Department of Justice

Facing an existential legal threat, the scandal-plagued software company has hired price-fixing monopolists’ favorite lawyers.

Despite successes in fighting corporate power, the message is muddled.

This week’s Hack Watch recaps some economic stories you may have missed, plus our initial reaction to Biden’s big speech.

Price Gouging Has Been Enabled Through Decades Of Unchecked Corporate Consolidation. The Strike Force Will Protect Consumers From Unfair Pricing And Unbridled Corporate Power.

As he leaves the scandal-plagued firm, Jay Parsons offers one last defense of rent-gougers.

Cracking down on corporate abuses is what government should be for.

The RealPage scandal gives Biden a real opportunity to rally working-class support for his reelection campaign.

This story has been retracted.

Jones Day, the Trump admin’s favorite law firm and home of its most notorious alums, is trying to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

DOJ’s penalty for Booz Allen Hamilton ripping off the government is tens of millions less than a whistleblower thinks the company stole. 

A company under federal antitrust investigation for helping landlords jack up rents is not a reliable or independent source.

All last spring, as the looming threat of default swallowed up all the oxygen on the Hill, every other serious crisis demanding political attention played second fiddle to Republicans’ manufactured disaster. In May, President Biden said his “hope and intention” was to “find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it.” A lawsuit brought this May by 75,000 federal employees challenging the constitutionality of the debt limit offers just that opportunity. 

So why is the Justice Department actively fighting to get the case dismissed, likely limiting the federal government’s capacity to govern effectively?

Two weeks ago, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan entered a House Judiciary  Committee hearing with a target on her back. In the leadup to the hearing, Republicans readied their trumped-up attacks against Khan and the agency she leads: a barely relevant memo from a conflicted ethics officer, a list of unfounded grievances from bitter former Commissioner Christine Wilson, and absurd defenses of Elon Musk’s lazy privacy practices at Twitter. But Khan emerged unscathed, and by the end, the Republicans had lost all their fire.

Implicit in the worldview of these revolvers is the idea that corporations should be free to operate and acquire competitors with near impunity, therefore antitrust enforcement should be as narrowly tailored as possible. This is obviously problematic — we need regulators that believe in the government’s ability to take on corporations with outsized market influence — but Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Christine Varney recently took things many steps further in her representation of the biotech company Illumina in its case against the FTC. Varney doesn’t just attack specific enforcement actions as unwarranted, but calls into question the constitutionality of the FTC’s authority to issue enforcement actions in the first place.