Because Sam enjoyed being a gangster, and he didn’t give a damn who knew it

When you’re entirely unaccountable and you know it:

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke to President-elect Donald Trump by phone Tuesday to recommend one of his former law clerks for a job in the new administration, ABC News has learned.

“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,” Justice Alito confirmed to ABC News Wednesday. “I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon.”

The call occurred just hours before Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday morning filed an emergency request with the justices asking them to block a New York judge from moving forward with sentencing Trump on Friday in his criminal hush money case.

Alito said that he and Trump did not discuss that matter.

“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.”

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.

I guess there’s not much point in trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety when you have already demonstrated a strong willingness to give the appearance of impropriety on multiple occasions while making it clear that you think you should not be responsible to anyone.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Abe Fortas handed a Supreme Court seat to Richard Nixon over a quickly returned retainer that Clarence Thomas would describe as “barely worth his time to collect.”