Interviews with over three dozen people detail how lobbyist Mike Davis used his ties to Trump to push the DOJ to approve deals, including HPE's Juniper deal
Wall Street Journal
Context & Ripple Effects
HPE’s proposed Juniper acquisition had already moved from a conventional competition dispute to a contested enforcement episode: the DOJsued to block the $14B transaction over enterprise wireless competition.
Related reporting then described disagreements inside the agency, including the departure of two senior antitrust enforcers, while intelligence-community arguments cast clearance as important to competition with Huawei. The new account places political access alongside those substantive pressures.
First-order effects
The reporting puts DOJ deal-review independence under immediate scrutiny, because it alleges that Mike Davis used ties to Trump to advocate for approvals.
For HPE and Juniper, the account adds political-process risk to a deal already tested by antitrust and national-security arguments; the parties’ regulatory path becomes more closely scrutinized.
Second-order effects
Companies facing DOJ merger review may put greater value on political and national-security advocacy alongside traditional antitrust submissions, particularly in strategically framed technology transactions.
Rival dealmakers and customers in enterprise networking could face less predictable review outcomes if access to senior political figures is perceived as influencing enforcement decisions.
Third-order effects
If similar accounts recur, antitrust review could be seen less as a rules-based competition process and more as an arena where industrial-policy and political considerations determine outcomes, weakening confidence in consistent enforcement.
The HPE-Juniper episode illustrates an unresolved tension: national-security claims may increasingly reshape technology-merger analysis, but their expanded role can blur the boundary between expert review and political intervention.
The trend: Technology merger enforcement is becoming more entangled with national-security priorities and political influence over agencies traditionally expected to operate independently.
This should deeply disturb everyone in the antitrust community. Everyone who claimed the Kanter-Khan era was politicizing antitrust has an obligation to speak out. This is dangerous stuff. White collar gangster antitrust. [image]
Trump-allied @HPE lawyer Mike Davis threatened to “destroy” DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater if she didn't approve HPE's $14B bid to acquire a rival, per a sworn deposition. Davis denies the threat. But DOJ allowed the acquisition & Slater is out of DOJ. https://www.wsj.com/...
“After the trial began in March, Trump began calling around to ask why it hadn't been settled. What's the holdup? he wanted to know, according to people familiar with the matter. It was an extraordinary role for a president to play in a routine antitrust investigation.”
love this WSJ story about how a revolving door corporate lobbyist easily destroyed the handful of almost semi-useful antitrust enforcers at Trump's DOJ — the exact opposite of what MAGA, much of the press, and Matt stoller claimed would happen under Trump 2.0 [embedded post]
This DOJ - like every DOJ - decided these antitrust cases on the facts. WSJ is falsely basing its reporting on disgruntled, fired employees who failed and consistently leaked confidential information to the media to further their own agenda against the Administration, including