Another week, another Supreme Court corruption scandal. This time it’s Samuel Alito in the spotlight, after ProPublica, fresh off its April exposé of justice Clarence Thomas’s decades of undisclosed gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow, revealed last week that Alito had taken his own undisclosed gifts from a billionaire: Paul Singer, hedge fund manager and GOP megadonor, who had business before the court from which Alito failed to recuse himself.

The Thomas story was bad enough for a court whose public standing has taken a beating over a series of outrageous rulings, followed by further stories that exposed just how deeply conflicted and compromised Thomas is. But the Alito story — already arguably worse, since Alito can’t even use Thomas’s excuse that his billionaire benefactor was never directly involved in a case that he ruled on — may become an even bigger debacle. That’s thanks in large part to a set of unforced errors accumulated over the course of the bizarre way the justice chose to respond to the story.

ProPublica’s report was preempted by a Wall Street Journal op-ed from Alito himself defending his conduct and “pre-bunking” the outlet’s piece, charging them with “misleading” reporting — even though he hadn’t read the unpublished report. As ProPublica later explained in a separate piece about this profoundly weird development, it seems that Alito, in concert with the Supreme Court’s press office, had used the outlet’s generous policy of holding off publication of the story until Alito sent back responses to lie to the reporters that he wouldn’t comment, find out when they were planning to publish the story, then blindside them by having the Wall Street Journal quickly spring his defense on the public.