Prominent Democrats are attacking the Trump Administration over the resignation of Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater.
Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) issued a joint letter calling Slater a “deeply respected antitrust leader.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called Slater’s firing “a major loss for bipartisan antitrust enforcement” because Slater was “one of Trump’s few bipartisan-supported nominees.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called Slater “one of Trump’s few bipartisan-supported nominees” and complained that “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder.”
Biden’s failed FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, who is now a registered lobbyist for Disney, wrote on LinkedIn:
This is a damn shame. Former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater was one of the most honest and competent people in this Administration, and someone who believes in real antitrust enforcement. That’s why she is being driven out by Bondi and why her exit is being cheered by monopolists. .
Despite her professed opposition to monopoly lobbyists, Sohn worked to help Disney lobby Slater on Disney’s acquisition of Fubo, which competed with the woke conglomerate’s subsidiaries ESPN and Hulu. Sohn was paid $110,000 to work on the merger. Slater also cleared ESPN’s purchase of the NFL Network, further entrenching the far-left company’s monopoly on sports streaming. As Breitbart News reported at the time, Sohn was so radical even the Biden Administration rejected her pro-censorship views.
As Breitbart News reported more recently, Slater is tied to the cause of online censorship herself, through her time with the “Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online” spearheaded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn.
Fox Business reported that Slater has “leaned on . . . Luther Lowe for outside advice.” Lowe is the chief lobbyist for Y Combinator and a former chief lobbyist for Yelp. As Breitbart reported, he gave over $150,000 to Democrats, while the CEOs of Yelp and Y Combinator hosted fundraisers for Kamala Harris. Y Combinator has weighed in on major antitrust issues before the Justice Department, including the antitrust cases against Google and Apple.
Tim Wu, the Columbia University Law professor and former Biden tech advisor, called Slater’s firing “bad news and another blow to what’s left of the parts of the Republican party that cared about the middle class, antimonopoly, and impartial law enforcement” in an X post. Wu’s called Slater’s firing evidence of “the decline of the New Right and victory for the corruptionists cannot be good news for the United States.”
Like Sohn and other Democrats, Wu’s support for antitrust action against big tech has nothing to do with Americans’ free speech rights online. He wrote an article titled, “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?,” which argued that the First Amendment needed to be rethought in light of Russia “unleashing troll armies to abuse the press” and the “the creation and dissemination of fake news” which are often, but not always, “tool of neo-fascists or the political right.”
The sole example of “corruption” related to Slater’s firing was that the Justice Department overruled a merger between Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. However, even the left-wing Guardian acknowledged that DOJ leadership was not upset that Slater opposed the merger. Rather, Trump’s CIA Director, “John Ratcliffe, said blocking the merger would in fact pose national security risks and questioned why he was never consulted,” and DOJ Leadership felt Slater had misled them about the national security concerns.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
