Wow: Trump Suddenly Fires Top DOJ Official

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1:20Michael Popok:And the heads continue to roll at the Department of Justice following Pam Bondi's immolation and embarrassing and unhinged performance in front of the House Judiciary Committee. except it's not Pam Bondi's head. They just fired Abigail Slater, a little known but super powerful head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division, because she's gotten sideways with Donald Trump, particularly about the acquisition of CNN's parent company, where Donald Trump has a vested interest in and has a conflict of interest in. She's taken on, Abigail Slater has taken on the tech giants. Many of them are in Donald Trump's back pocket or vice versa.

2:06Michael Popok:And she finally outworn, wore out her welcome 11 months into her tenure. This is not about Abigail Slater. This is about the American consumer now not having anyone to push back against Donald Trump's efforts to raise prices, to make things uncompetitive, to benefit his tech bro buddies. And who's going to pay the price literally? You and me and the American consumer. I'm Michael Popak. You're on Midas Touch and Legal AF. Let's talk about this. The last 24 hours, Donald Trump has fired a bunch of people. He fired after just 24 hours, a U.S. attorney that he had appointed to be the U.S. attorney in the Northern District of New York.

2:54Michael Popok:The guy made it 24 hours. That brings us to Abigail Slater. This is all in the wake. It's like Donald Trump needs to fire somebody after watching Pam Bondi's performance, but he doesn't know who. So now he's going to go to the next person on the list, which is Abigail Slater. Now, Abigail Slater had been with the Department of Justice for a long time in antitrust. Antitrust regulation is the going after companies. who through acquisition of their competitors make markets less competitive to the consumer, meaning your prices are higher. So when a major cell phone company acquires a competitor and gets a large market share, that means they have the ability through market muscle to raise prices and there's no competitor to balance it off, right?

3:48Michael Popok:If you acquire all of your competitors, you can just raise prices as high as you can. And who's going to stop that? The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice through their investigations. Many things like combinations of companies have to ultimately be approved and be cleared through this Department of Justice Antitrust Division. But we've been reporting for over a year that Donald Trump has corrupted it, allowing insiders, allowing business lobbyists to get inside of the sacrosanct Department of Justice Antitrust Division to manipulate policy. Now, that hasn't stopped Abigail Slater because she's a career antitrust lawyer and a public servant.

4:28Michael Popok:So she has continued to go after the Warner Brothers Netflix combination. She's basically had Paramount, which is owned by the Ellison family, close friends of Donald Trump, effectively sidelined. Paramount wants to buy Warner Brothers, including CNN. but Netflix stepped in the middle and it all comes down to the antitrust division. Now, Donald Trump has his big fat thumb on the scale because he wants the Ellison family who also own Oracle to acquire Warner Brothers and get their hands on CNN, giving Donald Trump yet another non-independent media company under his control to add to CBS and 60 Minutes and ABC.

5:13Michael Popok:And then he would add one of the crown jewels, CNN through his buddy acquiring it. Now, Donald Trump just last week had a tell. He had a tick that sort of told us that Abigail Slater's time on this planet was not long, at least as the head of the antitrust division. Actually, two tells. One, when he was interviewed about the acquisition, he made a very interesting comment that he would no longer be involved. He said he was going to be involved with who gets the prize of CNN and who gets the prize of Warner Brothers assets. And then suddenly last week he said, no, no, I'm not going to be involved.

5:51Michael Popok:My Department of Justice is going to handle that, which we know he's captured and completely controls. But here's the clip. You are close with the Ellisons who are trying to stop a merger between Warner Brothers, Discovery and Netflix. This deal could change the makeup of the media as we know it. Are you personally going to get involved in that deal? I haven't been involved. I must say, I guess I'm considered to be a very strong president. I've been called by both sides. It's the two sides. But I've decided I shouldn't be involved. The Justice Department will handle it. OK. In what way? Just looking at it to see if it's regular.

6:24They're going to make a decision. I mean, there's a theory that one of the companies is too big and it shouldn't be allowed to do it. And the other company is saying something else about, you know, they're not going to. But you're not going to interfere, even though you're close with the hell out of each other. And there'll be a winner.

6:37Michael Popok:So, yes, his Department of Justice is in control, but he doesn't want Abigail Slater to be controlled. So she was canned to get her out of the way for Donald Trump to influence and try to award the prize of CNN and Warner Brothers assets to the Ellison family. I mean, it couldn't be any clearer than that. Let's talk about something no one wants to talk about. What happens when you die? Because unfortunately, it's going to happen to you, to me, but you can be prepared with Trust and Will Online Estate Planning. I'll be honest, estate planning is one of those things that really is easy to put off.

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7:58Michael Popok:Don't wait until it's too late. Protect your loved ones today, tomorrow, and beyond with Trust & Will, the most trusted name in online estate planning. Go to trustandwill.com slash legal AF and get 20 % off. That's trustandwill.com slash legal AF to get your 20 % off. trustandwill.com slash legal AF. The other reason that Abigail Slater knew the writing was on the wall, that her career was going to be cut short just 11 months in, is because Donald Trump also pardoned a guy named Tim Lewicki, who had a company called Oakview, where he rigged the bids in order to make sure that Oakview won a contract.

8:47Michael Popok:It's called bid rigging. It's when you have what's supposed to be competitive competition between competing bids, all right, in order to do a contract, right? A request for proposal goes out, an RFP, bids come in, and the lowest bidder, lowest cost provider is supposed to win, as long as they meet all the criteria of the bid. He rigged it to make sure that he would get it. And he was convicted by Donald Trump's own Department of Justice in the first term, led by Abigail Slater, and Donald Trump pardoned him. Donald Trump just pardoned him for this bid rigging scandal. So if Abigail Slater didn't know her time was up then, she certainly knows it now.

9:32Michael Popok:And then you get this lukewarm, you know, thank you for your service social media post from Pam Bondi. Let's just call this out for what it is. She has gone after, I'm talking about Abigail Slater now, Apple run by Tim Cook, best buddies with Donald Trump. Right? And Donald Trump doesn't like that. And Tim Cook doesn't like that. She's gone after Google and successfully went after them related to ads that you see on Google and YouTube. And we know that Google and YouTube are big supporters of Donald Trump as well. So when you look at the industries that she's taken on, you know, media, technology, buddies of Donald Trump, many of them donated to his inauguration or his ballroom or both or up at the podium during his inauguration, where instead of friends and family, it was just tech bros in the back.

10:33Michael Popok:Tim Cook and the head of Meta Facebook and, you know, Zuckerberg and all that. Of course, Abigail Slater, standing tall in defense of proper antitrust regulation, was going to be on the way out. when Donald Trump said out loud in that video, I am going to keep out of it. I'm going to have the Department of Justice do it. What he really meant to say is, I got to get rid of Abigail Slater because she's in the way of what I want to accomplish with making our country not competitive, making sure that my buddies can acquire the companies that they want to acquire and not have any pushback for the antitrust division.

11:18Earlier in the year, we reported on lobbyists.

11:23Michael Popok:This has never happened in the history of the antitrust division. You know, you're not supposed to have cross-contamination or contamination. You're not supposed to allow lobbying to come into the antitrust division. Lawyers, lawyers representing Discovery or Warner Brothers or Google, Apple, any of the companies in the pharmaceutical arena, any of the companies that are going to interface with the antitrust division, they send their lawyers. They don't send their lobbyists. But to Donald Trump, everything is transactional, right? Everything is commercial. And so he allowed, and Slater put an end to it, a lobbyist to get inside of the antitrust division to try to lobby for new regulations that would regulate them as an industry.

12:10Michael Popok:That's wrong. That's corrupt. Elizabeth Warren, Senator Elizabeth Warren, fighting every day for us, said that the dismissal or firing of Abigail Slater is corruption again in our midst. And I'll be on record once again. This Department of Justice is the most corrupt Department of Justice completely captured by the presidency, completely captured by a criminal president. And this is the result. No doubt why we see U.S. attorneys get fired after. Look at what we just looked at in the last year. You've got six different U.S. attorneys who have been bounced by courts and had to resign in disgrace because they were not qualified.

12:57Michael Popok:They couldn't get confirmed at the Senate and they were illegally appointed by Pam Bondi. Gone. Including Lindsey Halligan. Including Alina Habba, those closest to Donald Trump. You know, then you've got even the ones that they're trying to encourage to take the job are lasting shorter than, you know, you know, like the shelf life for a U.S. attorney is apparently 24 hours. We just had one replaced after 24 hours. The leading attorney prosecutor for one of the 93 federal districts made it 24 hours. And now you've got Abigail Slater, which is indicative of a broader disease and corruption and cancer with an Department of Justice named Donald Trump and Pam Bondi.

13:42Michael Popok:So I'm going to continue to follow it all right here for you. I might as touch. Take a moment, slide over to Legal AF YouTube channel, hit the free subscribe button. Can't get your fill of Legal AF? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack. Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the Substack. You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily roundup that I do call, wait for it, Morning AF. What else? All the other contributors from Legal AF are there as well. We got some new reporting. We got interviews.

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