Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

Collins: What we are learning is that President-Elect Trump did speak with Justice Alito in recent days. What makes all of this so unusual is that call came one day before Trump's legal team filed that emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to try to delay his sentencing.. pic.twitter.com/eWlxVrQ9sd

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 8, 2025

ABCNews:

"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," Alito 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."

There is no record of this conversation, but we can trust Justice Alito, right?

 It is not unusual for a sitting justice to offer a job recommendation for a former clerk, but it is rare, court analysts said, for a justice to have such a conversation directly with a sitting president or president-elect, especially one with an active stake in business pending before the court.

There you go again, raising the appearance of a conflict. Don’t you know that doesn’t apply to the Supremes?

And Troy Gonzales inadvertently explains the concept of “appearance of conflict”:

“I mean, I don't think so,” he told Blitzer. “I mean, who knows what the conversation they had, but I doubt it was on something like that. There's so many things, so many important issues that need to be discussed and I’m certain, you know, there’s a lot of that so I wouldn’t necessarily say that.”

Which also doesn’t apply to the Supremes.

Steve Vladeck:

In a year-end report ostensibly devoted to identifying “threats to judicial independence,” Chief Justice Roberts missed perhaps the biggest one—the erosion of public faith in the courts in general, and #SCOTUS, in particular.

WHAT? How did THAT happen?!?

Nope. Still don’t understand how this sad state of affairs came about.