GoKawiil“It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.”
That quote was first delivered by mob boss Michael Corleone in The Godfather, but last Monday, it became the title of a speech by the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief Omeed Assefi. At a George Washington University event co-hosted with the publication MLex, Assefi described an agency firing on all cylinders, standing strong against bad corporate actors when warranted, but being open to reasonable negotiation to reach the strongest possible result.
Implicitly, Assefi was responding to months of complaints that his agency was bowing to corporate lobbyists and striking weak settlements. Last summer, two top deputies to Assefi’s former boss, Gail Slater, were fired for what the agency called “insubordination”; one later claimed two Justice Department officials had “perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law.” In February, Slater abruptly departed the agency, following reports that she’d been sidelined on key decisions (which the DOJ denied). Weeks later, the agency settled its high-profile battle with Live Nation-Ticketmaster in a decision industry players described as baffling. And just days before Assefi’s speech at GW, The Wall Street Journal published the fullest account yet of the events leading up to Slater’s departure and the settlement with Live Nation, describing backroom dealings between the Trump administration and MAGA-aligned lobbyists like Mike Davis, who tweeted, “Good riddance” when Slater left. The DOJ has denied any untoward dealings.
At the Antitrust Division, though, Assefi said his staff was “tuning out the noise and focusing on helping the American people who we are so privileged to serve.” The Division’s job, he said, is to engage in an “unrelenting pursuit of holding wrongdoers accountable.” He then quoted Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II: “this is the business we’ve chosen.”
Much of the antitrust world seems markedly skeptical. As lawyers descended on DC for the American Bar Association’s annual Antitrust Spring Meeting last week, hope that President Donald Trump’s administration would take anti-monopoly concerns seriously seemed deflated. Former enforcers warned of creeping corporate influence and a backsliding of enforcement. While Assefi and other officials pushed back on the criticism, onetime allies questioned whether they’d ever been serious about enforcing the law.
“We are shocked, shocked at any suggestion that there’s politics in antitrust enforcement at the federal level”
At an event later in the week, Roger Alford, one of Slater’s fired antitrust deputies, compared Assefi to a different cinematic criminal: corrupt police chief Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca. The acting antitrust chief was “doing his best Captain Renault impression of, ‘I’m shocked, shocked that there’s gambling in this establishment,’” Alford said. “And essentially what we have now is disingenuous claims that we are shocked, shocked at any suggestion that there’s politics in antitrust enforcement at the federal level.”
Now, the question on most people’s lips isn’t whether the Trump administration cares about antitrust — it’s whether anyone else has the resources to step in.
During the first year of Trump’s second administration in 2025, a delicate coalition of bipartisan populist antitrust enforcement was still tenuously holding together. The week of that Spring Meeting saw Slater speak at a Y Combinator event in downtown DC that hosted both former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan — whom Vice President JD Vance had once praised as one of the few Biden officials “doing a pretty good job.” But the administration was already pushing potential allies away. The DOJ and Federal Trade Commission had barred leaders from attending the Spring Meeting, believing the ABA aligned with Democrats. The administration had gutted federal regulatory agencies, raising questions about how they could still function as effective watchdogs.
Freed of their employment and thus the Trump administration’s restrictions, both Slater and Alford appeared at the Spring Meeting this year. Slater was met with applause during her surprise appearance on the keynote panel. “I’m really happy to be here this year while I still have my law license,” Alford quipped, appearing to reference a conservative effort to have him disciplined by the DC bar for speaking out about what he saw at the DOJ.
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