A symbol of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, which culminated in his January 6, 2021 rally and the insurrection that followed, was flown over the home of Justice Samuel Alito just days before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, and as the U.S. Supreme Court was reviewing a 2020 election case. Now, calls are mounting for Justice Alito’s ouster.

The “Stop the Steal” movement, created in 2016 by far-right activist Roger Stone, was put into action by Trump acolytes during the 2020 election cycle. It is based on the “Big Lie,” promoted by Donald Trump and the majority of his followers, the false claim that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election, that it was “stolen.”

A symbol of “Stop the Steal” is an upside down American flag, which is technically used only “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” Trump’s MAGA followers co-opted the symbol, and it was widely seen during the violence of the January 6 insurrection.

It was also, as The New York Times reported in its bombshell story Thursday night, flown at “the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.”

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A critical element of The Times’ report is the timing of Alito’s “Stop the Steal” flag.

“While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision,” the Times reported.

“In coming weeks,” The Times noted, “the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.”

Justice Alito is taking no responsibility for the flag at his house.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito told The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, who did not write the Alito article, commented: “Crucially, Alito doesn’t deny the flag was flying upside down, doesn’t deny its meaning, doesn’t express any disapproval for it and doesn’t disavow it.”

The Times also reports there are ethics and impartiality issues surrounding the use of the Stop the Steal flag.

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“Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.”

Legal and political experts, not to mention many ordinary Americans, are expressing great concern, with some even calling for Alito’s ouster, and some even using the word “impeachment.”

U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), responding to the news, blasted both Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas.

“A judge is supposed to act in a way that enables all parties and lawyers appearing before the Court to believe they will be treated fairly,” Sen. Kaine wrote. “Alito and Thomas have brazenly destroyed this bedrock principle.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and a scholar of authoritarians and fascism, also pointed to both for Alito and Thomas, and called for their ouster.

“Clean up the Court,” she urged. “Thomas and Alito must go. They are far-right activists masquerading as impartial justices, that is why so many anti-democratic forces (Federalist, billionaires) have invested in them.”

Political scientist Norman Ornstein, the highly-respected emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic, responded to the Alito scandal.

“Sam Alito is a partisan insurrectionist. He has no business being on the Supreme Court,” he wrote Thursday night.

“It is time for a House member to introduce an impeachment resolution against Sam Alito,” Ornstein added an hour later. “He has openly and blatantly violated every standard we expect for any judge, not to mention the Supreme Court. And time for Dick Durbin to suck it up and hold hearings on this abuse of power,” he said, referring to the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Richard Painter, a professor of law and a former chief White House ethics lawyer, cut to the chase, posting the U.S. Code requiring recusal:

” ‘Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.’
28 USC Section 455″

“Justice Alito should be impeached and removed!!” declared SiriusXM host and attorney Dean Obeidallah. “If a liberal justice flew a flag in support of coup attempt waged by a Democratic President, the House GOP would immediately impeach him! We need Senate Dems to hold hearings!”

Veteran journalist John Harwood, responding to the Alito article, remarked, “bitter fanatic on the court.”

Laurence Tribe, University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, a constitutional law scholar who has argues three dozen times before the Supreme Court, commented: “More telling — and disqualifying — than the sheer antidemocratic sentiment this ‘Stop the Steal’ flag displayed is the hair-splitting sophistry of Justice Alito’s pathetic effort to shift blame from himself to his wife or someone else in his household.”

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a conservative until 2020, also blasted Justice Alito. Watch the video of her remarks below or at this link.

.@JRubinBlogger on the “Stop the Steal” flag waving at Justice Alito’s house, “I was gobsmacked…. This is an overt symbol of identification with the MAGA forces. For him to allow this … is simply an outrageous violation of ethics … The court needs to be radically reformed.” pic.twitter.com/pqgCe4y5Nx

— Washington Post Live (@PostLive) May 17, 2024

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Well-known conservative journalist Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to two Republican Senators, is warning of the “raw display of political power” Donald Trump is using to attack the court during his trial.

During the early days of the Trump New York criminal trial many noted the ex-president was alone. He was sitting, and at times, snoozing, alone in court, unsupported by family members or friends.

Multiple reports had described Trump as “glowering.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid commented “how alone Donald Trump looked,” with “no family there, no supporters there.”

“He looked smaller,” she observed.

Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, had told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that “more than anything else,” what’s important is “the extent to which he’s had no control over the situation.” She explained “he needs control in order to project the image that he’s been able to project for so long. Without that control it all falls apart.”

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“I mean, we know that Donald is a very weak person, or at least some of us know that, and that his ego is a very fragile thing that needs to be bolstered in every moment. He needs the rallies. He needs the applause in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago because he knows deep down he’s nothing of what he claims to be,” she added.

Trump spent days first urging his supporters to rally on the courthouse steps, then to protest at courthouses across the county and “rally behind MAGA,” he demanded.

When they didn’t, he falsely claimed they were being blocked in New York by law enforcement. He described the Criminal Courts Building as locked up like “Fort Knox.”

“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! ” Trump wrote falsely, with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins quickly disputing his claim.

The optics have changed.

Trump had “complained that ‘no one is defending me,'” NBC News reported on May 1. “He grumbled outside the courtroom that there were no protesters supporting him outside.”

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Then his son, Eric Trump, showed up, along with “his strategist and de facto campaign chief Susie Wiles and longtime adviser Dan Scavino. Trump’s legal strategist Boris Epshteyn was by his side two days last week. And Natalie Harp, a communications aide, has been present.”

Now, top Republican lawmakers are taking turns showing up in court to demonstrate party loyalty, becoming de-facto surrogates.

A Fox News “BREAKING NEWS” alert late Monday morning read: “Watch Live: GOP Senators, other trump defenders speak outside the NY v Trump trial.”

Indeed, Republican Senators and Trump allies are now flocking to the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building.

Last week, U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) and Fox News host Jeanine Pirro were at the courthouse during Stormy Daniels testimony.

Rick Scott (R-Fla) and Jeanine Pirro (R-Fox) at the courthouse today = extra emotional support for Trump while Stormy Daniels is testifying? pic.twitter.com/KR5PfAcWgl

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 9, 2024

On Monday, U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and JD Vance (R-OH) were in the courthouse, standing next to Eric Trump behind the ex-president during his mid-day news conference.

Trump this morning has printed out a new New York Times poll showing him ahead in swing states and also some Fox News columns for good measure. note that JD Vance and Tuberville are behind him pic.twitter.com/xSreViCWk0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 13, 2024

Tuberville, a far-right conspiracy theorist and white nationalist, also held a separate press conference outside the courthouse Monday, decrying the “depressing” courtroom, claiming Trump is being forced to experience “mental anguish,” attacking District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and promoting a false, anti-immigrant narrative suggesting perhaps the jurors aren’t American citizens.

Tuberville: The Republican candidate for President is going through mental anguish in a courtroom that’s very depressing. Very depressing! pic.twitter.com/HHmrYpuJwS

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2024

Tuberville: I am disappointed in looking at the American citizens— the supposedly American citizens in that courtroom pic.twitter.com/14cNFyjzqx

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2024

“We discussed what I predicted would be a growing trend of GOP officials, including VP hopefuls, appearing courtside,” Carpenter wrote Monday morning.

“Trump is under order a gag order,” she noted. “If he directs anyone to make statements that his [sic] prohibited from making that is a direct violation of the gag order and the judge must be monitoring these surrogate statements.”

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She adds, “previous surrogates have not opted to defend Trump on the merits. They [are] following the Trump playbook of attacking family members of the court, which Trump’s former lawyer Ty Cobb described as a ‘strategic’ act of intimidation, ‘designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.’ That’s a real threat afoot here,” she observes.

“It’s really worth reflecting on that,” Carpenter stresses. “Republican officials are scurrying up to NYC to launch awful, slimy attacks on the court.”

She warns, “assembling members of the GOP to defend Trump courtside is a raw display of political power. And again, this has to be emphasized, they are not defending Trump on the merits. They are attacking the court.”

“Trump has successfully co-opted the GOP to shield himself from political accountability and now he is using the GOP to shield himself from criminal accountability. That’s the difference between 2016/2020 and 2024. This is a very grave danger.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he has a “duty” and “responsibility” to contest the results of the presidential election if there is a question about the process complying with the U.S. Constitution and vowed to do so again this year as he did in 2020, if the same “circumstances were presented.” The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the 2020 case with Johnson’s claims, and his argument was dismissed by a constitutional expert as being on “the far-right fringes of American legal thought.”

Johnson joined an increasing number of top GOP lawmakers this past week who were asked if they will accept the results of the 2024 election, especially if the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, loses. Up until the 2020 election amid Donald Trump’s interference, the United States had enjoyed the regular, peaceful transfer of power for more than 200 years.

Before being elevated to Speaker, Johnson was a little known Louisiana Republican back-bencher who happened to be the “congressional architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, advocating an interpretation of the Constitution so outlandish that not even the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority could swallow it,” according to Michael Waldman, a constitutional attorney and president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

That effort came in the form of an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, signed by 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives, including Johnson.

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“Johnson was the legal mastermind behind the doomed push to decertify the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” Waldman wrote in October of 2023 after Johnson became Speaker of the House. “He pressured colleagues to sign on to his effort, warning them ominously that Trump would be ‘anxiously awaiting the final list to review.'”

In a lengthy interview with Politico published Friday, Johnson was asked if he had any “regrets” about his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won.

“No, I don’t,” Johnson told Politico. “My point in the amicus brief — people often ask me about this and they never read the brief — was a very simple and very profoundly important legal question. And that is, was the plain language of the Constitution violated in the days that led up to the 2020 election? And it very clearly was, because the language of the Constitution says plainly the state legislatures are the bodies in each of the states that determine the process by which electors are chosen. In a presidential election year, it’s a critically important thing.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, Waldman notes, refused to hear the case. He wrote that Johnson’s legal argument is “an obscure idea on the far-right fringes of American legal thought. Many of you now know the name — the ‘independent state legislature theory.’ Johnson argued that state legislators are the sole state-level decision-makers in federal elections, and that no one else can exercise any form of discretion, oversight, or agency to administer an election. It’s a baseless, ahistorical, dangerous, and completely bonkers reading of the Constitution.”

Johnson claims that only state legislatures have control over the specifics of elections management. But in most states the Secretary of State is – by law – responsible for the elections and how they are managed.

Johnson doubled down in his claims, suggested that the Supreme Court shirked its responsibility, and even suggested they did so because the real answer was too “profound” and “unsettling” for the nation to grapple with.

“Now remember my background as a constitutional law attorney,” declared Johnson, who frequently likes to remind reporters of his work before becoming a congressman. “For 20 years, I litigated constitutional questions in the courts. And to me, this was just such a plain and very important question to be answered. The only mechanism we had to present that to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, was to attach it along to that Texas case that was going to be before the court. That’s why the amicus brief was filed there. The Supreme Court dodged the question. Perhaps they calculated that the answer was so profound, it would be so unsettling, and it was not worth them addressing, but well.”

The Speaker made clear he would do the “exact” same thing again.

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“And so you asked me if I regret that? I don’t. I would do the exact same thing today if the circumstances were presented, because I feel like I have a duty. I’m an officer of the Congress and I have a responsibility. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and if it’s plainly on its face not being followed, I have an obligation as an officer of this body to present that to the judicial branch.”

Waldman went on to write, “Johnson’s election denial isn’t mere ‘one could argue’ lawyerly guff. Johnson has ties to a movement that incorporates election denial into evangelical Christianity. Members of the movement held prayer sessions in which they asked for divine intervention to reverse the 2020 result.”

“Mild-mannered Mike Johnson is a no-holds-barred, hold-on-to-power-at-all-costs election denier,” Waldman concluded. “How could this matter in 2024? It seems clear the election deniers won’t wait until the actual election this time. Their bid to subvert the results will start well before ballots are cast and counted. Johnson may preside over key proceedings.”

Indeed, as Newsweek reported Friday, former Trump “fixer,” attorney Michael Cohen, is warning of a Republican “plot” to “steal the election.”

“Their plot to steal the election if they don’t win has already been set in motion,” Cohen warned on his podcast. “Open your eyes. It’s already being set in motion.”

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