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DOJ Insider Blows the Whistle on Pay-to-Play Antitrust Corruption [1]
['David Dayen']
Date: 2025-08-19
× Expand Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA via AP Images Roger Alford testifies during a congressional hearing last year on Capitol Hill in Washington.
I met Roger Alford once, a few months ago at a conference. He’s a no-doubt conservative who served in both Trump administrations, yet he is cursed with having a sense of right and wrong. He was fired a few weeks ago for resisting pay-to-play corruption at the Justice Department, which offended his belief system. Unlike virtually everyone in the Republican Party since Inauguration Day, he’s willing to talk about it.
Alford, now a law professor at Notre Dame, delivered a speech at the Tech Policy Institute Aspen Forum on Monday, and simultaneously released an opinion piece in UnHerd, a well-known forum for populist conservatives. In both, he decried the subordination of the rule of law to a “rule of lobbyists,” confirming a degradation of antitrust under Trump that has been widely reported. In doing so, he made it more likely that the lobbyist cabal and their enablers in the Justice Department, both of whom he singled out by name, would face a judicial tribunal that can expose this broken process.
More from David Dayen
Here are the top takeaways from Alford’s revelations on Monday, and what it means for those in power and the future of antitrust enforcement:
Playing on betrayal. Some progressives may blanche at Alford’s praise for President Trump’s populist messaging, and insistence that it has been subverted by top DOJ officials selling out to lobbyists. He absolves Attorney General Pam Bondi and her number two Todd Blanche of blame as well.
Setting up a dichotomy between “genuine MAGA reformers and MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists” may not sit well. But the audience for these remarks is not anyone reading the Prospect. He is attempting to reach the president and his inner circle by playing on Trump’s demand for total loyalty.
Alford personally names Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle and associate attorney general nominee Stanley Woodward as betraying the MAGA realignment of working-class voters by selling merger clearance to the highest bidder, concerns that he says are “not based on conjecture.” Mizelle and Woodward, Alford states, don’t share Bondi’s “commitment to a single tier of justice for all,” instead welcoming MAGA influencer lobbyists like Mike Davis, Arthur Schwartz, and Will Levi into boozy backroom deals for their clients. Specifically, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks paid Davis and Schwartz and Levi $1 million to defuse a merger challenge, and Mizelle and Woodward, perceiving them as MAGA comrades, overruled Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater to settle the case. Alford and Bill Rinner, who was also fired recently, were involved in the HPE negotiations.
Whether you believe Trump and Bondi actually have the best interests of the common man at heart or not (I vociferously don’t), in the context of Alford trying to build a wedge against those figures he sees as corrupt, it’s probably the best rhetorical play he can make.
I should add that the Justice Department is playing the loyalty angle as well: A spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that Alford is “the James Comey of antitrust.”
Tunney Act witness. Alford pointedly refers to the “HPE-Juniper merger scandal,” and urges that Judge Casey Pitts, who is overseeing the case, use the Tunney Act, a 1974 law written to prevent antitrust enforcement from becoming corrupted by big money, to intervene in the settlement. “I hope the court blocks the HPE-Juniper merger. If you knew what I knew, you would hope so too,” Alford said.
But what’s important is the line that comes after: “Someday I may have the opportunity to say more.” While Alford was circumspect on the details in his speech, that line was a tell that Alford would be willing to say what he knows if compelled under oath.
If Judge Pitts initiates a Tunney Act proceeding in the HPE-Juniper case, he can, as Alford notes, “demand extensive discovery and examine the surprising truth of what happened.” That includes documents and witnesses. As Alford concedes, the Tunney Act has not really worked as intended; weakening by the D.C. Circuit Court is a primary cause of that. But this time, you have a top Justice Department official pointing to two other top officials who distorted the legal system. Judge Pitts has an obligation to the public interest to examine that, and a key witness who could give him the necessary information.
Self-enrichment. Davis and Schwartz and Levi have a financial interest in pay-to-play perversion of the justice system. Alford specifically cites “million-dollar success fees” for their service to corporations. But this can only be perpetuated with friends on the inside.
“In my opinion based on regular meetings with him, Chad Mizelle accepts party meetings and makes key decisions depending on whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend,” Alford claims. That’s a significant charge of corruption. And it leads other companies to learn how the game is played and hire their own lawyers and lobbyists with the home-team MAGA imprimatur to get what they want. From an economic standpoint, anyone seen as a “MAGA friend” can boost their asking price to deliver results for corporations. And Alford notes that ethical lawyers cannot compete with unethical ones, sending them out the door and poisoning the entire system.
Mizelle has his own interest in this. Davis, beyond soliciting favorable treatment for companies, helps conservative judges get federal appointments. Mizelle’s wife Kathryn received one of those appointments, as a district court judge in the Middle District of Florida in 2020. It has been reported that Kathryn Mizelle wants to bump up to the circuit court of appeals, and Davis is well positioned to advise Trump to make that happen. In this way, Mizelle helping Davis get his way for his clients could pay off.
People like Mizelle, Alford says, “consider law enforcement not as binding rules but an opportunity to leverage power and extract concessions. They have, shall we say, a loose relationship with the law.”
A warning on Live Nation. Alford describes a “new normal” where firms hire influence-peddlers to go above the heads of antitrust enforcers, “seeking special favors with warm hugs.” And he pointedly asks which case will be next, and not in a hypothetical way. “Will the same senior DOJ officials ignore the President’s Executive Order just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of the Fifth Floor in defense of their monopoly abuses?”
The executive order being referred to involves “combating unfair practices in the live entertainment market.” Trump cites ticket scalpers and bots as the main problem here, urging enforcers to target them. In fact, just yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission sued ticket resellers for securing thousands of tickets to live events and jacking up the price on the resale market.
But this ignores the root cause of Live Nation using its market power in promotion, venues, and ticketing to charge outrageous fees, shortchange fans and artists, and subvert competition. The Justice Department Antitrust Division has an active lawsuit over this illegal monopolization. And Alford is saying here that Live Nation has hired lobbyists—Mike Davis is reportedly one of them—to get the case dropped.
Making business harder. Alford uses a lot of biblical, moral rhetoric in the speech. But he also has a practical point. Rule by lobbyists is inherently unstable, he says, which actually creates more hazardous terrain for mergers. “I personally have heard lawyers say that the political uncertainty of this Administration is more difficult than the predictable but hostile environment of the Biden Administration,” he says.
I’ve heard that said before. If a business has to not only worry about whether their merger is legal but whether they can locate the right fixer to bless whatever they’re doing, regardless of the law, the system becomes harder, not easier, to navigate. It’s not like the Trump administration will decline to harass companies if they follow the law; there’s apparently a “loyalty list” in the White House for companies that are perceived friends or enemies. Alford is right to say that this creates “massive legal and economic uncertainty.”
Seeking change. Alford isn’t out for glory here; he truly thinks that the Justice Department can course-correct and stop giving out preferential treatment in a sale to the wealthy. I don’t really agree with him, but that appears to be his motivation. He has friends back in the Antitrust Division, and he wants them to be able to do their work without interference.
“I am speaking out now because it is still early days in this Administration and I think correcting the problems at the DOJ is still possible, either by political will or judicial decree,” he says, again implicitly citing the Tunney Act as a tool to fight corruption. One way this could end is that the negative publicity from a messy Tunney Act proceeding forces the pay-to-play system back underground. Alford also suggests that his boss, Slater, should report directly to Blanche, and that Mizelle and Woodward should be removed from antitrust oversight. He hints at the need for “personnel changes among the senior leadership at the Department of Justice.”
Personally, I think the Antitrust Division has gotten the message that it’s time to back off. There are no pending merger cases at the division for the first time in years. The leftover conduct cases against RealPage, Ticketmaster, Google, and Apple have an unknown future.
Alford is fighting uphill, though it’s significant that he’s fighting.
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[1] Url:
https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/
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