Supreme Court’s Alito sells AB InBev, buys Coors

Associate Justice Samuel Alito of the United States Supreme Court poses for a formal portrait in the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC, on October 7, 2022.

Alex Huang | Getty Images

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sells stake in beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev Conservatives dumped Bud Light over its partnership with transgender social media influencers.

On the same day Alito sold Anheuser-Busch, he bought the same amount of stock. Molson Coorsa company with a history of facing political boycott The file shows it’s own.

The dealings have prompted new accusations that Alito, one of the high court’s six conservative members, is involved in or aligned with partisan politics, despite a recently adopted code of conduct instructing the justices to “refrain from political activity.”

Alito sold between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of AB InBev stock on August 14, 2023, according to a financial disclosure document submitted to a judge recently released through the federal Judiciary. database.

Periodic transaction report of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Courtesy of the United States

The Supreme Court did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Alito’s trading reports or the timing of his stock activity.

Alito’s sale comes as Anheuser-Busch is still grappling with a months-long boycott of Budweiser beer after it teamed up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to Collaboration took place during a social media campaign in April 2023.

The partnership thrust the world’s largest brewer into the center of a broader battle over transgender rights and acceptance in the United States and sparked a backlash from conservatives and Mulvaney supporters, according to reports Mulvaney was followed and supported. Targets receiving death threats amid controversy.

In May 2023, Modelo replaced Bud Light as the best-selling beer in the United States. Data at the time showed that Bud Light sales had dropped by nearly 25% year-on-year.

Still, AB InBev reported better-than-expected second-quarter 2023 profits, and as of May, AB InBev appeared to emerge from the boycott mostly unscathed.

Alito transfers Coors It’s also noteworthy given the company’s history of facing backlash from Mexican-American, black and LGBTQ groups over its workplace practices.

The revelations about Alito’s investment activities come as the justice faces a flood of criticism. New York Times report In the days after the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, his home hung with an inverted American flag, a symbol used by supporters of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” conspiracy.

Alito has denied participating in flag-flipping activities. He told the Times that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, did so “briefly” “in response to a neighbor using offensive and personally insulting language on a yard sign.”

But the announcement did little to quell Alito’s critics, some of whom are now demanding he explain the timing of the Anheuser-Busch sale.

Gabe Roth, executive director of the nonprofit judicial watchdog group Fix the Court, said in an email to CNBC: “Given the timing of this sale and its resemblance to an inverted flag, it could be interpreted as an kind of political statement.

“I think Supreme Court justices should avoid making political statements, even cryptic comments, or even comments that their wives or agents might make about their estates or brokerage accounts, respectively,” Ross said.

Ross noted that to his knowledge, the beer companies involved have no pending business before the Supreme Court.

But Ross said that if Alito or his agents were indeed reacting to the Bud Light boycott or the culture wars surrounding it, the stock sale “says more about the judge’s media coverage and where it places him on the political spectrum.” location in.

“If the sale was in response to last year’s Bud Light controversy, it could raise issues of apparent bias in future court cases involving transgender rights,” Ross said.