Are You Serious?! Samuel Alito Flew Yet Another January 6 Flag

It turns out that the upside-down flag flown at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s Virginia home after the January 6 insurrection wasn’t the only time one of his properties nodded to the election denialism of Donald Trump’s supporters.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag flew last summer at Alito’s vacation home in New Jersey, according to The New York Times. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it originated as a symbol of the American Revolution but became a symbol of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement—including one carried by rioters at the Capitol building.

Several photos acquired by the Times showed the flag hanging outside of Alito’s residence on Long Beach Island on four separate dates between July and September 2023.

The revelations cast further doubt on Alito’s excuse for flying an upside-down American flag at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, on January 17, 2021: He blamed his wife, telling Fox News that she had hung it upside down “for a short time” after an anti-Trump neighbor hurled insults at her.

Democrats have since called for Alito to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election, and introduced a resolution Tuesday to censure the “shameless” justice for what they call “beyond poor judgment,” arguing that Alito had violated the court’s ethics and invited questions about the court’s impartiality.

A white supremacist candidate will remain on the Missouri GOP’s ballot for governor, according to a state judge who rejected a lawsuit brought by the Missouri Republican Party.

The state GOP had attempted to boot Darrell Leon McClanahan III from the August election after photos resurfaced in February of McClanahan giving a Nazi salute while posing with a hooded Ku Klux Klan member. But the action was too little too late to keep his name from appearing on the ballot beside the likes of Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe, and state Senator Bill Eigel. Instead, it will be up to Republican voters in Missouri to decide if they want a “pro-White” candidate leading the “Show-Me” state.

“The Plaintiff did not present to the Court any evidence that having McClanahan on a primary election ballot would cause it any injury,” wrote circuit court Judge Cotton Walker in his ruling Friday. “McClanahan’s presence on the primary election ballot is not necessarily an endorsement of the candidate by the party.”

Still, McClanahan’s blatantly racist views weren’t exactly a secret before he filed to run—nor was it the Missouri GOP’s first time accepting filing fees and candidacy paperwork from him in a local election. The known white supremacist had a failed run for U.S. Senate in 2022, when he placed fifteenth in a group of 21 candidates, pulling more than 1,100 votes.

McClanahan has not rejected his ties to white supremacist groups but has instead tried to downplay them, saying he is just an “honorary” member rather than a formal member of the Knight’s Party Ku Klux Klan. He identifies with the racist religious sect Christian Identity and has attended several events hosted by the Arkansas-based Christian Identity Klan, including a cross burning, which he attempted to brush off by describing the event as “religious Christian Identity Cross lighting ceremony.”

McClanahan also attended the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest—an experience that he wrote positively about for the Knights Party’s newsletter, The Torch, cataloging his descent into far-right, race-based radicalization.

McClanahan’s attorney, Dave Roland, celebrated the outcome, telling the Columbia Missourian that the ruling will keep party leaders from having “almost unlimited discretion to choose who’s going to be allowed on a primary ballot.”

“I’m not sure they ever actually intended to win this case,” Roland told the publication. “I think the case got filed because the Republican Party wanted to make a very big public show that they don’t want to be associated with racism or antisemitism. And the best way that they could do that was filing a case that they knew was almost certain to lose.”

Judge Aileen Cannon held an unusual hearing on Wednesday to consider arguments to throw charges against one of Donald Trump’s co-defendants, his former valet Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. But it didn’t take much for proceedings to quickly devolve into a shouting match.

Nauta’s concerns were overshadowed in the Ft. Pierce, Florida, courtroom by a disagreement between his lawyer, Stanley Woodward, and prosecutor Jay Bratt. Woodward claimed that Bratt pressured Nauta to cooperate with the prosecution by threatening to hold up Woodward’s nomination to a judgeship. Nauta argued that his lack of cooperation with the Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was the reason he was charged.

“I had been recommended for a judgeship, that’s beyond dispute,” said Woodward. “There was a folder about defense counsel on the table” during Nauta’s meeting with Bratt, he said, adding that Bratt directly referenced the judicial nomination.

“I think the implication was that I was to travel and convince Mr. Nauta to cooperate with the investigation, and if I didn’t [do] that, there would be consequences,” Woodward added.

Prosecutor David Harbach didn’t take kindly to this account and accusation.

“Mr Woodward’s story of what happened at that meeting is a fantasy,” Harbach said, banging the lectern. “It did not happen.”

“This is a lawyer whose allegations amount basically to him being extorted,” Harbach added, waving his arms before Cannon told him to calm down.

Cannon asked the prosecutor why there wasn’t any evidence gathered of the 2022 conversation, saying, “Why do those comments [about Woodward] have to be made?”

“That is not true, and I didn’t say that,” Harbach shouted, saying that there wasn’t a recording of the conversation between Bratt and Woodward, but that special counsel Jack Smith’s team preserved records of the meeting.

In response, Woodward ran back up to the lectern, saying  “I’m here” and offering to testify under oath about his recollection of the meeting.

This hearing was the first in-person proceeding in the Republican presidential nominee’s classified documents case in over a month. On May 7, Cannon announced that the case would be indefinitely delayed to unresolved pretrial motions, fueling ongoing accusations that the judge, a Trump appointee, is deliberately slowing down the case so that it won’t hurt Trump’s election prospects. 

But, new evidence has come to light in recently unsealed documents showing that Trump hoarded classified documents even after the 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago. Moreover, after the federal government subpoenaed security footage from his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president ordered his staffers to avoid security cameras when moving boxes around. Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to illegally retaining national security documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Joe Biden may not appear on the Ohio ballot in November, according to a letter sent from Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose warning the state’s Democratic Party of the electoral quagmire. LaRose notes Ohio state law requires presidential nominations be confirmed 90 days before the general election—and the DNC, where Biden would be officially nominated, falls two weeks later.

“As it stands today, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee will not be on the Ohio ballot,” LaRose said when releasing his letter to the Ohio Democratic Party on Tuesday. “That is not my choice. It’s due to a conflict in the law created by the party, and the party has so far offered no legally acceptable remedy.”

While Biden’s campaign previously said they were “monitoring the situation” the last time this hiccup was presented to them, LaRose’s warning doesn’t bode well.  It’s up to the GOP-controlled state legislature to decide whether they’ll waive the deadline requirement, and there’s no indication they feel like doing that. Per Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens in comment to the Ohio Capital Journal, “There’s just not the will to do that from the legislature.”

“We’ve seen the dysfunction here in this place,” Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Democrat, told press on Tuesday. “I think at this point, you’re probably going to see either, you know, some sort of inner party effects or perhaps court action.”

At this point in the primaries, Biden has already secured nearly double the delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination, yet continues to lag in the polls. Trump won the Buckeye State against Biden in 2020 with 53.3 percent and in 2016 with 51.7 percent of the vote. It’s unclear what, if anything, Biden’s campaign plans to do, but one thing’s clear: The DNC should fire their event scheduler.

On Wednesday, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern was banned from speaking the rest of the day after a surreal fight where Republicans lost it over his mention of Trump’s many criminal charges and legal issues.

McGovern pointed out that a Republican had called Trump’s hush-money trial “a sham trial” without any reproach from the chair at the time.

But as McGovern was stating the president’s various charges in full, Republican Representative Erin Houchin interrupted him and moved to have his words stricken from the congressional record for “engaging in personalities.”

Later, McGovern posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he was banned from speaking on the House floor for the rest of the day merely because he stated Trump’s charges, even though other representatives have called the trial a sham on previous occasions.

It’s the latest example of the Republican-controlled House taking action against Democrats for the same words and actions that they allow from their own party. Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked the appearance of Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett and refused to apologize, drawing a sharp retort from Crockett that quickly became a meme and a trademark.

If Republicans are going to prohibit mentioning the Republican presidential nominee’s criminal charges, it makes little sense. Trump became a private citizen when Joe Biden was sworn in as president, and they could conceivably extend this excessive privilege to any private citizen they want, arbitrarily. If mentioning his charges is so offensive, they should save their energy, because while Trump’s hush-money trial is nearing its closing stages, his classified documents trial, his election interference trial in Georgia, and his election interference trial in Washington, D.C. are all still ongoing.