DOJ Insider Blows the Whistle on Pay-to-Play Antitrust Corruption

https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/



I met Roger Alford once, a few months ago at a conference. He’s a no-doubt conservative who served in both Trump administrations, yet he is cursed with having a sense of right and wrong. He was fired a few weeks ago for resisting pay-to-play corruption at the Justice Department, which offended his belief system. Unlike virtually everyone in the Republican Party since Inauguration Day, he’s willing to talk about it.

Alford, now a law professor at Notre Dame, delivered a speech at the Tech Policy Institute Aspen Forum on Monday, and simultaneously released an opinion piece in UnHerd, a well-known forum for populist conservatives. In both, he decried the subordination of the rule of law to a “rule of lobbyists,” confirming a degradation of antitrust under Trump that has been widely reported. In doing so, he made it more likely that the lobbyist cabal and their enablers in the Justice Department, both of whom he singled out by name, would face a judicial tribunal that can expose this broken process.

Here are the top takeaways from Alford’s revelations on Monday, and what it means for those in power and the future of antitrust enforcement:

Playing on betrayal. Some progressives may blanche at Alford’s praise for President Trump’s populist messaging, and insistence that it has been subverted by top DOJ officials selling out to lobbyists. He absolves Attorney General Pam Bondi and her number two Todd Blanche of blame as well. Setting up a dichotomy between “genuine MAGA reformers and MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists” may not sit well. But the audience for these remarks is not anyone reading the Prospect. He is attempting to reach the president and his inner circle by playing on Trump’s demand for total loyalty.

Alford personally names Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle and associate attorney general nominee Stanley Woodward as betraying the MAGA realignment of working-class voters by selling merger clearance to the highest bidder, concerns that he says are “not based on conjecture.” Mizelle and Woodward, Alford states, don’t share Bondi’s “commitment to a single tier of justice for all,” instead welcoming MAGA influencer lobbyists like Mike Davis, Arthur Schwartz and Will Levi into boozy backroom deals for their clients. Specifically, Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks paid Davis and Schwartz and Levi $1 million to defuse a merger challenge, and Mizelle and Woodward, perceiving them as MAGA comrades, overruled Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater to settle the case. Alford and Bill Rinner, who was also fired recently, were involved in the HPE negotiations.

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