Alito’s Pathetic Flag Defense Crumbles with New Revelations

Conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s goofy excuse for flying an inverted U.S. flag outside his Virginia home—that his wife did it because she was upset about a neighbor’s sign—has deteriorated more swiftly than civil rights under the high court.

In an interview with The New York Times, Alito neighbor Emily Baden detailed a series of disputes she had with Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, roundly debunking every part of the Alitos’ fascist flag-loving story. Baden also revealed that Alito’s wife is a bit of a nightmare neighbor—yelling incoherently at her, spitting toward her vehicle, accosting her, and sending a coded Christmas card to the family home.

According to receipts provided to the Times, the core dispute that Alito claims instigated his wife’s decision to fly an inverted flag outside their home actually occurred nearly a month after the flag was spotted outside their home.

On February 15, 2021, Baden’s then boyfriend called the police over harassment they were experiencing from Martha-Ann Alito, telling Fairfax County police, “Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop.”

According to an interview Samuel Alito gave to a sympathetic Fox News face, the Alitos were inexplicably harassed by a male neighbor, who placed a sign outside directly accusing Martha-Ann Alito of inciting the January 6 Capitol riot. But as Baden tells it, Martha-Ann Alito regularly harassed her and her partner, including glaring creepily from her car at their home the day after the Capitol riot, where they had placed signs declaring, “Trump is a fascist” and broadly criticizing Republicans who refused to condemn the riot with a sign that read, “You are complicit.”

Alito, via Fox News, also claimed a man hurled a vulgarity at his innocent wife. In reality, as confirmed by both Baden and a neighbor who witnessed the dispute, Baden is the one who shouted at Martha-Ann after she criticized a “Fuck Trump” sign placed in their yard. Baden responded along the lines of, “How dare you behave this way. You’ve been harassing us—over signs. You represent the highest court in the land. Shame on you,” according to the Times.

In a statement to the Times, Alito claimed the flag was placed “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” Baden, however, says she never saw the inverted flag, and it’s not viewable from her mother’s home.

Baden further detailed instances of Martha-Ann lingering outside their home, glaring at them for their yard signs the day after the Capitol riot. Last Christmas, Baden’s mother, Barbara, received a Christmas card from the Alitos that included a handwritten note reading, “May you have PEACE.”

None of the Alitos’ thin story explains why they also flew a Christian nationalist flag outside their vacation home in New Jersey in 2023.

Donald Trump is looking increasingly nervous as his hush-money trial comes to a close.

The former president took to Truth Social late Tuesday to torch not only the judge who oversaw the case but also his own attorneys, who he seemed to suggest did not offer him the legal defense he wanted.

“THE GREATEST CASE I’VE EVER SEEN FOR RELIANCE ON COUNSEL, AND JUDGE MERCHAN WILL NOT, FOR WHATEVER REASON, LET ME USE THAT AS A DEFENSE IN THIS RIGGED TRIAL. ANOTHER TERM, ADVICE OF COUNSEL DEFENSE!” Trump wrote.

An advice of counsel defense negates the element of criminal fraud when the advice stems from “reasonable reliance” on the advice of a person’s legal counsel. Openly lambasting his own defense suggests there’s a bit more panic going on behind the scenes than Trump’s letting on—but it’s not as if his defense strategy should have come as a surprise to him.

Trump’s legal team indicated in March that they would not invoke an advice-of-counsel defense. Instead, they wanted to include evidence that centered around the lawyers in Trump’s decision to dole out hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels—a strategy that Judge Juan Merchan described as a “presence of counsel” defense and that he ultimately deemed would be too confusing for the jury to navigate.

But Trump’s meltdown persisted well into Wednesday morning. In separate posts, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee lambasted his former fixer Michael Cohen, misinterpreted closing arguments in the courtroom as a “5 HOUR FILIBUSTER” put on by the “SOROS BACKED D.A.’s OFFICE,” and mocked Robert De Niro as a small man whose artistry had gone “WAY DOWN IN VALUE,” after the actor paid a visit outside of the New York courthouse hosting Trump’s trial.

But before long, Trump was back to fixating on the legal defense that could have been.

“KANGAROO COURT! A CORRUPT AND CONFLICTED JUDGE. RELIANCE ON COUNSEL (ADVISE OF COUNSEL) NOT ALLOWED BY MERCHAN, A FIRST. HIS RULINGS, ON A CASE THAT SHOULD, ACCORDING TO ALL LEGAL SCHOLARS AND EXPERTS, NEVER HAVE BEEN BROUGHT, HAVE MADE THIS A BIDEN PUSHED WITCH HUNT. THERE WAS NO CRIME, EXCEPT FOR THE BUM THAT GOT CAUGHT STEALING FROM ME! IN GOD WE TRUST!”

“THE D.A.’s OFFICE WAS ALLOWED TO GO ON WITH 5 HOURS OF BULL.…  YESTERDAY” Trump wrote, adding in another post, “DEFENSE OF COUNSEL DEFENSE!”

At his hush-money trial on Tuesday, Donald Trump kept some crib notes around to help him remember some key points.

Those key points included, “This case should be dismissed by the judge but it’s totally corrupt,” written in Trump’s favorite black marker on a yellow sticky note. When news photographers were briefly allowed into the courtroom before proceedings started Tuesday, one of them snapped a picture of the note.

It’s not the first time he’s carried notes during an important event. According to the Associated Press, he carried a handwritten note that said, “I want no quid pro quo” when he spoke outside of his first impeachment hearing. In 2019 at the White House, he carried notes reading, “They want to impeach over acts that they did,” and “I’m going to keep working for the American people,” while speaking about infrastructure.

But why would he need a reminder of his own opinion? It seems Trump might have wanted the public and reporters to see the note and report on it. It also gets awfully close to violating his gag order in the trial, which prohibits the former president from attacking court staff, jurors, the prosecution, witnesses, and their families. He’s already been fined $10,000 for 10 violations and has been warned by Judge Juan Merchan that he could go to jail if does it again.

Or is it cognitive decline? Just last week, Trump was bragging at his Bronx rally about successfully putting on his pants and, less than two weeks ago, seemed to freeze while giving a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.

In any case, Trump may not have to spend much time in the “icebox” Manhattan courtroom for much longer, as closing arguments are winding down in his trial over payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election. He faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime, and has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

Judge Aileen Cannon may have slapped down a request to gag Donald Trump, but her indefinite delays on the trial could very likely put a deadline on her own involvement in the case entirely.

On Tuesday, Cannon rejected special counsel Jack Smith’s gag order request in Trump’s classified documents trial on the basis that the filing wasn’t polite enough, telling the federal prosecutor that he did not offer Trump’s legal team enough time to discuss (and ultimately reject) the request. But time is of the essence in Trump’s criminal trials—especially with a loose-lipped defendant who keeps haranguing federal agencies and a Trump-appointed judge who is slow-walking the case to an early grave.

Some legal experts have predicted that it’s that exact combination that will push the trial until after November and into a possibility where Trump could potentially pardon himself, avoiding any consequences for snagging the sensitive documents. But others believe that the constant delays could lead to another alternative: Cannon’s removal from the trial.

Cannon filed her decision Tuesday without prejudice, meaning that Smith can refile his request to gag the former president. If he does, Cannon would be forced to make a definitive ruling, explained MSNBC legal analyst Jordan Rubin.

Smith could then appeal that ruling—and “possibly [build] a case to try and get a new judge to preside,” Rubin wrote.

Legal scholar Matthew Seligman agreed that a renewed motion would put Cannon’s fate squarely in her own hands.If she doesn’t approve the renewed motion—or if she sits on it indefinitely—Smith could “potentially” go to the Eleventh Circuit and ask them to step in, Seligman told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. Or if she denies it outright, there is an “overwhelming likelihood” that Smith will appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, during which he could ask for her removal.

“The obvious concern here is that Trump’s rhetoric is going to inspire violence against federal law enforcement officers, and this is something that can’t wait,” Seligman said, noting that the threat isn’t “purely hypothetical.”

In April, a former Navy submarine technician from North Carolina, Ervin Lee Bolling, rammed his SUV into the FBI’s Atlanta headquarters. His social media history revealed him to be an individual enmeshed in QAnon conspiracy theories—a political conspiracy that paints Trump as a messiah—making posts in support of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” election interference campaign, and said that he was “looking for a good militia to join” after a federal stimulus bill passed in December 2020.

But Trump’s recent messaging could do even more damage, Seligman warned. Over the weekend, Trump accused the Biden administration of authorizing the FBI to shoot him during its search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago—a claim that was, in actuality, a wild misread of a standard policy statement regarding the agency’s use of deadly force.

The Biden administration still won’t change its policy toward Israel, despite overwhelming photo evidence of gruesome casualties in Israel’s latest attacks on Rafah in Gaza.

That was the message Tuesday from National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby at a press conference.

“The Israelis have said this is a tragic mistake,” Kirby told reporters when asked whether Israel’s attacks over the weekend qualified as the type of “death and destruction” U.S. officials have warned about.

“We’ve also said we don’t want to see a major ground operation in Rafah that would really make it hard for the Israelis to go after Hamas without causing extensive damage and potentially a large number of deaths. We have not seen that yet,” he said, claiming that Israel was operating mostly in a corridor on Rafah’s outskirts.

One reporter at the press conference, CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe, pressed Kirby after those comments.

“How does this not violate the red line the president laid out?” asked O’Keefe.

“As I said, we don’t want to see a major ground operation. We haven’t seen that at this point,” Kirby replied.

“How many more charred corpses does the president have to see before he considers a change in policy?” O’Keefe asked in response.

“We don’t want to see a single more innocent life taken,” Kirby said, before flipping out and remarking that he “kind of” took “a little offense at the question.”

The exchange was telling, as the Biden administration has previously said that any major operation in Rafah would constitute a “red line.” Events over the weekend would seem to show Israel has embarked on such an operation, with an estimated 45 Palestinians killed in a strike on Sunday and chilling images of burned corpses circulating on social media.

As Israel’s brutal war in Gaza leads to more civilian deaths, Biden runs the risk of losing the support of voters critical to his reelection campaign. His administration has sought to bury a report on Israel’s actions in Gaza and has pledged to defend Israel and its leaders in the face of a war crimes inquiry by the International Criminal Court. Increasingly, Biden’s statements attempting to reassure the American public are being undermined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war continues. The best option, which Biden has been so far unwilling to adopt, may be halting weapons shipments to Israel, but there’s no telling if or when Biden will ever reach that point.