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An Attempted Coup at the Antitrust Division [1]

['Matt Stoller']

Date: 2025-08

Something unusual happening in the antitrust world this week. On Wednesday evening, there was an attempted coup by what looks like MAGA-linked corporate lobbyists against Gail Slater, Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. Slater is known as something of a populist, having worked in roles opposing Google, and staffing J.D. Vance in the Senate. So this attack is involves two different factions on the right competing over power. And like stories involving massive amounts of money and power hidden behind cultural disputes, just two outlets - The Capitol Forum and Semafor - reported on it.

The backstory is that a few weeks ago, acting associate attorney general Chad Mizelle - Pam Bondi’s chief of staff - got into a fight with Slater over what looks like an obscure and sort of unimportant merger, Hewlett Packard’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. The two companies make wifi systems for big campuses, like universities or corporations, and there are just three firms in the market.

It’s a pretty obvious case, and the Division filed to block the merger in January, to the cheers of MAGA influencer Mike Davis, who is close with Donald Trump and was responsible for judicial nominations during much of Trump’s first term. Davis is known as a populist, a fierce defender of Trump, and someone supportive of the cases against big tech. He’s a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s show, and helped defeat the AI regulation moratorium. This challenge suggested that Davis’ brand of populism was on the ascent, and it scared Wall Street.

In late June, however, the Division settled the Hewlett Packard-Juniper case, and the company’s stock popped by 11%, indicating that the settlement didn’t hinder the market power the company was trying to achieve.

And the more observers looked into the settlement, the weirder it got. To complete the deal, HPE must license some software and divest an unrelated line of business, to a buyer to be named later. That’s a very odd choice, because settlements in merger cases are supposed to resolve the concern initially filed in the complaint. This one didn’t, and allowed HPE to gain pricing power in the market at issue. They also didn’t have a buyer lined up - again that’s unusual. Moreover, no staff attorneys signed the settlement, which shows that Division staff knew it was likely unlawful. The lead signer isn’t even in the Division, it’s acting Associate Attorney General Mizelle.

There were more oddities. The CEO of Hewlett Packard, Enrique Lores, went on CNBC the day after and pretty much said that the deal got through without any meaningful divestments. That’s a bold public relations move. It also looks like there may have been insider trading, with heavy options volume on Hewlett Packard stock before the settlement was announced. Here’s Unusual Whales:

And now we’re learning more, since it turns out that Slater was not on board with the merger settlement itself but was bigfooted by Mizelle. Moreover, one of the key people pushing for the merger was the same MAGA influencer who cheered it on in January. That would be Mike Davis, who was listed as a consultant for Hewlett Packard in certain legal forms, and reportedly helped negotiate the settlement without the input of the actual political appointees in charge of antitrust. This dynamic prompted a “bitter” argument wherein Slater’s team demanded that HPE negotiate with the Division, instead of using its network of Trump-friendly lobbyists and lawyers, which include Arthur Schwartz and big law firm Sidley Austin’s Will Levi. It didn’t matter, the deal went through.

Then, this Wednesday, came the coup itself when, as Semafor put it, “two of Slater’s deputies, Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, were out.” Slater can’t be easily removed, since she’s a Senate-confirmed appointee, but her deputies had no such protections. There is some question now of the status of Alford and Rinner, but the bottom line is that Slater is under attack. Without her own staff, she can’t run the Division.

If Slater is undercut here, it means the rest of the monopolization and merger cases, as well as the Division’s behavior itself, will likely be available directly for a price for any large corporation that wants to pay. That means Google, Apple, Visa, Live Nation, RealPage - they can all just hire the right lobbyists to make their cases go away.

And that brings me to two possible legal wrinkles, since a lot of what I’ve described sounds unlawful. The first is that members of Congress and state attorneys general can investigate what happened. And some have noticed. The second, more interestingly, is called the Tunney Act, a law written during the Nixon administration to prevent corruption around antitrust settlements. As the Capitol Forum reports, under that law, judges have the authority to investigate and block settlements they think are not in the public interest. They can appoint special masters, take testimony of government officials, and they have fairly broad investigative authority.

It’s hard to block a merger using the Tunney Act, but the truth is that the real threat here is that it exposes sordid deeds by the HPE executives, the deal lawyers, the Department of Justice or the consultants involved. Even if the judge ends up approving the consent decree, the discovery/hearing process itself could lead to a shakeup in goverment; these types of actions at the DOJ could also lead to more scrutiny of other consent decrees.

Will that happen here? The judge in the HPE-Juniper deal is a liberal named Casey Pitts, and he’s a former labor lawyer who worked at a public interest law firm. So that’s a possible sign it could. And it should happen, since there are many indications of possible wrongdoing, not limited to the merger itself, but also the insider trading of Hewlett Packard stock and the involvement of outside personnel. With the ugly specter of the Paramount deal and obvious political speech implications, members of Congress are starting to notice that corrupt merger deals are a problem.

A lot of people are going to respond to this piece with “well it’s the Trump administration, what did you expect?” And the answer is that I expected exactly this dynamic, the populists and the corporate types fighting with each other, with the big business types eventually winning most though not all of the disputes. But I think it’s worth chronicling the details regardless.

At some level, what we’re really dealing with overall is corruption on a society-destroying scale. It's understandable for everyone to be cynical about corruption right now, but readers should remember that it's not like an ever-worsening degree of corruption is inevitable. Different countries are more/less corrupt, and we've been more/less corrupt at different times. 77% of Americans trusted the Federal government in 1964, which is no doubt far better than it was during the scandals of the 1920s, such Teapot Dome, Mellon, etc. That’s because we made our society work again.

What we should be doing is constructing an agenda for an opposition party that will articulate a way to run our society based on integrity and virtue, instead of whatever it is we’re seeing here. And to do that, getting the details matters. In the meantime, there’s a very big difference between the problematic situation we’re in right now, and the worst case scenario on antitrust.

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[1] Url: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-attempted-coup-at-the-antitrust

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