Alito spoke with Trump shortly before Supreme Court filing

WASHINGTON – Justice Samuel Alito spoke with President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday, not long before Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to delay his sentencing following his conviction in New York in a case arising from hush money payments.

“William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position,” Alito said in a statement Wednesday. “I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon.”

Justices often serve as references for their law clerks, but the prospective employers are seldom certain to have business before the court.

Alito said he had not talked about the hush money case or any other legal proceeding with Trump.

“We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today, and indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed,” the justice said. “We also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the president-elect.”

Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, an advocacy group that seeks more openness at the Supreme Court, said the call was unseemly.

“No one is questioning Levi’s credentials, which are as good as can be,” Roth said. “The call was merely an excuse for Trump to speak with one of the nine people determining the fate of his hush money sentencing in the coming days and who will review many more Trump-related issues over the next four years.”

The call was reported earlier by ABC News.

In his emergency application, Trump’s lawyers urged the justices to halt the sentencing, which is scheduled for Friday, 10 days before the presidential inauguration. The filing came after a New York appeals court rejected the same request Tuesday and sharply questioned the validity of his effort to stave off the sentencing.

“This court should enter an immediate stay of further proceedings in the New York trial court,” the application said, “to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government.”

The Supreme Court asked prosecutors to respond to the application by Thursday morning and may act on the request later that day.

Alito has been the subject of controversies in recent years. In 2023, ProPublica reported that he had failed to disclose a private jet flight paid for by a conservative billionaire who later had cases before the court. In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, the justice wrote that he was not obligated to disclose the trip.

In 2024, The New York Times reported on an upside-down American flag flown outside the justice’s residence in the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and on an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, carried by Jan. 6 rioters and a symbol for a more Christian-minded government, on display at the justice’s beach house in the summer of 2023.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.