In the weeks before he died, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke of how "refreshing" Donald Trump's run for the presidency was, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Journal interviewed author Bryan Garner, who spent two weeks in 2016 traveling through Asian countries with Scalia and had a decades-long friendship with the jurist. His memoir, "Nino and Me," will be released Tuesday.
"Justice Scalia thought it was most refreshing to have a candidate who was pretty much unfiltered and utterly frank," he said of Trump.
He also spoke well of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was also making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
"But [Scalia] was fascinated by the fact that Trump was so outspoken in an unfiltered way, and therefore we were seeing something a little more genuine than a candidate whose every utterance is airbrushed," Garner said.
But Garner would not speculate on how Scalia would have viewed the first year of Trump's presidency.
"These [were] early days in the campaign," he said. "It shouldn't be looked at through the lens of everything that's happened since."
Scalia, 79, died a week after returning from his Asian trip with Garner, the newspaper said. He was found dead Feb. 13, 2016 in his room at a Texas hunting resort.
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