Gail Slater, head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division resigned on Thursday after reportedly losing the support of key cabinet officials. Slater approved multiple mergers for Woke Disney while also holding up American companies taking on China’s Huawei.
As Breitbart News reported this morning, Slater resigned from her position as the head of the antitrust division with her tenure including the high profile antitrust case against Google, which failed to secure a breakup of the internet giant or any penalty beyond what most onlookers considered a slap on the wrist.
Slater originally came under fire for ignoring concerns from Trump administration intelligence officials that blocking the merger of HPE and Juniper would help empower Huawei. As Breitbart News reported at the time, many MAGA leaders such as Charlie Kirk had the same concerns. Slater ignored them, while greenlighting mergers from woke companies like Disney. She was also involved in the ongoing review of the widely-criticized proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Bros, although her stance on it is unclear.
But Slater had troubling items on her resume as well. Prior to becoming the DoJ’s top antitrust official, Slater was a member of the “Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online” spearheaded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn.
The working group included a string of NGOs and transnational bodies that have been dedicated to the online suppression of conservative viewpoints: the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, the German Marshall Fund (responsible for the “Hamilton 2.0” dashboard which labeled MAGA supporters Russian trolls), the Center for Democracy and Technology (relentlessly focused on shutting down Elon Musk’s X and censoring Trump supporters), and the United Nations.
In a major report, the Working Group called for “scalable solutions” to stop social media companies from “enabling the spread of disinformation, hate speech, election interference, cyber-bullying.” It praised Big Tech for “removing apps like Infowars for spreading COVID-19 disinformation” and “deleting misleading tweets from major political figures such as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.” The report argued this showed a “recognition by platforms of their moral/de facto responsibility as good corporate citizens for the content posted on their platforms.”
Some left-wing commentators have portrayed Slater as being beat out by corporate lobbyists. Daniel Dayen of the American Prospect posted on X that she was defeated by lobbyists who made “corrupt deals with corporate monopolists for millions of dollars.”
Luther Lowe, the head lobbyist for Y Combinator who previously served as head lobbyist for yelp and personally gave over $150,000 to Democrats (and not a cent to Republicans) posted on X “This is not a good development for those who care about little tech.”
During the 2024 election, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman hosted a “Little Tech for Harris” fundraiser headlined by Nancy Pelosi.
Despite these portrayals as a foe of big corporations, Slater’s achievements included the approval of massive mergers for companies like Disney. She just approved the NFL-Disney Merger without even giving it a thorough “second request review.” She previously approved another Disney merger with the streaming company FUBO.
In contrast, to Slater, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has taken on Disney by investigating The View for violating equal time rules. Carr publicly noted the importance of not approving anti-competitive deals from monopolistic companies like Disney last week.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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