Trump DOJ Official Faults Corporate Push to Sway Antitrust (1)

The Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be aggressive in its focus on American workers, consumers and businesses and resist efforts by big companies to hold sway over enforcement, a senior Trump administration official said.

“I have concerns about the level of corporate capture from the antitrust defense bar,” said Omeed Assefi, who is taking over the department’s criminal antitrust enforcement, in an interview with Bloomberg. “There’s a very clear ease to which the defense bar behaves with the division and thinks they’re, I would say, entitled to outcomes.”

Assefi had been running DOJ’s antitrust division since January until ...