Former Alito Law Clerk ‘Aghast’ After Seeing Jan. 6 Flag Outside His Home, Calls For Recusal

A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.

Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.

“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”

“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”

Alito has sparked fierce criticism from Democrats after The New York Times first reported an upside-down American flag affiliated with the “Stop the Steal” movement was displayed outside his home in Alexandria, Virginia, shortly after the Capitol attack. The justice has since said the flag was hung by his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, during a dispute with neighbors.

The Times published another report a week later after discovering a second flag affiliated with insurrectionists was flown outside the Alito’s beach house in New Jersey in mid-2023. That symbol, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, is affiliated with the Christian nationalist movement and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

The twin reports prompted many Democrats