Justice Department Antitrust Chief Gail Slater Leaves Post

Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater on Thursday stepped down from her post as she sought to further “America First antitrust.”

Slater wrote on X, “It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG for Antitrust today. It was indeed the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role. Huge thanks to all who supported me this past year, most especially the men and women of @justiceatr.”

The Senate confirmed Slater last March with the support of Republicans and Democrats, and she led some of the agency’s most prominent antitrust cases during her time at the Justice Department.

During her time she led the antitrust case against Google, in which the Justice Department convinced a federal judge in Virginia that Google monopolized the ad tech market. However, it did not convince the judge to break up Google’s search business in a follow up case.

Slater at times clashed with senior officials who favored more lenient oversight of mergers. In a way, Slater found herself in a political bind between the two camps of the Trump administration: those with a more populist impulse and those that favored more lenient dealmaking.

Slater had submitted a statement of interest in an antitrust case alleging that big tech and big media organizations colluded to censor an organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“On behalf of the Department of Justice, we thank Gail Slater for her service to the Antitrust Division which works to protect consumers, promote affordability, and expand economic opportunity,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.

During many of her speeches, Slater had argued that “America First Antitrust” is about empowering “America’s forgotten men and women:”

America First Antitrust empowers America’s forgotten men and women to shape their own economic destinies in the free market. We will stand for America’s forgotten consumers. We will stand for America’s forgotten workers. And we will stand for the small businesses and innovators, from Little Tech, to manufacturing, to family farms, that were forgotten by our economic policies for too long.

How will we accomplish this and what are our guiding principles? I submit we need only look to the past and to our conservative roots to find these principles. America First Antitrust roots are grounded in the Sherman Antitrust Act, but they in fact date back to our nation’s founding.

She added, “Let us not forget that the Boston Tea Party was a protest not only against the British government’s taxation without representation, but also against the monopoly granted to the British East India Company.” [Emphasis added]

“Finally, America First Antitrust continues the legacy of the Ohio Republican Senator John Sherman, the namesake of the Sherman Act, a true economic populist who never went to college, was a self-taught engineer, and became a lawyer under the apprenticeship of his brother,” she added.