Politics

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,” the letter said. “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.