The Utter Failure of the Trump Administration’s Antitrust Chief

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There was a brief moment when it looked like the Trump administration would get serious about monopolies. It didn’t last.

that Delrahim and Attorney General William Barr abused antitrust enforcement to punish political opponents. The most important revelation was that they ordered burdensome informational demands to marijuana industry mergers that they had no intention of challenging under the antitrust laws.

None of this had been public, and it was shocking. So was the the deception with which Delrahim attempted to wave it away. Because federal merger review is bureaucratically opaque, his letter might strike many as pretty reasonable. The Justice Department must quickly review many large mergers, and Delrahim said his team needed to learn as much as it could of this new, idiosyncratic, and fast-growing industry.

His claims were facially absurd. The “second requests” he ordered to marijuana companies are extremely burdensome impositions reserved for a tiny fraction of the thousands of mergers reviewed every year. Because they impose extraordinary and expensive demands on the firms that receive them, they are not issued except with respect to deals that are very likely illegal.

More remarkable than what Delrahim said are the things he didn’t say. He didn’t dispute the whistleblower’s claim that DOJ staff were ordered not to interview customers and competitors of the firms under review—even though third-party interviews are bread and butter in merger investigations and are required by the agency’s—nor that, once the merging firms complied and delivered millions of pages of documents, the investigators didn’t really read them.

 

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