The Republican Party today is a battleground. The confrontation isn’t between traditional conservatives and Trump supporters. Rather, it pits genuine MAGA reformers against MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists. It’s a fight over whether Americans will have equal justice under law, or whether the wealthy and the well-connected enjoy preferential access to our justice system.

Officials like Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, my former boss, strive to remain true to President Trump’s populist message that resonated with working-class Americans. Antitrust enforcement that applies equal justice under the law can deliver tangible results for millions of Americans. The MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists and the DOJ officials enabling them are pursuing a different agenda. They’re determined to exert and expand their influence and enrich themselves as long as their friends are in power. Will America be governed by the rule of law or the rule of lobbyists? If the rule of lobbyists prevails, it will render futile the realignment of the two parties, which has impelled millions of working-class Americans to migrate to the Right over the past decade.

The Department of Justice is today the central front in this battle. Slater and her closest advisers are committed to protecting ordinary Americans by vigorously enforcing the antitrust laws. The same can’t be said for many in the senior leadership. This was painfully demonstrated in the handling of the HPE-Juniper merger, which saw two tech giants achieve a sweetheart settlement, circumventing the Antitrust Division by currying favor with senior officials above us. The arrangement, as Sohrab Ahmari reported in these pages, involved a literal backroom meeting over cocktails.

It is still early days in this administration, and correcting the problems at the DOJ is possible, either by political will or judicial decree. I experienced nothing remotely like this when I served at the DOJ in the first Trump administration, and hopefully this is a short-term aberration.

To be clear, I have absolutely no reason to think the White House or other departments are involved in the current HPE-Juniper merger scandal. Nor do I think Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is involved.

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But I can’t say the same about a small set of actors in senior leadership within the DOJ. I met with the most senior officials of the DOJ regularly, and my concerns aren’t based on conjecture. The core problem is simple: Attorney General Pam Bondi has delegated authority to figures — such as her chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, and Associate Attorney General-Designee Stanley Woodward — who don’t share her commitment to a single tier of justice for all.

Good may yet prevail, but at least with respect to senior DOJ oversight of antitrust enforcement, we are on a path toward injustice.

Under the rule of law, rules matter and must be respected, both in substance and in procedure. Under the rule of lobbyists, by contrast, antitrust laws are nuisances or obstacles to overcome. Rather than the legitimate lobbyists who have expertise and perform traditional functions of education and engagement, bullying lobbyists with no relevant expertise are perverting law enforcement through money, power, relationships, and influence.

There are people within the DOJ who follow the law and care deeply about protecting Americans from anticompetitive behavior. That is true of the leadership and career staff at the Antitrust Division. Sadly, there are others inside and outside the government who care little for the antitrust laws. They consider law enforcement not as binding rules, but an opportunity to leverage power and extract concessions.

Although the terms of my service with the federal government limit what I can say even after I depart, I believe that in the HPE-Juniper merger scandal, Mizelle and Woodward acted inconsistent with the populist values of the Trump administration. These actions have potentially opened the case to judicial scrutiny under the Tunney Act, passed by Congress in the Seventies to ensure that merger settlements take place consistent with the public interest, not based on political connections over cocktails between lobbyists and government officials.

It would be helpful for the court reviewing the settlement to clarify the substance and the process by which the settlement was reached. Although the Tunney Act has rarely served its intended purpose, the court may demand extensive discovery this time around, and examine the surprising truth of what happened. Indeed, the court should block the HPE-Juniper merger. If you knew what I know, you would hope so, too.

The second distinction between the rule of law and the rule of lobbyists is that those who follow the rule of law show no special favors to the parties and counsel appearing before them. By contrast, the rule of lobbyists cares deeply about benefits they can extract in transactional relationships with perceived friends. At the Antitrust Division, we ignore the affiliations of the lawyers who appear before us — whether friend or foe, Republican or Democrat — and attempt to treat everyone equally. That’s how we maintain a single-tier system of justice.

Others at the DOJ and elsewhere in government consider some parties, counsel, and lobbyists to be on the “same MAGA team” and worthy of special solicitude. They consider others to be “enemies of MAGA” that merit particular disfavor. Too often in the current DOJ, meetings are accepted and decisions are made depending upon whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend. Aware of this injustice, companies are hiring lawyers and influence-peddlers to bolster their MAGA credentials and pervert traditional law enforcement.

Third, the rule of law provides predictability while the rule of lobbyists guarantees instability. Violations of the antitrust laws impose grave risks to companies, including criminal prosecution, massive civil penalties, company breakups, and the blocking of mergers. Lawyers and their clients need a stable and predictable environment to do business. The Antitrust Division uniformly seeks to promote the rule of law in both litigation and merger enforcement. I personally have heard lawyers say that the political uncertainty of this administration is more difficult than the hostile but predictable environment of the Biden administration.

The DOJ, of course, must welcome all lawful competition and all pro-competitive mergers. And there is nothing wrong with lobbying done the right way. But this new pay-to-play approach is so far removed from legitimate lobbying or traditional antitrust enforcement that it is creating massive legal and economic uncertainty. Those adopting this new approach care little about the instability this creates for the markets.

The cost to the country of this new pay-to-play approach to antitrust enforcement is enormous. MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists are influencing their allies within the DOJ and risking the president’s conservative-populist agenda.

Is this the new normal, with every law firm hiring an influence-peddler to dual track and sidestep the litigation and merger review process? That’s what law firms are considering. The DOJ is now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the Antitrust Division leadership to seek special favors with warm hugs. On numerous occasions in a variety of matters, we implored our superiors and the lawyers on the other side to call off the jackals. But to no avail. Cases are being resolved based on political connections, not the legal merits.

Which case is the next casualty? Will the same senior DOJ officials ignore the president’s executive order on live entertainment just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of the DOJ in defense of their monopoly abuses, making bogus arguments about mergers being necessitated by national security?

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What must the antitrust bar think? If the new game in town is to hire well-connected lobbyists ignorant of the law to get your deal done or your case dismissed by going around and above Slater, what role are respected antitrust lawyers supposed to play? Why did the lawyers advising the parties in the HPE-Juniper merger scandal not appreciate the risk they were generating, not only for their clients and their law firms, but for the entire antitrust bar?

Lastly, there are real costs for the lobbyists, the companies and lawyers who hired them, and the officials within government. Outside the small circle of transactional MAGA friends seeking and giving favors, do these lobbyists and their friends in power actually know what traditional or populist conservatives think about them?

Those who forsake the rule of law are violating fundamental moral principles. The Bible teaches: “You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality.… Justice, and only justice, you shall follow” (Deuteronomy 16:19-20). I know many in and out of government who sincerely respect these moral principles. Perhaps now is the time to implement them. The influence-peddlers and their allies in government will hide behind their friends in power, excuse their behavior, claim we are naïve, and hope this all goes away. But many of their friends in power have principles and want to avoid further scandal.

How will the DOJ recover from the current crisis? Will there be policy or personnel changes among the senior leadership at the department? Will Slater have the freedom to enforce the law and fire or hire her team consistent with the administration’s true antitrust agenda? At a minimum, will the DOJ remove Chad Mizelle and Stanley Woodward from any antitrust oversight? In the absence of reforms at the DOJ, must state attorneys general now join every DOJ antitrust lawsuit and merger challenge as a check against influence-peddling? The status quo is simply unsustainable.

My position while I served in government was simple: lobbyists and lawyers are subordinate to the law. Yet by stating this truth, I was dismissed for insubordination. My termination letter is now framed and hangs on the wall in my office at Notre Dame. I joke with friends that I’ve never been fired before, and I’ve been working since my first job as a young teenager at the Dairy Queen in Sherman, Texas. All it took to be fired were lobbyists exerting influence on my superiors to retaliate against me for protecting the rule of law against the rule of lobbyists.

The rule of law is not just an inheritance, it is also an opportunity and obligation. Soldiers are willing to go to war and risk their lives to serve our country. So why shouldn’t we take lesser risks to serve our country and protect the rule of law? The principles inscribed in marble at the Department of Justice building only survive if each generation takes up the fight. Failure is always a possibility. But so too is triumph.

A GOP that “has more of a care for American citizens,” Slater told UnHerd earlier this year, must protect the market system from monopoly. Yet today, powerful figures within and outside the administration are bearing down on Slater and her team — simply because she insists on a transparent, rigorous process for approving mergers that would hinder market competition.

“We’re willing to do settlements,” a former official familiar with the turmoil inside told me, “but they need to be real settlements. They can’t be weak, fake settlements, which is what HPE-Juniper was, frankly.” That’s in reference to a $14 billion deal that saw tech firm Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquire Juniper Networks, one of its biggest competitors in the enterprise-networking market (think wireless systems and other connectivity solutions for large institutions and workplaces).

The Biden administration began scrutinizing the proposed merger. But it was Omeed Assefi, the acting attorney general for antitrust in the early Trump II administration, who challenged it in court before Slater was confirmed by the Senate and took up her position. Settlement negotiations began soon after the government filed suit. Yet the final settlement, and the way it came about, did not meet with Slater’s approval, according to The Wall Street Journal. Chad Mizelle, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, “pushed it through” anyway.

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Slater has been under intense pressure ever since, and two of her senior lawyers, Roger Alford and William Rinner, were terminated on Monday. The formal justification was reportedly “insubordination.” Yet the real nub was that they and their boss, Slater, objected to unusual shenanigans in the process, including boozy backroom meetings between company lawyers and lobbyists, on one hand, and officials from elsewhere in the Department of Justice, on the other. Slater and her team also took issue with the outsized influence of lobbyists “who weren’t antitrust specialists, but were brought in for their connections to administration officials,” per the Journal — a characterization echoed by the former official.

“Boozy backroom deal” here isn’t a figure of speech, by the way. It captures what literally took place, according to the former official, who described a meeting between government officials and lobbyists that took place at one of Washington’s “private city clubs” over cocktails.

That’s a red flag. As Matt Stoller, a historian of the anti-monopoly movement, told me, “when Richard Nixon engaged in a corrupt settlement over the ITT merger, Congress was so outraged that they passed the Tunney Act to stop these kinds of misdeeds.” Under the act, firms that are settling antitrust issues with the government must disclose any communications, written or oral, between their representatives and US officials related to the settlement.

Yet not all of the HPE lobbyists were listed on the Tunney Act disclosures, according to the former DOJ official. One unlisted figure is Arthur Schwartz, described by Punchbowl News as “a longtime behind-the-scenes operator who has extremely close relationships with corporations looking for advice in Trump’s DC.” A source close to Schwartz insisted that while he represented HPE, he wasn’t involved in settlement discussions, thus obviating the need for disclosure.

Tunney disclosures aside, a private gathering of company representatives and government officials circumventing regulators on the front lines — Slater’s office — is disturbing. The DOJ did not return a request for comment.

All this led Rinner and Alford, the two fired officials, to speak up, in frustration and warning, while they were still in their roles. In a June speech at George Washington University, Rinner declared: “We do not plan to hash out merger settlements over martinis.” Likewise, at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee on antitrust and consumer welfare, Alford railed against the “massive ecosystem of consultants and lobbyists who push regulatory agencies toward imposing durable rules and regulations that stifle the free market.”

In reality, said the former official, “we had intense pressure from lobbyists,” prompting Slater’s team to urge the firms to “call off their dogs against us.” According to multiple sources familiar with the deal, the “dogs” in question were Schwartz and Mike Davis, a Republican legal operative and president of the Article III Project that describes itself as “an advocacy organization fighting to rein in Big Tech” (Davis, unlike Schwartz, is listed on HPE’s Tunney Act disclosure; he didn’t reply to my request for comment by deadline; Schwartz would not speak on the record).

The settlement’s defenders insist that the merger is essential for national security, creating a large American rival to China’s Huawei for networking solutions used by foreign governments and militaries. HPE, the thinking goes, shouldn’t be confused with Hewlett-Packard’s consumer-products line: dorm-room printers and the like. Since enterprise networking isn’t a consumer-facing product, it shouldn’t raise typical antitrust concerns around price and consumer welfare.

That’s simply not true. As the DOJ noted in its original complaint challenging the merger, “HPE and Juniper are the second- and third- largest providers, respectively, of enterprise-grade WLAN solutions in the United States.” If one of the three largest providers is taken over, it would very likely lead to higher prices and less dynamic innovation for “for scores of American businesses and institutions” — not just foreign governments and militaries.

As it is, numerous domestic entities rely on MIST, Juniper’s flagship networking system, including Dartmouth College, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and George Washington University. Ditto for numerous state and local agencies, sports stadiums, and the like. Once MIST is eliminated or subsumed under HPE’s leading networking product, known as Aruba, then all of these American institutions would face higher IT costs, which they would no doubt pass down to customers. Indeed, in its original complaint, the DOJ submitted comments by an HPE executive noting the competitive threat posed by MIST to Aruba in the higher-education market — perfectly unrelated to networking for foreign militaries.

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Then, too, HPE didn’t raise national-security concerns in any of its legal filings related to the antitrust dispute (though it did bring them up in news releases). Moreover, the antitrust division has a process for checking whether challenging a merger might trigger national-security concerns. That process was followed by Assefi, the Trump DOJ’s acting antitrust czar, when he first challenged the HPE-Juniper merger. He met with no issues from the Intelligence Community or other national-security agencies.

It is telling, too, that HPE’s Tunney Act filings don’t mention any meetings with national-security officials, whether from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, or the National Security Council. The filing only lists communications with officials in the DOJ. As the former official said, “under the statute, they would have to have disclosed that they spoke with nat-sec—they have to disclose whom within the government they spoke with. How is the government supposed to make that judgment” — that the deal isn’t security-sensitive — “if the nat-sec agencies haven’t been apprised?”

It is possible that the judge overseeing the settlement will review it for compliance with the Tunney Act, as four Democratic senators demanded in a letter on Tuesday. Either way, the episode opens a dismaying window into a second Trump administration in which the wealthy and well-connected are free to run roughshod over populist reformers.

Squint and you can see this working out. Sort of. As with earlier Right-wing coalitions — like the one between religious conservatives and foreign-policy hawks that defined the Bush era — both camps can claim some wins. Populists got an immigration crackdown plus tariffs; the tech bros neutered entire regulatory agencies. But when it comes to combating monopoly, Big Tech’s default business plan, the contradiction threatens to make the populists look like utter saps.

Standing at the sharp edge of these tensions is a diminutive Dublin-born lawyer named Gail Slater, who leads the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice as assistant attorney general. Given her reputation as a fierce enemy of monopolies, Trump’s choice of Slater for the job drew cheers from the market-skeptical corners of the so-called New Right. Yet Slater views her mission as protecting markets — not attacking them.

“We see what we’re doing as an essential part of the American free enterprise system”, she tells me in an interview at her office deep inside the DOJ’s labyrinthine Washington headquarters last week. “We think that we should have more confidence in our system and not think that in order to compete with China, we have to become more like China” — that is, an economy in which most sectors are dominated by a handful of giants coddled and controlled by the state.

The tech lobby insists that US national security and dominance in fields like AI require government to get out of industry’s way. Slater doesn’t see it this way, and the disagreement is more than academic. This week, an antitrust suit against Google launched in the first Trump administration and carried through by Team Biden entered its remedies phase. In 2024, Google was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior in the online search market, and now the court has to decide how to hold it accountable and prevent future wrongdoing.

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Slater’s litigation team argued that Google operates a “vicious cycle”, spending enormous sums to become the default engine worldwide, then improving its search results with better data gleaned thereby, and then using the windfall revenues to deepen its advantage as the default engine. The Trump administration insists that Google must sever its default-engine partnerships with the likes of Apple, divest from its own Chrome browser, and license its data to competitors.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission — a parallel independent agency with rule-making authority as well as the power to bring its own cases — is trying a suit against Meta launched in 2020, during the first Trump term. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg attempted to forestall the trial by offering a $1 billion settlement, far short of the $30 billion demanded by FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson. Trump himself was reportedly open to a cash deal, but the FTC ultimately spurned Zuckerberg’s payout after a meeting involving Ferguson and key staff.

Was Slater worried that a cash offer, however high, wouldn’t bring about structural fixes to Meta’s overweening market power? Yes, “and I’m told I was in that meeting”, she adds knowingly — that is to say, she inveighed against settling. A progressive antitrust veteran tells me he believes that Slater’s arguments played an important role in the outcome.

In response, Big Tech and its allies in the Chamber of Commerce Right have characterized Slater as a dangerous radical who’d sacrifice American innovation on the altar of fair play. But she insists her philosophy has a solidly conservative precedent in the Reagan administration’s decision to break up AT&T.

“This is an argument that’s been made before”, she tells me. “AT&T made a similar argument when this division, the Antitrust Division, in the mid-Eighties” resolved to “break them up.” Back then, “AT&T said, ‘You can’t do this. We are a national champion. We are critical to this country’s success. We will lose the Cold War if you break up AT&T’, in so many words.” Even so, “the division moved forward, and the Reagan administration, which is not thought of as the toughest antitrust enforcer in the history of the country” divided the firm into smaller units. Bell Labs, its research and development arm, was spun off.

America didn’t lose the Cold War, and contrary to the corporate fearmongering, the following decades saw the communications revolution that allows you to read this very article. “From that [breakup] came a lot of competition and innovation”, notes Slater. “The wireless industry came from that breakup. Bell Labs was unleashed, because the innovations at Bell Labs had been suppressed for the reason that AT&T didn’t want to disrupt its own monopoly.”

It’s true that bigness is sometimes rational. Most modern industries entail network effects, increasing returns to scale, or both. It’s why you don’t see mom-and-pop tire manufacturers, as UnHerd contributor Michael Lind often quips. But as the AT&T case shows, bigness can also generate sclerosis. Firms that dominate “toll roads”, whether landline connections or search engines, collect hefty rents without having to innovate or improve their products. They begin to put much of their energy into maintaining the chokehold.

As a result, market power translates into political power and vice versa in an accursed loop all too characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. It’s why Slater views antitrust as a critical component of the post-neoliberal turn in American political economy and the bipartisan rethink on globalization.

“I came from a family of lawyers”, she recalls. “And for people of my generation in Ireland, a lot of our legal education was influenced by being part of the European Union”, and that meant “competition law and economic law. Law and economics was a big part of, you know, European Union law, because it was all about integrating those economies”.

A pinched account of antitrust law, in which the only thing that mattered was consumer prices, was critical to the neoliberal revolution. That model “did very, very well for a lot of companies and the stock market” — and for a narrow slice of the population with the right degrees and the equity portfolios to show for it. The rest lost well-paying, often-unionized jobs and were told to take solace in cheap flatscreens.

There has to be an alternative model that “has more of a care for … American citizens, right?” asks Slater. “We see ourselves as part of that project.”

From an antitrust point of view, this means taking a more holistic view of the consumer-welfare standard that is at the heart of American monopoly law, crucially determining whether mergers should go forward. Slater laments how neoliberals of the Left and the Right, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, reduced consumer welfare to consumer prices alone, neglecting other factors, such as whether a merger would substantially lessen competition or cost jobs (consumers are also workers, after all).

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Today’s antitrust renaissance — represented on the Right by Slater and Ferguson and on the Left by Biden-era czars like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter — is all about reopening windows onto the economy that had been shuttered by the neoliberals. Yet Slater resists the “Khan-servative” label embraced by Right-of-center fans of the progressive antimonopoly crusader.

“There’s some overlap, like in the Venn diagram, there is some overlap” with Khan’s approach, Slater says. But there are also significant points of departure. For one thing, Khan led the FTC, aggressively using that agency’s rulemaking authority, which had long been left dormant. Slater, by contrast, is at the Antitrust Division, strictly an enforcement agency.

Philosophically, too, Slater sees herself as perhaps more deal-friendly compared to Khan. “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign”, says Slater, “we’ll just get out of the way. There was a perception . . . that a lot of deals were being held up for a long time, unnecessarily by both agencies [the FTC and the Antitrust Division]. And that was leading to inefficiencies” and hindering “deal flow”. Slater hopes that her approach — “If your deal is not a problem, we’re gonna say, ‘OK, you’re free to merge’ ” — will lead to less polarizing drama in the business community.

At the same time, she has so far retained the merger-review guidelines the Trumpians inherited from Team Biden. Though standard practice, the move has triggered grumbling in the pro-business press. It also garnered praise from a group of high-ranking progressives and Biden alumni I spoke with earlier this month. Slater is also scrutinizing the use of anticompetitive practices to suppress wages — winning a criminal conviction against a home health agency to fix nurses’ wages in Las Vegas. And she beams about meeting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien as one of her earliest steps in the role.

Speaking to Slater and her colleagues — one of them vents rage about how corporate attorneys used to walk around the DOJ building as if they owned it — it’s hard to believe they’re part of the same administration as Elon Musk, who positively loathed Biden’s trust-busters. Slater says she supports DOGE’s mission, even as she has resisted its efforts to shutter her division’s local field offices.

After our interview, I email her to ask if she would hesitate to act against one of Musk’s firms if she concluded that it was engaging in monopolistic behavior. In response, she sent me a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post announcing her nomination to the job, underlining the President’s expectation that she will enforce the law “vigorously and FAIRLY.”