A former vice president who died in late 2025 has been thrust back into the national spotlight following the publication of internal Supreme Court documents that reveal Justice Antonin Scalia secretly lobbied his colleagues to take up a case involving Dick Cheney — then went duck hunting with him weeks later.
The revelations, published by CNN on June 1, 2026, stem from the private papers of the late Justice John Paul Stevens and expose a previously hidden chapter in one of the most ethically controversial episodes in modern Supreme Court history.
Richard B. Cheney, the 46th vice president of the United States, died on November 3, 2025, at the age of 84, surrounded by his family at home. His family confirmed the cause as complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease — a fitting if sobering end for a man who had survived five heart attacks over the course of his life and received a heart transplant in 2012.
The Ethics Question Lives On
The newly uncovered documents show that Justice Scalia actively persuaded his colleagues to reverse course and agree to hear Cheney’s appeal in late 2003, when the Supreme Court was poised to reject the appeal entirely. Within three weeks of the court announcing it would take the case, Scalia accompanied Cheney on a private duck hunting trip in Louisiana, touching off one of the most enduring controversies over judicial ethics in recent memory.
What the Stevens documents now reveal is that Scalia’s role began not after the court agreed to hear the case, but before — making his subsequent duck hunting trip with Cheney all the more ethically fraught in retrospect.
The Sierra Club formally requested Scalia’s recusal, arguing his impartiality had been irreparably compromised. Scalia refused in a defiant 21-page memorandum, insisting the two men had never discussed the case and were never alone together during the trip. The court ultimately ruled largely in Cheney’s favor in June 2004, allowing the administration to keep the task force’s internal deliberations secret.
A Case Built on Secrecy
The backstory begins in 2001, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney chaired the National Energy Policy Development Group, a White House task force whose meetings with energy industry lobbyists became the subject of intense public and legal scrutiny. The Sierra Club and Judicial Watch sued to compel the release of records revealing who participated in those closed-door sessions. Cheney and the Bush administration fought back, arguing the case violated the constitutional separation of powers.
New York University ethics professor Stephen Gillers, a critic of Scalia at the time, told CNN the new documents deepened his concerns. “The more influential he is on behalf of Cheney’s interests, given Cheney’s governmental and personal interests in the case, and Scalia’s friendship, and the timing of the trip, it makes the Scalia activity behind the scenes all the more reprehensible,” Gillers said.
A Legacy Revisited
His death prompted an outpouring of tributes that captured the paradox of his public life. Former President George W. Bush, for whom Cheney served two terms beginning in 2001, called the loss “a loss to the nation and a sorrow to his friends,” describing Cheney as “among the finest public servants of his generation — a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held.” Bush delivered a eulogy at the state funeral held at Washington National Cathedral on November 20, 2025, where former President Joe Biden and other living vice presidents gathered in tribute. Notably absent were President Trump and Vice President Vance.
Their absence was hardly surprising. The estrangement between Cheney and Trump had been years in the making — and it ended with one of the most stunning crossover endorsements in modern American political history. In October 2024, Cheney publicly endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president, declaring that Donald Trump posed a threat to the Constitution and the rule of law.
The CNN report rekindles a debate that Supreme Court ethics reform advocates have long pointed to as a cautionary tale. The new Stevens documents suggest the Scalia-Cheney relationship was not merely a friendship that happened to overlap with a pending case — it was a friendship that actively shaped whether the case would be heard at all.
Dick Cheney is gone, and Antonin Scalia died in 2016. But the questions raised by their once-private relationship — and the decisions it may have influenced — continue to echo through an institution whose legitimacy depends on the public’s belief that its doors are not opened by friendship. A survey found that 74% of Americans support term limits for Supreme Court justices, and 70% back congressional investigations into potential ethics violations — both with bipartisan support.
For a court that has faced renewed ethical scrutiny in recent years over undisclosed gifts and relationships between justices and wealthy benefactors, the revelation is a timely reminder that the tension between personal ties and judicial impartiality is not a new problem.
