House Democrats open inquiry into ouster of US antitrust chief Gail Slater

House Democrats on Wednesday demanded a briefing from the justice department on the removal of Gail Slater, who was forced to resign as head of the antitrust division this month under a cloud of controversy and fraught tensions with her bosses inside the Trump administration.

The request from Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, marked the first step in what is almost certain to become a much larger investigation should Democrats reclaim the House majority in the midterm elections and gain subpoena power.

In a letter to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, Raskin sought a briefing on the role of Trump-connected lobbyists in Slater’s removal, after she tried to block a $14bn merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, a cloud-computing and software company.

“With the departure of AAG Slater, it appears there are no longer any principled antitrust experts left to guard the antitrust division from this cascade of corruption,” Raskin wrote. “The leadership vacuum is occurring just as the antitrust division is handling historic cases.”

Slater was pushed out after her relationship with Bondi and JD Vance – once her most powerful ally until he grew weary of her invoking his name at the justice department– steadily deteriorated off the back of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise case, the Guardian has previously reported.

Among other things, Slater had told Bondi that the US intelligence community never raised national security concerns about stopping the deal. But her claim was contradicted by John Ratcliffe, the CIA director who questioned why he had not been consulted.

An exasperated Bondi later told associates she felt Slater had lied to her to continue with the suit, which the justice department dropped in June 2025 in favor of negotiating a settlement. Slater in turn complained the department had been captured by lobbyists for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, at a congressional hearing earlier this month. Photograph: Allison Robbert/AP

A spokesperson for the justice department referred queries about its response to Raskin’s letter to Bondi’s previous statement thanking Slater for her service.

Still, the department’s lack of response to an earlier request by Raskin in August about the tumult inside the antitrust division appears to have galvanized Democrats to double down on an investigation into a series of high-profile or controversial cases.

The letter also raised questions of a merger between American Express Global Business Travel and CWT Holdings; a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster; bids by Netflix and Paramount to acquire Warner Bros Discovery; an appeal against a US district court ruling that Google has a monopoly over online searches.

With respect to the American Express deal, Raskin wrote: “It appears the dismissal may have also prevented the disclosure of contacts between DOJ officials and Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to President Trump where you were a partner until January 2025.”

Roger Alford, the former principal deputy to Slater, suggested in freewheeling remarks at a Tech Policy Institute event shortly after he too was pushed out from the antitrust division last year that he expected political lobbying to shape the outcome of the Live Nation matter.

“Regarding live nation,” the letter said, “Mr Alford has warned that these firms ‘have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of [DOJ’s] Fifth Floor [which houses the senior leadership offices] in defense of their monopoly abuses.’”

An investigation into the circumstances of Slater’s removal could be bruising for Trump allies, seen to have played a role in the saga but are not part of the administration and therefore not protected by an assertion of executive privilege by Donald Trump to block their testimony.

The people who fit that category are likely to include Mike Davis, a firebrand Republican litigator who was retained by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to advise on the merger and took credit for Slater’s removal in posts on X.

Davis declined to comment when reached by phone on Wednesday, but he has previously posted to X: “Dear Trump Appointees: If Senate Democrats would be upset if you got fired, you should just resign now. You’re in the wrong administration.”