A million years ago when I was a wee baby reporter, I helped run a tiny publication that played big called techPresident, premised on the idea that this Internet thing just might change the practice of politics. One of our more popular features was called “Clearing the Cache,” or a scruffy round-up of what I was finding interesting out in the world as I went about my reporting. With the permission of my then-editor Micah Sify, which only required the lightest of begging, I’m reviving the “Clearing the Cache” brand for the modern era. I hope you might find it of use:
There’s a fair amount of mishegas at the moment surrounding the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, where two of the top deputies to Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater have been fired against the backdrop of the Justice Department signing off on a settlement involving the merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. At least one DOJ source suggested the removals were due to insubordination. Advocates are calling for review of the situation under 1971’s Tunney Act, passed in response to then-President Richard Nixon’s handling of a deal regarding what was then International Telephone & Telegraph. Nixon was captured on White House tapes directing then-Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Richard McLaren to take a step back: “I don’t want McLaren to run around prosecuting people, raising hell about conglomerates.” Proving the adage that much of the way Washington is 50-years-on is still a reaction against the way Richard Nixon ran the place, since that time the antitrust division has operated to some degree as a “Department of Antitrust,” feeling itself somewhat outside the chain of command of the rest of the department and at arm’s length from the White House. But in line with the “unitary executive” theory all the rage among Project 2025 proponents, the antitrust division at the moment seems to be moving more fully into the broader agency apparatus.
One of those dismissed, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Roger Alford, was a key intellectual force shaping the antitrust division’s vision for its agenda. Alford hosted Slater at Notre Dame—where he has long been on the law school faculty—for her first, rather-Catholic-inflected speech in office. Said Slater at the time, “antitrust respects the moral agency of individuals by protecting their individual liberty from the tyranny of monopoly. Here at Notre Dame, the principle of individual moral agency is second nature.”
Playing a key role here: the controversial right-of-right figure Laura Loomer, who objected to the handling of the HPE case and who has emerged as something of a “loyalty enforcer” for President Trump.
Loomer aside, the enormously consequential role that outside voices can play in the day-to-day dealings of Trump’s Washington is something with which we in the media are arguably still grappling. To wit, the Winklevoss brothers, who’ve come a long way since Larry Summers was mean to them. They’ve been objecting directly to President Trump about the nomination of Brian Quintenz—currently the head of crypto policy at Andreessen Horowitz—to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on the grounds that he’s not sufficiently committed to disrupting the regulatory agency where he once worked.
Quintenz’s Senate committee confirmation vote was supposed to happen Monday, but didn’t.
Elsewhere on the merger front, attention turns to the hugely obscure Surface Transportation Board, which will say yay or nay on the big railroad deal involving the Union Pacific’s purchase of Northern Suffolk. Reuters notes that “[t]he board rarely rejects mergers outright.”
The New Yorker’s Jon Allsop wonders if Democrats are congenitally bad at the Internet.
For his part, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey (yay Jersey!) wants his colleagues to tweet (post on X, whatever) more. Probably fair to say some of his colleagues aren’t finding themselves all that open to Booker’s messaging advice at the moment.
Inspired in part by the successes of her Republican colleague Marjorie Taylor Green, Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett is, reports The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, is “testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump.”
Meanwhile, Mike Collins is running for the Senate in Georiga.
Speaking at a Senate hearing on privacy, former FTC consumer protection bureau chief Sam Levine distilled why some advocates are raising heck about Delta’s plan for AI-powered pricing: “We've always seen that pricing abuses can start in the airline industry.”
At that same hearing, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota—banding together with ally-in-privacy Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican from Tennessee—allowed herself about three-and-a-half seconds of optimism for the prospect of federal privacy legislation passing before conceding that, especially in the face of considerable opposition from many in the tech industry, getting a bill like that on the President’s desk remains “hard.”
And for Reddit, focusing on, as CEO Steve Huffman puts it, “fulfilling the promise of the Internet” seems to be working.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
-Nancy