The Scoop
Four Democratic senators accused President Donald Trump’s nominee for a top Justice Department post of allowing “outside corporate influence to corrupt” merger reviews and are seeking records of his dealings with HPE, American Express, and other companies that received DOJ takeover approvals.
The lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Amy Klobuchar, D, Minn., can’t prevent the confirmation of Stanley Woodward to be the third-ranking official at DOJ. But with their new letter, which was shared first with Semafor, they are poking at a rare area of disagreement among conservatives, who are torn between a populist dislike of corporate power and the traditional Republican impulse to simply back big business.
Woodward, currently a counselor to Attorney General Pam Bondi, has faced criticism for his involvement in the settlement that cleared HPE’s $14 billion takeover of rival Juniper. The agreement, which allowed HPE to complete the merger with relatively small tweaks, prompted the firing of two DOJ officials and exposed a rift within the MAGA world. Antitrust chief Gail Slater opposed it; Woodward and another deputy signed it.
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Twenty Democratic state attorneys general also want answers about the HPE settlement. Last month they asked a federal court to examine whether the merger serves the public interest and if the process that led to its clearance violated federal anti-corruption laws.
Liz’s view
The Trump administration’s approach to antitrust is at best muddled and at worst wielded unevenly in service of other aims, like cracking down on corporate diversity efforts or facing off against China. All this has left deal-hungry CEOs and their advisors — who cheered Trump’s election as a sign that mergers would be given a light look — at a loss.
“Khanservatives” — so named for their affinity with former President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcer, Lina Khan — once counted Vice President JD Vance as an ally. “The No. 2 big threat to our liberty is big business,” right behind “big government,” Trump’s first pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, once said. And it was easy to forget during the Biden years that two of the monopoly cases against big tech companies, Google and Meta, were brought during Trump’s first term.
But the Khanservatives have lost momentum in a White House with dealmaking instincts of its own. Big Tech CEOs’ rightward shift may have tempered Trump’s desire to crack down on them, but more likely, the White House sees antitrust enforcement as a means to an end, and has more politically valuable ends in mind than promoting competition.
The View From ROGER ALFORD
“Do these lobbyists and their friends in power actually know what traditional or populist conservatives think about them?” Roger Alford, the DOJ official fired by the White House over his opposition to the HPE settlement, said in a fiery speech last month that name-checked Woodward, whom he accused of “risking President Trump’s populist conservative agenda.”
