Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote a WSJ op-ed instead of commenting for a story that revealed his ties to a billionaire who had 10 cases before SCOTUS

• A recent ProPublica report details how Alito took an expensive trip with a billionaire before reviewing cases involving him.
• ProPublica asked Alito for comment on the story, but the court's spokeswoman said he wouldn't comment.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed attacking investigative news outlet ProPublica instead of replying to a request for comment from the publication about a story regarding his ties to a billionaire who had at least 10 cases come before the Supreme Court.

The ProPublica article, which was released hours after Alito's op-ed was published in the Wall Street Journal, detailed how Alito flew to Alaska on a private plane owned by GOP billionaire Paul Singer. According to the outlet, if Alito chartered the jet himself, it would have cost him more than $100,000 each way.

When ProPublica asked the Supreme Court's head spokeswoman if Alito would comment on the story — as newsrooms do when publishing new information about someone on the high court — the spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito wouldn't comment on the matter.

Hours after the spokeswoman said Alito wouldn't comment, Alito did comment — just not to ProPublica.

Instead, the longtime justice published an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal titled "Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers."

In his op-ed, Alito defended himself against ProPublica's accusations of impropriety as a Supreme Court Justice and said the two claims levied against him — not recusing himself from cases involving Singer and not disclosing his trip — were invalid.

"I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites," Alito wrote, while a legal and judicial ethics expert said the opposite to ProPublica.

The expert, Abbe Smith, said that if she represented a client and learned after the fact that the judge had taken a gift or vacation from the other party in the case, she'd be "outraged."

"If I found out after the fact, I'd be outraged on behalf of my client," Smith told ProPublica. "And, frankly, I'd be outraged on behalf of the legal system."

Similarly, despite seven ethics experts having told ProPublica that Alito should've officially reported his trip, Alito said that he and other justices "commonly interpreted" the rule's hospitality exception "to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts."

Aside from his failure to recuse himself from cases and not officially reporting his trip, Alito's refusal to respond to ProPublica and then publishing a personal response elsewhere won't help the public's growing concerns about the high court.