Around midday on Friday, June 16, ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan sent an email to Patricia McCabe, the Supreme Court’s spokesperson, with questions for Justice Samuel Alito about a forthcoming story on his fishing trip to Alaska with a hedge fund billionaire.

We set a deadline of the following Tuesday at noon for a response.

Fifteen minutes later, McCabe called the reporters. It was an unusual moment in our dealings with the high court’s press office, the first time any of its public information officers had spoken directly with the ProPublica journalists in the many months we have spent looking into the justices’ ethics and conduct. When we sent detailed questions to the court for our stories on Justice Clarence Thomas, McCabe responded with an email that said they had been passed on to the justice. There was no further word from her before those stories appeared, not even a statement that Thomas would have no comment.

The conversation about Alito was brisk and professional. McCabe said she had noticed a formatting issue with an email, and the reporters agreed to resend the 18 questions in a Word document. Kaplan and Elliott told McCabe they understood that this was a busy time at the court and that they were willing to extend the deadline if Alito needed more time.

Monday was a federal holiday, Juneteenth. On Tuesday, McCabe called the reporters to tell them Alito would not respond to our requests for comment but said we should not write that he declined to comment. (In the story, we wrote that she told us he “would not be commenting.”)

She asked when the story was likely to be published. Certainly not today, the reporters replied. Perhaps as soon as Wednesday.

Six hours later, The Wall Street Journal editorial page posted an essay by Alito in which he used our questions to guess at the points in our unpublished story and rebut them in advance. His piece, headlined “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Readers,” was hard to follow for anyone outside ProPublica since it shot down allegations (notably the purported consumption of expensive wine) that had not yet been made.

In the hours after Alito’s response appeared, editors and reporters worked quickly to complete work on our investigative story. We did additional reporting to put Alito’s claims in context. The justice wrote in the Journal, “My recollection is that I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions,” and that none of those conversations involved “any case or issue before the Court.” He said he did not know of Singer’s involvement in a case about a long-standing dispute involving Argentina because the fund that was a party to the suit was called NML Capital and the billionaire’s name did not appear in Supreme Court briefs.

Alex Mierjeski, another reporter on the team, quickly pulled together a long list of prominent stories from the Journal, The New York Times and The Financial Times that identified Singer as the head of the hedge fund seeking to earn handsome profits by suing Argentina in U.S. courts. (The Supreme Court, with Alito joining the 7-1 majority, backed Singer’s arguments on a key legal issue, and Argentina ultimately paid the hedge fund $2.4 billion to settle the dispute.)

It does not appear that the editors at the Journal made much of an effort to fact-check Alito’s assertions.

If Alito had sent his response to us, we’d have asked some more questions. For example, Alito wrote that Supreme Court justices “commonly interpreted” the requirement to disclose gifts as not applying to “accommodations and transportation for social events.” We would have asked whether he meant to say it was common practice for justices to accept free vacations and private jet flights without disclosing them.

We also would have asked Alito more about his interpretation of the Watergate-era disclosure law that requires justices and many other federal officials to publicly report most gifts. The statute has a narrow “personal hospitality” exemption that allows federal officials to avoid disclosing “food, lodging, or entertainment” provided by a host on his own property. Seven ethics law experts, including former government ethics lawyers from both Republican and Democratic administrations, have told ProPublica that the exemption does not apply to private jet flights — and never has. Such flights, they said, are clearly not forms of food, lodging or entertainment. We had already combed through judicial disclosures, so we knew that several federal judges have disclosed gifts of private jet flights.

We might also have sent Alito some of the contemporaneous stories about Singer’s dispute with Argentina that were readily available online. Given Alito’s previous ties to the Journal’s editorial page — he granted it an exclusive interview this year complaining about negative coverage of the court — it’s probable that the stories we sent him would have included the page’s 2013 piece titled “Deadbeats Down South” that approvingly noted that “a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management” was holding out for a better deal from Argentina. We would have asked how his office checks for conflicts and whether he is concerned it didn’t catch Singer’s widely publicized connection to the case.

The Journal’s editorial page is entirely separate from its newsroom. Journalists were nonetheless sharply critical of the decision to help the subject of another news organization’s investigation “pre-but” the findings.

“This is a terrible look for ⁦@WSJ,” tweeted John Carreyrou, a former investigative reporter at the Journal whose award-winning articles on Theranos lead to the indictment and criminal conviction of its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. “Let’s see how it feels when another news organization front runs a sensitive story it’s working on with a preemptive comment from the story subject.”

Bill Grueskin, a former senior editor at the Journal and a professor of journalism at Columbia, told the Times that “Justice Alito could have issued this as a statement on the SCOTUS website. But the fact that he chose The Journal — and that the editorial page was willing to serve as his loyal factotum — says a great deal about the relationship between the two parties.”

Even Fox News got in the game. “Alito must be congratulating himself on his preemptive strike, but given that the nonprofit news agency sent him questions last week, was that really fair? And should the Journal, which has criticized ProPublica as a left-wing outfit, have played along with this? The paper included an editor’s note that ProPublica had sent the justice the questions, but did not mention that its story had not yet run,” the cable news outfit’s media watcher Howard Kurtz wrote.

There are lessons for ProPublica in this experience. Our reporters are likely to be a bit more skeptical when a spokesperson asks about the timing of a story’s publication.

But one thing is not changing. Regardless of the consequences, we will continue to give everyone mentioned in our stories a chance to respond before publication to what we’re planning to say about them.

Our practice, known internally as “no surprises,” is a matter of both accuracy and fairness. As editors, we have seen numerous instances over the years in which responses to our detailed questions have changed stories. Some have been substantially rewritten and rethought in light of the new information provided by subjects of stories. On rare occasions, we’ve killed stories after learning new facts.

We leave it to the PR professionals to assess whether pre-buttals are an effective strategy. Alito’s assertion that the private flight to Alaska was of no value because the seat was empty anyway became the subject of considerable online amusement.

And the readership of our story has been robust: 2 million page views and counting. It’s possible that Alito has won the argument with the audience he cares the most about. But it seems equally plausible that he drew even more attention to the very story he was trying to knock down.

Alito’s behavior underscores that the “no surprises” approach involves taking a risk, allowing subjects to “spit in our soup,” as Paul Steiger, the former Journal editor who founded ProPublica, liked to say.

Nevertheless, following our practice, we asked the Journal editorial page, Alito and McCabe for comment before this column appeared. We did not immediately hear back from them.

Our reporting on the relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and Republican megadonor, has touched off a national conversation about the ethics of the Supreme Court. Other news organizations have stepped up their scrutiny of the high court, and our stories have been cited thousands of times in editorials, op-eds and Congress.

The lavish travel Crow funded and the previously undisclosed real estate deal and tuition arrangements between Crow and Thomas that our reporting revealed has become fodder for the dueling narratives of American politics.

“Today’s report continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in response to our story about the tuition payments. “I hope that the Chief Justice understands that something must be done — the reputation and credibility of the Court is at stake.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shot back at a recent hearing of the committee: “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court. There’s a very selective outrage here.”

The furor seems destined to continue. And so we thought it might be useful if we said a bit more about the origins, timing and criticisms of our journalism on this subject.

Editors at ProPublica have been thinking about the need to look more closely at the state and federal judiciary for years. One byproduct of our gridlocked legislature is that judges have come to play a larger and larger role in people’s lives, from health care policy to affirmative action to abortion.

Last year, we worked with our partners at The Lever on a story revealing that a wealthy industrialist had gifted $1.6 billion to a group run by Leonard Leo, a key player in assembling the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Reporting in recent years has shown Leo running dark money groups focused on influencing the judiciary.

We admired the work done by our colleagues, notably at The Wall Street Journal, which found federal judges were ruling on a surprising number of cases in which they had a financial interest. A New York Times piece on what appeared to be a coordinated effort to befriend and influence Supreme Court justices also caught our eye.

But the federal judiciary still struck us as a relatively under-scrutinized branch of our democracy. So late last year, we assigned Justin Elliott, Josh Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski to take a look. The team filed a raft of public information requests for records on courts across the country.

Early on, the ProPublica team decided to focus on the highest court in the land and began by scouring the annual disclosure forms filed by the justices. Research in some obscure corners of the internet brought to light evidence that Thomas had made at least one trip on Crow’s plane that had not been disclosed. As the team dug deeply over several months, the reporters amassed a detailed picture of what turned out to be decades of unreported trips the two had taken in the United States and overseas.

The weekend after that story appeared, a reader called one of the reporters to say Crow may have renovated Thomas’ mother’s house in Savannah, Georgia. A cursory search of online records showed that Thomas’ mother’s home had, in fact, been sold to a limited liability corporation that we quickly linked to Crow. The reporters flew to Savannah, collected public records from the appropriate local government offices and interviewed neighbors. Once we established that the justice had sold properties to Crow and confirmed Thomas had never disclosed the deal, we published.

Soon after that second piece appeared, the reporters turned to another tip that came in after the initial story published: that Crow had paid tuition for Mark Martin, Thomas’ grandnephew, who the justice had legal custody of and has said publicly he was raising as his own son.

The tip was that Crow had paid tuition at two private boarding schools. One of the schools had spent a period in bankruptcy, and the reporters reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings. They found a bank statement that showed Crow had paid a month’s tuition for Martin. A former administrator at the Georgia school who had access to school financial information told us in an on-the-record interview that Crow had paid a full year of tuition. He also said that Crow had told him that Crow also paid Martin’s tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia.

Crow has issued statements about his relationship with Thomas that we’ve included in our stories. He acknowledged that he’d extended “hospitality” to the Thomases, but he said that Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” He said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house to preserve it for posterity. And in response to questions about the tuition payments, his office said, “Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth.” He has not disputed any of the facts in our reporting.

The timing of the stories have prompted some to wonder if ProPublica had the information about the trips, the house and the school tuition in hand at the outset and spaced out publication to achieve maximum impact. We did not.

This story developed as much investigative journalism does — organically, with one finding leading to the next. Tips like those that pushed the Thomas story forward are essential to our reporting. It’s why ProPublica publishes the email addresses of its editorial staffers to help sources connect with us. (If you have a tip for our newsroom, we have details about how to get in touch.)

Our reporting on the courts continues, and we stand ready to look into questions about judges or justices of any ideological stripe.

The response to our investigation has been generally positive, with leading commentators on legal affairs using it to examine and explain why the nation’s highest court has no binding ethical code. As is always the case, our work also has its critics.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has also criticized the reporting on Thomas in a seriesofcolumns by James Taranto, its editorial features editor.

Boiled down, his argument is that Thomas was not required to disclose the tuition for Martin and his omission of the sale of his mother’s house from his forms was an innocuous mistake. The experts we quoted, Taranto and several other critics contend, simply got it wrong.

We understand that experts may hold differing points of view about complicated subjects. It’s why we reached out to ethics lawyers who had served in Republican and Democratic administrations. We specifically sought out attorneys with expertise on the Ethics in Government Act, the federal disclosure law that binds justices and many other federal officials. We also talked to retired and currently serving federal judges about how they would handle comparable situations. Their views are reflected in our stories.

Every ethics expert we have spoken with said Thomas was required by law to disclose the gifts or transactions that we’d found.

In his columns, Taranto has used an increasingly inaccurate shorthand to refer to our work. He began by saying we had committed a “sloppy reporting error” in our story about the real estate transaction. Later, he said we were “comically incompetent” and described our story on the real estate transaction as “error-filled.”

Despite his assertions, none of Taranto’s columns cited an error in our stories. We sent an email asking him to identify the multiple facts he believes we’ve gotten wrong. He sent back a link to his first column. When we replied that the piece did not cite a single factual misstatement from our story, he ghosted us.

Perhaps more importantly, we sent detailed questions to Thomas and invited him to explain his decisions. He declined to do so but issued a statement the day after the first story appeared that said he and his wife, Ginni, counted Harlan and Kathy Crow as “among our dearest friends.” Thomas said that early in his tenure on the court, he “sought guidance from my colleagues and others on the judiciary and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

The debate over that statement continues in Congress and in public. Neither Crow, Thomas nor anyone else has identified a factual error in any of the stories. Thomas has not responded to any of the questions we sent about each of our subsequent stories, and he has not commented in public since his initial statement.