is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
The sudden firing of two high-ranking antitrust officials this week is signaling upheaval at an agency responsible for arguing some of the biggest tech monopoly cases in decades.
Two top deputies to Department of Justice Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater were fired earlier this week for what a DOJ official would only explain as “insubordination” in an unattributed statement. Antitrust trade publication MLex reported that termination letters for Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, who also served in the first Trump administration, did not mention the reason for their firing. (Alford later posted a copy of his letter, which he said he framed and hung in his University of Notre Dame office.) But accounts from multiple publications including CBS News have detailed internal turmoil over a merger that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle reportedly helped usher through over objections from the Antitrust Division’s leadership, after close allies of President Donald Trump’s got involved.
The ordeal fuels concerns that Trump’s penchant for granting political favors to his allies will overrule any true bipartisan enthusiasm for antitrust crackdowns, including in some of the most consequential actions involving the tech industry. Slater, who worked for Vice President JD Vance in the Senate, is widely seen as a respected and serious figure in antitrust circles. She’s been critical of Big Tech and has continued some of the Biden administration’s most aggressive antitrust pushes, albeit with changes reflecting a distinct “America First” flavor. But the firing of two close colleagues she relied on to carry out her vision — which Slater reportedly opposed — calls into question whether such policy ideals can survive an administration with a history of rooting out dissenters.
Personnel decisions at the DOJ have always ultimately fallen to the president, but the Antitrust Division has traditionally operated with a degree of distance. “There’s no pretense that that custom exists anymore,” says Bill Kovacic, a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “To outsiders, an episode like this shows that political intervention works, and then if you can hire the right people to get to the White House or to the DOJ front office with the right arguments, you can override the preferences of the Antitrust Division.”
“An episode like this shows that political intervention works”
The merger settlement involved Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. The DOJ filed a lawsuit in January seeking to block the merger, which it alleged would reduce competition in the market for enterprise-grade wireless networking equipment. But this week, the parties said they “reached a settlement that resolves the government’s competitive concerns.” Unnamed Trump administration officials told Axios that national security aims were a big factor behind the ultimate settlement, including strengthening US competitiveness against China’s Huawei. But other reports suggest political influence might have played a bigger role. HPE disclosed in a legal filing that Mike Davis, an influential Trump ally, was among the company’s advisors who had met with DOJ representatives leading up to the settlement agreement.
Though Davis has called Slater a friend, the antitrust chief did not engage with him during the settlement negotiations, The Wall Street Journal reported, and members of her team took issue with politically-connected lawyers like Davis being brought in to influence the talks. Slater resisted the HPE agreement, according to the WSJ, and in the DOJ press release, her statement simply thanked the “hardworking men and women of the Antitrust Division for their work on this case,” without mention of the settlement itself.
In a letter to the judge overseeing the merger case, four Senate Democrats charge that the proposed settlement actually wouldn’t resolve the antitrust concerns with the deal, in part because it would require HPE to sell a business that the lawmakers say doesn’t directly compete with Juniper’s offerings anyway. Alongside reports about potential procedural issues in reaching the settlement, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote, “These reports raise concerns regarding whether the settlement advances the interests of the public or a well-connected, well-paid group of insiders. At a minimum, it’s unclear whether the settlement even addresses the Justice Department’s original antitrust concerns.”
“This is a massive change from how the Justice Department has operated for the last 50 years,” Bill Baer, who previously led antitrust enforcement at both the DOJ and FTC, said about the reported events. “Since Watergate, there has been something of a firewall between White House personnel and the Justice Department on how to handle individual investigations and cases. The events of the last two weeks suggest that that firewall no longer exists.”
... continue reading