLS

The Supreme Court justice, whose family allegedly entered into a potentially lucrative oil and gas agreement, has helped to gut environmental protections over the years.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Last year, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife of nearly four decades, leased a 160-acre plot in Oklahoma to an energy company, which promised her 3/16ths of all profits it gleaned from mining the land for oil and gas. Meanwhile, according to a new report from The Intercept, Alito has continued to weigh in on environmental cases brought before the high court—despite a history of recusing himself from matters that might pose a conflict of interest to his personal investments. Though the energy company in question, Citizen Energy III, has never been directly involved in a Supreme Court case, Jeff Hauser, the founder of a watchdog group that looks at executive branch appointees, told The Intercept, “There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth.” A spokesperson for Alito did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, and no ill-advised rebuttal in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal had been published by the justice as of Monday evening.

Read it at The Intercept