Washington Post bombshell: Washington Post buried Alito flag story for three years

Saturday's report raises many questions, several relating to the fact that the Post, at least passively, made the decision not to reveal this news many times since 2021.

Last week, many of us learned from The New York Times that an upside-down American flag had been temporarily raised over the Alito household in the days after January 6, 2021.

Justice Sam Alito, who is a problem, blamed it on his wife and said it was a response to a dispute with neighbors, despite the complete absence of logic about why the household of a Supreme Court justice would respond to a neighborhood dispute by both disrespecting the American flag and using it in the same way as it was being used by those who supported the insurrection but were unable to storm the Capitol.

It turns out that the The Washington Post did not learn about the flag on May 16 from that Times report.

In a series of paragraphs that are up there as being among the most shocking I have read in my journalistic career, the Post acknowledged on Saturday — dropped in the middle of the holiday weekend, more than a week after the Times’s report — that they had known about the flag since at least January 20, 2021, and had not revealed knowledge of it until May 25, 2024.

First, the shocking acknowledgement was that the now-retired longtime Supreme Court reporter, Robert Barnes, had, in fact, confronted the Alitos about the flag on that day in 2021.

What happened, per the Post, is unreal:

Somehow, that inexplicably did not make it into or onto the pages of the Post until Saturday.

I am truly glad the Post’s reporters who reported this news now — Justin Jouvenal and Ann Marimow — did so. However, in doing so now they left many unanswered questions — or, rather, by reporting it now raised them. To explain them, I am going to primarily refer to other Post stories to show how bad it is that they hid this information for more than three years — until a competitor reported it.

First, the explanation given by the Post for failing to report the story in 2021 — in the days after the insurrection — is unacceptably vague and woefully inadequate for a paper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Who made that decision, and do they still have any role at the Post? And who all knew about it? (And, less important for democracy, but relevant and of interest for the media beat, why did they publish it now?)

More importantly, how was this explanation not questioned and, even if credited, not still newsworthy in that moment?

We were literally in the middle of an impeachment — not just an inauguration — when Barnes went to the Alitos’ house.

A truly remarkable — and truly disappointing — aspect of this situation, to my mind, is the fact that the Post had to have, at least passively, made the decision not to report this news many times over the past three-plus years.

It is that aspect of this that leads to my remaining questions.

Second, and perhaps most astonishing to me, why was this not reported in March 2022, when The Washington Post broke significant news about Ginni Thomas’s texts to Mark Meadows urging him to take action to overturn the election. These texts from one justice’s wife, making front-page national news in the Post, happened in the same time period as when Martha-Ann Alito — again, even crediting the justice’s claim that this was all his wife’s doing — was flying the American flag in a way supported by those who wanted the election overturned.

Was Bob Woodward informed that the Post had this Alito flag story — and had sat on it — when he published his texts story in conjunction with Robert Costa?

Worse still, why did the Post still withhold this story from the public in its day-two follow-up report from Barnes himself, along with Marimow, about the ethics of a justice’s participation in cases relating to January 6 when his wife had supported those efforts.

We know that Barnes knew; he was the one who went to their house.

Third, throughout all of 2023 — as ethics stories came out monthly about Thomas and, eventually, Alito; as Alito himself issued a statement refusing to recuse himself from a case in which some, including me here at Law Dork, had believed he should do so; and, even when the justices eventually decided to adopt a code of conduct — the Washington Post never decided the public should know this story.

Fourth, and finally, after all of that, how was this possibly not raised earlier this year in conjunction with the many stories the Post published surrounding the case over whether Colorado could block Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment — the clause that bars former officials from office if they “engage in insurrection”?

Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring Trump from that state’s primary ballot, holding both that Colorado couldn’t make the decision and also setting forth additional rules for how Section 3 can be applied. Notably, though, it was a bare five-justice majority who issued that further-reaching decision.

“In a case involving no federal action whatsoever, the Court opines on how federal enforcement of Section 3 must proceed,” the trio of Democratic appointees wrote in a portion of their opinion disagreeing with the majority. Justice Amy Coney Barrett also declined to join that section of the majority’s “per curiam” opinion.

As Alito provided an essential fifth vote hollowing out the Fourteenth Amendment’s bar to insurrectionists’ holding office, the Post sat silent.