Abigail Slater, picked by US President-elect Donald Trump to be the next chief of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, boasts a stellar resume on antitrust and technology policy matters and comes from an impressive political pedigree. If confirmed, Slater will take charge of the division at a pivotal time in the history of the agency as enforcers seek to break up Google while fighting other court battles against Apple.
Abigail Slater, picked by US President-elect Donald Trump to be the next chief of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, boasts a stellar resume on antitrust and technology policy matters and comes from an impressive political pedigree. If confirmed, Slater will take charge of the division at a pivotal time in the history of the agency as enforcers seek to break up Google while fighting other court battles against another Big Tech platform, Apple.Slater, who has been an economic policy advisor to US Senator and Vice President-elect JD Vance from Ohio since February 2024, is expected to keep up the pro-enforcement antitrust trend that picked up under Joe Biden and which has left the antitrust bar unsettled over the past four years.
One case that will be closely watched, not just in the US but in Europe and other jurisdictions, will be the DOJ’s monopoly lawsuit against Google, a case brought under the first Trump administration in 2020. The DOJ and a Colorado-led bipartisan coalition of 36 states emerged victorious when a Washington, DC federal judge ruled in August that Google was an illegal monopolist in the Internet search markets.
The government is now preparing for a remedy trial in April 2025 and it has already proposed that Google be forced to sell its Chrome browser, and potentially the Android operating system.
Vance is on board with splitting off Google.
"I think you have to break these companies up. I think they're too big. They've become monopolists. They've become too powerful and, frankly, they became too powerful thanks to government privileges," he said days before the US elections (see here).
Vance also told an Ohio state court this year to categorize Google as a common carrier, arguing that the tech giant holds itself out as providing a search service under a general contractual offering and therefore can be regulated as a common carrier (see here).
While Slater has not publicly commented on a break-up of Google, she recognizes that Big Data is a big deal. In a November 2023 article written for the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Slater said that, “Whatever precedent is set in the Google antitrust case could also prove instructive in how legislators in Congress think about big data’s role in digital markets. This is particularly timely as Congress is currently weighing legislation focused on the appropriate role of government in AI.”
Google's hoovering up of user data to build scale and push out rivals played a big role in the government's case at trial (see here).
— Slater’s story —
The Political Life did a podcast with Slater in February 2021, titled “Abigail Slater's Journey from Dublin to the White House.”
There are “not many people that can say that they worked at the White House,” host Jim O'Brien said at the time.
“Only in America,” Slater replied.
“I feel like I can't say that often enough, because a lot of people are down on America right now. And so I'm here to say, as an immigrant, as someone who came here with a suitcase in 2003, don't give up on America,” she said in an Irish accent that remains intact.
— Ten years at FTC —
Slater is from Dublin, Ireland and graduated from the Loreto Abbey in 1989. She continued her education at University College Dublin, and Oxford University, from which she earned her law degrees. She also studied German law at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg.
She worked in London and Brussels as an antitrust lawyer until her law firm, Freshfields, sent her to work in Washington, DC. From there, Slater found her way to the Federal Trade Commission where she spent a total of ten years. Her time working as a trial attorney for seven years on antitrust and mergers reviews in the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, where she focused on healthcare cases, was followed by three years as an attorney advisor for former Democratic commissioner Julie Brill.
Slater advised Brill — a well-known champion of privacy enforcement — on antitrust matters. Brill is a Democrat who was appointed by President Barack Obama, but Slater said the difference in their party affiliations never posed a problem.
“When I interviewed with her, I told her I was a registered Republican, and she chuckled and said that didn’t matter to her. There seemed to be more bipartisan consensus on antitrust policy than there is now,” Slater recalled. There were lots of 5-0 votes. Now we are in the midst of more of a sea change,” she told MLex sister publication FTCWatch in 2019 (see here).
Slater said the most notable case she worked on involved the agency obtaining a historic $1.2 billion settlement from drugmaker Cephalon's parent, Teva Pharmaceuticals, which the FTC accused of overcharging for the sleep disorder drug Provigil.
“I was one small cog on the agency’s team,” she said.
Slater said going from her staff job to working directly for a commissioner was “fascinating.”
“Some days you felt like you weren't working at the same organization because the job was so different,” she told The Political Life.
As a line attorney, Slater said, she worked on one case at a time with one set of facts at a time. The cases are very fact-dependent and require one to use a very different skill set for doing investigations, taking depositions, reviewing documents. She described it as “very sort of hands-on nuts and bolts lawyering.”
“And then to go work for a commissioner, it's a different role. You're advising on the work that you used to do, as it were,” Slater said.
The FTC staff would put cases together and make recommendations to the commission, and the Democratic and Republican commissioners would then vote on the cases. The job of an advisor to a commissioner is to review the work and ask questions of the staff and the bureau directors, and then make a recommendation to the commissioner.
The FTC is a five-member commission that votes on cases and policy reports, and the work of an advisor is varied.
“At the commission level, you're looking at everything. You're like the sort of central clearing house for all of the work coming in from different parts of the commission. And it was very challenging, very, very rewarding work. And I learned a lot in three years,” Slater said.
While she worked on significant cases the FTC brought against pharmaceutical companies’ pay-for-delay agreements, her views on technology patents and standard-setting aren’t known. In 2012, however, Slater was involved in a project aimed at exploring the impact of patent assertion entity activities on innovation and competition and the implications for antitrust enforcement and policy.
— Move to the White House —
After the FTC, Slater went on to become general counsel at the Internet Association, a now defunct
American lobbying group based in Washington, DC that was once said to be Silicon Valley’s most important voice in Washington. Slater worked there from September 2014 to February 2018.
“At that moment in time, you were looking at a lot of sort of new, novel issues as they intersected with the Internet and the companies that we represented. A big part of it was privacy, because privacy is still a large issue. You know, for Internet companies, data security, some intellectual property issues, international trade,” Slater said in the same podcast with The Political Life.
From there, Slater was appointed special assistant to US President Donald Trump — a role in which she managed the technology, telco and cyber policy portfolios from February 2018 to May 2019.
At the White House Slater worked on several privacy and telecommunications issues. She was a senior aide on the National Economic Council under two directors, former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, a registered Democrat, and long-time Republican economist Lawrence Kudlow.
She was a key architect of the inter-agency privacy plan and was also a public face for the administration at events involving policy debates. One of the files she worked on involved Trump signing an executive order to ban Huawei from selling telecom gear in the US.
“I was at the right place at the time to work on important issues,” she told FTCWatch.
The White House’s National Economic Council is not very big, Slater said in the podcast. “We could all fit in one room and we'd sit and have staff meetings with our boss, Larry Kudlow, sitting around one table.”
“So what we're supposed to do is be small but mighty and be a force multiplier. So work with the agencies on implementing the policy, and it's divided by the economic sector. So I did tech and telco, cyber security. My counterparts did international trade or financial services, you name it,” she said in the podcast.
Slater said the 18 months working at the White House “felt like five” years, but walking every day from the old executive office building to the White House campus “never gets old.”
“It was hard to leave, and it was very bittersweet,” Slater said about the end of her White House role.
After leaving the White House, she was senior vice president for policy and strategy at Fox Corp. in Washington.
At Fox, Slater was more of a generalist at a time when the company focused on high-quality live programming but also recognized the shift to digital and streaming. She also worked on legislation on copyright laws and the misappropriation of digital streams so that illegal streaming was no longer a misdemeanor, but a felony.
She then spent nearly two years at Roku as vice president before joining Vance’s staff.
— Praise from the antitrust bar, enforcers —
Despite her work on other subjects, Slater said “at my core, I am an antitrust lawyer.” She said the field is appealing because “it’s very interesting. It is applied economics with an analytical framework, and you are exposed to many different kinds of companies and you learn a lot about them.”
A former FTC lawyer who worked with Slater described her as “an antitrust lawyer’s lawyer who is very methodical and thorough. She has a strong personality and will do what is right and won’t be pushed around.”
This lawyer said Slater is a strong enforcer but predicted she wouldn’t try to push the law as far as the Biden administration did.
“She will look at whether this is an efficient use of government resources,” she told MLex.
The lawyer said Slater has a soothing voice with an Irish accent and “will tell you your client is being sued and it will sound lovely.”
Former Acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen told MLex that Slater is “an ideal candidate with deep knowledge of the law and institutions and has experience in government, private practice and as an in-house counsel.”
Ohlhausen added that Slater is a “lovely person who will be a good leader.”
She also said it is not unusual that Slater worked as an attorney-adviser for a commissioner of another political party.
“When you bring a career person to your staff it’s less about political tests and more about having the knowledge.”
Republican FTC commissioner Andrew Ferguson almost immediately reacted to news of Slater’s nomination, saying, “This is a perfect pick.”
“A serious antitrust lawyer who understands the unique challenges of Big Tech, but also wants to promote growth and innovation,” Ferguson said in a post on social media platform X. “Fantastic choice by President Trump.”
Slater’s combination of government and private sector experience is among the most varied of any person who has run the DOJ’s antitrust division. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be taking a job that for Robert Jackson was a stepping stone to a seat on the Supreme Court, and that for William Donovan led to the top job in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
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