Department of Justice

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This story has been retracted.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. 

On Friday, May 19, the National Association of Government Employees filed an emergency motion in their lawsuit against President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. NAGE urged the Massachusetts District Court to issue a preliminary injunction holding that the debt ceiling violates the separation of powers and Presentment Clause set forth in Articles I and II of the U.S. Constitution. 

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and DOJ Antitrust Division have long served as an essential stop for antitrust experts looking to maximize opportunities, influence, and compensation at BigLaw firms and monopolistic corporations. By spending some time learning the ins and outs of government investigations and enforcement efforts, revolvers are seen by potential corporate employers to be better equipped to assist corporations in antitrust lawsuits against their former government employers.

This is the latest installment of a new biweekly blog series from RDP. Every two weeks, we call out ongoing trends in media coverage of the Justice Department’s focus and priorities, giving context from our past DOJ oversight work as needed, with an eye to the impact of DOJ capacity and resources, as well as alignment with the Biden administration’s professed goals.