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.

Alito said the call was a routine job reference for a former law clerk whom Trump was considering for a government position.

It was not clear, however, why Trump would make a call to check references, a task generally left to lower-level aides.

Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, an advocacy group that seeks more openness at the Supreme Court, said the call was deeply problematic given the ethics controversies swirling around the court in general and Alito in particular.

“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,” Roth said.

“Typically,” he added, “Trump and Alito are better at hiding their ethics issues, at least for a few months or sometimes longer. But with the Supreme Court greenlighting near-absolute presidential immunity last year, and with Congress refusing to pass enforceable ethics for the justices, it appears there’s no reason to even try.”

In a statement Wednesday, Alito said the call was an unexceptional endorsement of a talented clerk.

“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. “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. Even aside from his own criminal case, Trump is set to lead an administration that will undoubtedly be a party in dozens of cases 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.”

The call, reported earlier by ABC News, added to the questions surrounding ethics practices at the court, including ones about gifts and luxury travel accepted and only partly disclosed by Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas.

In 2023, ProPublica reported that Alito 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.

In Trump’s emergency application, his lawyers urged the justices to halt his 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 this morning and may act on the request later that day.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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