Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist ponders the legacy media’s latest attack on a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Left-wing media breathlessly reported Wednesday that Associate Justice Samuel Alito provided a job reference on behalf of one of his former clerks to President-elect Donald Trump.
“William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position. I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon,” Alito told ABC News, which broke the shocking news that an employer gave a job reference for one of his former employees.
CNN, Politico, CBS News, Rolling Stone, Associated Press, New York Times, NBC News, and a host of other left-wing media outlets amplified the report about Levi’s efforts to secure a job as the Defense Department’s general counsel and suggested it was part of an elaborate conspiracy to change the outcome of a looming case. Levi clerked for Justice Alito in the 2011-2012 term and was former Attorney General Bill Barr’s chief of staff.
Federal judges and Supreme Court justices provide references for former clerks regularly, in the same way that other employers provide references for former employees regularly. Ethics guidelines for federal judges acknowledge this reality and mention how to handle such scenarios in the Published Ethics Advisory Opinions.
These guidelines say judges providing job references should not initiate contact with Congress or the White House, and should not respond to media requests in support or opposition of a nominee, but “there would be no impropriety in a judge answering an inquiry from a screening committee or appointing authority with respect to the judge’s knowledge concerning the qualifications and other relevant factors of a nominee for appointment to any public office.”
You would not know that judicial ethics codes approve of job references if all you read was Adam Liptak’s conspiratorial essay for The New York Times.
