The Trump Justice Department is embroiled in a corporate coup attempt, exposing major rifts within the GOP coalition and a rampant culture of pay-to-play corruption. The graft reaches the highest levels of the agency, resulting in the ouster of top department prosecutors and threatening to undo a number of ongoing Joe Biden–era lawsuits against corporations like Apple, Visa, and Ticketmaster.
After a scorched-earth lobbying campaign, the Department of Justice walked back its own lawsuit blocking a $14 billion tech megamerger pursued by tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) just weeks before the case was set to go to trial.
Instead, the Justice Department approved the deal with a weak consent decree — a legally binding order imposing some obligations on the combined firm to maintain market competition. In doing so, officials overruled their own antitrust division, whose initial complaint on the merger laid out a litany of anticompetitive concerns.
HPE and its acquisition target, Juniper Networks, are head-to-head competitors in the market of Wi-Fi systems that many businesses, large and small, rely on. According to the lawsuit, the merger will increase Wi-Fi costs, which will ultimately be passed on to consumers.
In the months following the initial January lawsuit, HPE ran an unorthodox lobbying campaign to influence the Trump administration by bankrolling a team of shadowy Trump-connected consultants and influence peddlers.
That included paying $1 million each to Arthur Schwartz, a confidant of Don Trump Jr and Vice President J. D. Vance, and MAGA antitrust whisperer Mike Davis, who celebrated the initial lawsuit (“3 into 2; you must sue,” was how he originally put it in a post on X) before getting hired by HPE to argue the opposite. HPE also paid a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin, Will Levi, who served as chief of staff to the US attorney general during Donald Trump’s first term.
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Auteur: Luke Goldstein
