Republican Detectives Aren't So Sure About Antonin Scalia's 'Heart Attack'

By Joanna Rothkopf | February 16, 2016 | 10:00pm

Politics

There are going to be kookoos any time a celebrity dies—we weren’t there when it happened, so, invariably, we don’t know the real truth. I am cool with this because I love to dream, since dreaming doesn’t hurt anyone. But we have just hit the conspiracy jackpot: the 79-year-young Antonin Scalia, a highly-controversial figure with one of the most coveted jobs in the country—a job you can only lose if you die or retire—passed away with a pillow semi-near his head, without any witnesses.

I’d tell you to do the math, but a bunch of Republicans already have.

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This weekend, InfoWars.com founder Alex Jones posted an “emergency transmission” to his Facebook page, in which he responded to Scalia’s death with some valuable information from his gut.

“The question is, was Antonin Scalia murdered? And the answer to that is, has the Bill of Rights and Constitution been murdered? Has it been reported that members of the Supreme Court have been blackmailed? Yes it has,” he said in the video, noting that the term “natural causes” was a euphemism. “And I wish it was natural causes, but man, my gut tells me no. And if this is an assassination, this signifies that they are dropping the hammer.”

During a Monday interview with conservative radio host Michael Savage, Donald Trump graced this important national conversation with his presence.

“It’s a horrible topic,” Trump said, “but they say they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow. I can’t give you an answer… I literally just heard it a little while ago. It’s just starting to come out now, as you know, Michael.”

(John Poindexter, owner of the Cibolo Creek Ranch where Scalia’s body was found, has denied the suspicious pillow’s placement to CNN: “He had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying. The pillow was against the headboard and over his head when he was discovered. He looked like someone who had had a restful night’s sleep. There was no evidence of anything else.”)

Fanning the flames even more is the fact that Scalia’s family requested to forego an autopsy.

“As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia,” wrote William O. Ritchie, former head of criminal investigations for the D.C. police department, in a Facebook post. “You have a Supreme Court Justice who died, not in attendance of a physician. You have a non-homicide trained U.S. Marshal tell the justice of peace that no foul play was observed. You have a justice of the peace pronounce death while not being on the scene and without any medical training opining that the justice died of a heart attack.

“How can the Marshal say, without a thorough post mortem, that he was not injected with an illegal substance that would simulate a heart attack?” he continued, according to the Washington Post. “Did the U.S. Marshal check for petechial hemorrhage in his eyes or under his lips that would have suggested suffocation? Did the U.S. Marshal smell his breath for any unusual odor that might suggest poisoning? My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas.”

Another gut!

On Tuesday, yet another gut (Glenn Beck) used his radio show to publicize the theory that God purposefully killed Scalia last week in order to influence the elections.

“I don’t want to assume that I know his plan, but I will tell you this,” he said, transitioning to speak from the perspective of God. “I just woke the American people up. I took them out of the game show moment and woke enough of them up to say, ‘Look how close your liberty is to being lost. You now have lost your liberty.’”

“Just with this one guy, you’ve lost your liberty so you’d better elect somebody that is going to put somebody on, because for the next 30 years, if you don’t, the Constitution as you know it [is gone]… The only way that we survive now is if we have a true constitutionalist.”

I doubt that this theory is true because American politics are the most deadeningly boring channel, and God has infinity to choose from.

CNN legal analyst Jonathan Turley agreed that the lack of autopsy was notable, but said he was fairly certain that things actually are as they appear:

“The fact that you had a justice who died and was left in his room for hours doesn’t mean this is some Hollywood script,” Turley said. “What it probably means is that a justice passed away in his room and was left for hours. Nino Scalia did have medical problems, he was 79 years old.”

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Image via Getty.