Before getting to the news, I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be doing a call tomorrow at 3:30pm ET with The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield on what you can do about the Hollywood big media mergers. You can sign up here.

Since April, when Trump moved towards making the stock market go up as his core strategic goal, populists in the administration have lost virtually all of their power. One of the important pivot points in this shift was in July, when Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff for Attorney General Pam Bondi, engineered a coup against the right-wing populists at the Antitrust Division, at the alleged behest of MAGA corporate lobbyists Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz.

Yesterday, we got some good news on this front. Axios reported that Mizelle, who also served as the number three official at DOJ, the Acting Associate Attorney General, resigned from his positions in the administration. There were a number of reasons cited, including a desire to spend more time with family, with the obligatory ‘he is a hero’ lines from superiors. But nine months isn’t a lot of time in a high-level position like that, so there’s clearly more to the story. And I think it runs at least partly through the antitrust work we’ve done, and some dangerous legal territory into which these guys are heading.

Let’s start at the beginning, when the Trump administration in January challenged a $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks by Hewlett Packard. While not a particularly important merger in and of itself, it was a relatively big deal in monetary terms, and thus a symbol to Wall Street that Trump meant business. As conservative Sohrab Ahmani reported, the Antitrust chief, Gail Slater, said that the GOP must have “more of a care for … American citizens” and that meant cracking down on monopolies.

Starting in April, antitrust enforcers got less and less serious about challenging deals. Finally, in July, Mizelle and a coterie of MAGA lobbyists intervened in the Hewlett case itself, forcing the Antitrust Division to back down on the merger and instead pushing through a settlement that didn’t address market power concerns. Here’s Ahmani on the tackiness that ensued.

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…

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.

Mizelle got the deal through and had two of Slater’s deputies, Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, fired. But he broke a lot of china internally, and the White House had to intervene with a tense meeting, with the key players arguing it out in front of top Trump aides. These conflicts spilled into the press, as the lobbyists likely leaked the stories and then tried to blame their opponents.

And Alford, a committed conservative populist who returned to Notre Dame as a professor, has also let it lie. After leaving, he gave a talk titled “The Rule of Law vs the Rule of Lobbyists,” where he explicitly called out the sordid dealings that went down.

Alford personally names Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle and associate attorney general nominee Stanley Woodward as betraying the MAGA realignment of working-class voters by selling merger clearance to the highest bidder, concerns that he says are “not based on conjecture.” Mizelle and Woodward, Alford states, don’t share Bondi’s “commitment to a single tier of justice for all,” instead welcoming MAGA influencer lobbyists like Mike Davis, Arthur Schwartz, and Will Levi into boozy backroom deals for their clients.

So far, this sounds like a standard story of corruption, but there’s another angle that makes it problematic for the Trump administration and Mizelle himself. Under an old anti-corruption law called the Tunny Act, all antitrust settlements must be overseen and approved by a judge, with a public process for comments in case there are objections. Usually this law is an afterthought, but such a brazen scandal has changed the situation. Four Democratic Senators, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Richard Blumenthal, wrote a letter to Pitts for the Tunney Act proceeding. So did a host of state attorneys general, and advocacy groups.

So would a judge actually hold hearings? Ask for documents? Put witnesses on the stand? Try to reverse the deal? Even demand answers from the Hewlett Packard CEO? That’s not clear. All of it is possible. And the person hearing the case is Casey Pitts, a public interest and labor lawyer appointed by Joe Biden to the bench. So that’s a good draw if you are a populist, or a bad one if you are Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz, or anyone going around town trying to profit by letting mergers through.

And that brings us back to Mizelle. Right now, there’s a lot of frustration in the Trump administration over Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, which is perceived as weak and incompetent. They screwed up the Epstein files, and Trump feels they haven’t shown the ability to prosecute political opponents. My guess is that the White House aides and perhaps Bondi herself look around for someone to blame. And because of his overall sloppiness and willingness to grift in areas unrelated to Trump’s policymaking, the easiest person to point to is Mizelle. If he’s put on the stand by Pitts as a Florida resident, that’s his problem. If he’s put on the stand as top DOJ official, that’s a problem for Trump. So he got knifed.

Now, that’s not a story of good winning over darkness, how Deep Throat took down Richard Nixon through intrepid journalism (which in itself is a bit of a fairy tale). But it is progress. The truth is that taking apart corrupt regimes is never black and white, it’s about exploiting divisions and using legal processes and politics to chip away until something breaks.

Yesterday, we had a real crack in the dam. And at a moment of despair, that is not a small deal.

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller