Gail Slater's departure from the US Department of Justice on Thursday ended a nearly year-long turf war and stripped the Antitrust Division down to three political appointees in the front office.
Gail Slater's departure from the US Department of Justice on Thursday ended a nearly year-long turf war and stripped the agency's Antitrust Division down to three political appointees in the front office.Slater is the second high-ranking casualty in the division this week. Mark Hamer, a Slater deputy in charge of civil litigation, resigned on Monday after less than a year in the job (see here).
Omeed Assefi, the deputy assistant attorney general in charge of criminal enforcement, is reportedly stepping into Slater's job in an acting capacity.
Dina Kallay, in charge of international, policy and appellate, and Chetan Sanghvi, who focuses on economic research and analysis are the only two remaining deputies in the Antitrust Division, which in this administration has had six appointees at that level or higher.
Slater's eventual ouster had been the subject of speculation in antitrust circles after two of her deputies — Roger Alford and William Rinner — were fired in July 2025 for opposing a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. The deal closed after the companies settled with the DOJ, but several US states continue to challenge it, citing Alford’s accusation that two top DOJ officials of "perverted justice" through influence-peddling.
It is understood that Slater wasn't permitted to find replacements for Alford and Rinner.
Slater and her team are understood to have been under pressure to settle competition cases from higher-ups in Main Justice. The agency’s settlement of its HPE-Juniper lawsuit hasn’t completely resolved that matter, as a court still must determine whether the settlement was in the public interest and a number of US states recently won the right to depose and seek documents from professionals hired by the companies to get the deal cleared.
Those professionals — lawyers Mike Davis and Will Levi and political advisor Arthur Schwartz — were accused by Alford last August of improper lobbying and influence-peddling in connection with the settlement.
— Staff exodus —
A hiring freeze coupled with two rounds of deferred resignation programs left DOJ line attorneys in need of paralegals. On Wednesday, Slater posted a job ad for two paralegals to work in the DOJ's Chicago office, saying they would support "world-class antitrust lawyers who are focused on bringing more competition to our nation's agricultural sector as well as criminal antitrust enforcement."
Staffing in the Antitrust Division's Washington DC criminal section has been reduced by nearly half in the past year, and is now down to roughly 25 attorneys, it is understood. Overall staffing in the Antitrust Division is down to slightly north of 600 people from around 800 a year ago, it is understood.
The high-profile ousters and the exodus of line attorneys comes as the DOJ has major civil and criminal matters to see through, including monopolization lawsuits against Big Tech giant Google and a pending jury trial aimed at separating Ticketmaster from its parent, Live Nation. The latter case is less than three weeks from trial in a Manhattan federal court.
— Omeed Assefi —
Assefi has reportedly been appointed acting chief of the Antitrust Division, a position he briefly held last year before Slater’s arrival. He has been an assistant US attorney in the District of Columbia, where he prosecuted violent crimes in US District Court and the DC Superior Court.
Prior to that, Assefi served in the Trump administration as a deputy associate attorney general in the Office of the Associate Attorney General, where he helped supervise the Civil, Antitrust and Civil Rights divisions. Assefi also spent time as an assistant special counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office, where he represented the Office of the President in the DOJ special counsel’s investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
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