THERE’S GOLD IN THEM HILLS

Alito Weighed Environmental Cases While Wife Struck Oil Deal: Report

The Supreme Court justice, whose family allegedly entered into a potentially lucrative oil and gas agreement, has helped to gut environmental protections over the years.

Last year, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife of nearly four decades, leased a 160-acre plot in Oklahoma to an energy company, which promised her 3/16ths of all profits it gleaned from mining the land for oil and gas. Meanwhile, according to a new report from The Intercept, Alito has continued to weigh in on environmental cases brought before the high court—despite a history of recusing himself from matters that might pose a conflict of interest to his personal investments. Though the energy company in question, Citizen Energy III, has never been directly involved in a Supreme Court case, Jeff Hauser, the founder of a watchdog group that looks at executive branch appointees, told The Intercept, “There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth.” A spokesperson for Alito did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, and no ill-advised rebuttal in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal had been published by the justice as of Monday evening.