A former Trump Justice Department appointee blasted some of his ex-colleagues in a speech Monday, saying they “perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law” — and he named names.
Want your company’s merger approved? Pay a MAGA influencer.
A former Trump appointee alleges the DOJ is letting firms buy exemptions from anti-monopoly laws.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Roger Alford was a top appointee in the DOJ’s antitrust division in both President Donald Trump’s first and second terms. He and his boss, DOJ antitrust division chief Gail Slater, are associated with a faction on the right that wants tougher antitrust enforcement. They take a more skeptical view of mergers in sectors where only a few major companies are competing.
But Alford was fired last month. And now, he’s gone public about what happened, outlining what he said amounted to a “pay-to-play” scandal, where companies paid well-connected outside MAGA influencers to try to get mergers approved, and certain top DOJ officials played ball.
“For 30 pieces of silver, MAGA-in-Name-Only lobbyists are influencing their allies within the DOJ and risking President Trump’s populist conservative agenda,” Alford said. “Their goal is to line their own pockets by working for any corporation that will pay top dollar to settle antitrust cases on the cheap.”
“Perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law”
Though Alford didn’t have anything negative to say about Trump or Attorney General Pam Bondi, he pointed the finger at two officials in particular: Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, and Associate Attorney General nominee Stan Woodward.
Mizelle “makes key decisions depending on whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend,” Alford said. He continued: “Aware of this injustice, companies are hiring lawyers and influence peddlers to bolster their MAGA credentials and pervert traditional law enforcement.”
The background to this is that back in January, shortly after Trump was sworn in, the DOJ’s antitrust team sued to block IT company Hewlett Packard Enterprise from buying a rival, Juniper Networks.
But in June, DOJ suddenly backed off, agreeing to a settlement that let the deal proceed with minor concessions.
This, Alford clearly believes, was because Hewlett Packard hired two outside MAGA figures to grease the wheels for them: Mike Davis (a conservative legal activist) and Arthur Schwartz (a longtime ally of Donald Trump Jr.).
“Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz have made a Faustian bargain of trading on relationships with powerful people to reportedly earn million-dollar success fees by helping corporations undermine Trump’s antitrust agenda, hurt working class Americans, break the rules, and then try to cover it up,” Alford said in his speech.
Alford didn’t go into all the details about what happened, but Semafor has reported that Mizelle overruled Slater and Alford to push through the Hewlett Packard settlement — and Alford was fired soon afterward. (The drama spilled out into public, and even Laura Loomer got involved, as the antimonopoly advocate Matt Stoller has chronicled.)
Urging a judge reviewing the merger to dig into the matter more, Alford’s speech continued: “It is my opinion that in the HPE/Juniper merger scandal, Chad Mizelle, and Stanley Woodward perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law. I am not given to hyperbole, and I do not say that lightly.”
A DOJ spokesperson pushed back in a statement: “Roger Alford is the James Comey of antitrust — pursuing blind self-promotion and ego, while ignoring reality. He was fired from the Department, and all should treat his comments for what they are — the delusional musings of a disgruntled ex.”
What this is really all about
Over the past decade, a new antitrust movement skeptical of Big Tech and big corporations generally has gained some traction on both the left and right. Joe Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, became the face of this movement for Democrats, and certain up-and-coming Republicans seeking a populist brand, such as JD Vance, professed admiration for her.
Most Republicans, though, loathed Khan, sympathizing with complaints from business leaders that she was overly scrutinizing mergers, and took the GOP’s traditional pro-corporate line.
When Trump won his second term, though, he nominated a Vance staffer, Gail Slater, as his DOJ antitrust chief. Antitrust reformers like Stoller liked Slater and took her appointment as an encouraging sign that “Trump wants to take on big tech.”
In practice, though, Trump’s administration has been most defined by its weaponization of government for shakedown tactics. Trump likes deals, and he likes getting companies (or universities) to cough up money. He likes it when people ask him for favors, and he likes asking for things from them in return. He was never truly committed to an ideological agenda of tough antitrust enforcement. And he’s fine with Big Tech, so long as Big Tech gives him what he wants.
Slater and Alford apparently didn’t get the memo and thought they’d have a free hand to enforce the law as they felt appropriate. But this earned them enemies inside and outside the administration, CBS News reported last month. There were deals to be had — and money to be made.
In his speech, Alford referred to “people inside and outside government” who “consider law enforcement not as binding rules but an opportunity to leverage power and extract concessions.”
But though Alford put the blame on those two DOJ officials, his description seems to fit Trump’s approach to governance quite well.
We don’t know whether Trump himself got involved in the Hewlett Packard matter. But, as the saying goes, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
