I guess this is just par for the course:
An antitrust lawyer who was dismissed last month from the Justice Department accused senior officials of cutting deals with favored lobbyists and undermining the independence of antitrust enforcement.
Roger Alford, formerly the antitrust division’s second-in-command, on Monday said two senior aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi had corrupted the department’s typical law-enforcement process for dealing with antitrust lawsuits. The two senior officials were heavily involved in negotiating a proposed settlement in June that allowed Hewlett Packard Enterprise to acquire a competitor, Juniper Networks.
Alford called on a federal court in San Jose, Calif., that is overseeing the Justice Department’s proposed resolution to “examine the surprising truth of what happened.” Federal courts have authority to look for any backroom dealings that could have influenced the settlement of a merger lawsuit.
“I hope the court blocks the HPE/Juniper merger,” Alford said in a speech at the Technology Policy Institute in Aspen, Colo. “If you knew what I knew, you would hope so too.”
Total corruption all the way down:
Alford said Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, is prone to favoring outside lawyers and lobbyists with whom he is friends. Mizelle and another top aide to Bondi, Stanley Woodward, played significant roles in how the department settled with HPE and Juniper in June, Alford said. Trump has nominated Woodward to be the Justice Department’s third-ranking official.
“Chad Mizelle accepts party meetings and makes key decisions depending on whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend,” Alford said. “Aware of this injustice, companies are hiring lawyers and influence peddlers to bolster their MAGA credentials and pervert traditional law enforcement.”
This guy was in the first Trump Justice Department and says it was nothing like this.
There’s always been lobbying but this is something else entirely. It’s all MAGA patronage, grift and palm greasing. As Trump would say, “we’ve never seen anything like it.”