branches. should supreme court justices be held to the same standard as any and all other public servants? the senate judiciary committee held a hearing on the ethical standards or lack thereof for supreme court justices a topic that has come up in light of new reporting on repeated failures by justices to disclose details of lavish vacations, travel, gifts, even real estate transactions, testifying on behalf of democrats, a former federal judge and group of legal experts, guests invited by republicans included a former attorney general. more notable than who testified was who did not. chief justice john roberts declined an invitation from the committee, something dick durbin brought up at the start of today s hearing. in his letter last week the chief justice sent a statement of ethics principles and practices. it was a document that was attacheded to his letter. it is an extraordinary document. not in a good way. it makes clear while the justices are fine with consulting
i wonder where you think this hearing left the public conversation around ethics for the supreme court? well, i think there was an interesting dynamic that came out of this hearing in terms of what you heard from the republicans today. somewhat predictably republicans sort of approached it as doing their able best to run interference for clarence thomas and so as some of the clips you played showed, they did their darnedest to try to portray the democrats interest in this as pure lay partisan exercise. you played the statement about john kennedy referring to this as a high-tech lynching. in the next breath some of the same senators including lindsey graham and chuck grassley, while they thought that purposes behind this hearing might be partisan, they did hope that the supreme court would take action on its own to beef up its own ethical standards. there s daylight there between those sentiments from lindsey graham and chuck grassley and the position that john roberts
the trial, this is a public interest, there s an enormous amount that public wants to know about this and would help inform the public about what was going on inside of fox in this period of time, and we believe we should be able to have access to that to try to tell that story. so that s where it is. these things, they often take more time than people think. i don t think this is the type of thing where we would see documents, you know, unredacted in the coming days. there are times and i assume in this case it will happen as well where the group who has an interest here, which would be fox, can make arguments to the judge about why this stuff should remain private. glenn, what is i was going to say the $64 million question, but it s a $787.5 million question, in the redacted material seems to be what was it that tucker carlson did, right, that was so bad that they fired
at the new york times that talked about a concerted campaign to influence or at least get close to conservative justices that was waged on behalf of conservative interest groups matching up justices with conservative donors for gathering and social events. again, the idea that the court could be captured, that the court could be bought and sold, by those who have the money and the influence to do so, defies every logic of our republic and it s not surprising that the public is intuiting something is off and wrong here. we don t know if anything corrupt has happened, but it s the appearance of the too close associations that make things difficult. even before that reporting, there is the discussion of whether ginni thomas had been texting with mark meadows during the insurrection on the capitol. it seems there s with the court of the ideological developments and political findings that seem to match up with the tilt in the
endeavor. similarly to how we reported the story last week, you know, we continue to report, to try to understand what went on around the dismissal, what went into it, and what did fox know and when did it know it, as it was settling this suit and also learning, i mean the extraordinary thing about it is that senior company executives and the board did not know about the redacted material in the messages until the sunday before the trial was supposed to start. so we re simply trying to understand like how did that happen? why was it that these executives did not know about that at such a high-profile lawsuit and such an important moment, they didn t have all the information that the or side had? you know, basil, the amazing thing about this story and why there is almost a say shun