Stephen Miller’s Right-Wing Lawsuit Machine Must Be Stopped
America First Legal and former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, the legal group’s president, have secured headlines with lawsuits allegedly deploying “some of the nation’s best legal, political, and strategic thinkers to challenge” the radical left and the “woke” agenda. Yet the group’s securities fraud lawsuit against Target shows a sanctionable legal and strategic blunder.
The lawsuit claims that Target somehow defrauded investors because its stock went down after it sold LGBTQ merchandise and ran a Pride campaign. Although it’s true that conservatives reacted negatively with protests and boycotts, and that Target’s stock price declined around that time, nothing about the Pride campaign or backlash carries even the slightest whiff of fraud.
To try to cobble a fraud claim out of nothing, Miller’s outfit claims that Target’s statements about its board monitoring for risks (like boycotts and negative press coverage) must have been fraudulent because Target ran a Pride campaign (as did many other retailers). Bafflingly, it makes this claim after also complaining about Target’s long history of supporting LGBT rights.