corporatocracy (noun) — a system of government in which corporations, financial institutions, or other business entities hold effective political power, either by directly controlling the state or by exerting decisive influence over the officials and institutions that do.
A word before the reporting starts. I don't usually step outside the facts to tell you what I think about them. Most of the time, the facts do that work on their own. But four mergers, three ousted federal regulators, and a lobbyist who told a reporter, on the record, "I'm the best fixer in Washington, period. Full stop" — that's not a scandal in the way we usually mean the word. A scandal implies something went wrong. Read what follows and decide for yourself whether anything here actually did, by the only standard that currently matters: none of it appears to have broken a law. That's not a loophole in how the system works. As best I can tell, it's close to the whole of how the system works now. It just has a specific cast of characters and a specific client list at the moment, and it will have a different cast and a different client list the next time the party in power changes, because this isn't a story about one party. It's a story about what happens to any regulatory agency once the people who staff it can be reached by whoever's willing to pay the going rate, and about how thin the line has worn between "lobbying" and "picking who does the enforcing" in the first place. Read it, then decide who you think this system is actually built to serve.
Mike Davis is a 48-year-old Trump-allied lawyer and lobbyist. He's not an antitrust attorney by trade — his background is judicial nominations and MAGA-world legal combat, not merger law — and he doesn't work at the Justice Department in any official capacity. What he does is get paid by corporations to make the DOJ's Antitrust Division see things their way, and according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published in March, he's become one of the most influential people currently deciding which corporate mergers the federal government allows, without holding a single government job.
Here's how Davis describes his own role, on the record, to the Journal: "I'm the best fixer in Washington, period. Full stop. I know the people. I know the process. I know their pressure points. I know how to win." That's not a boast made in isolation. The Journal's investigation — built on interviews with more than three dozen DOJ employees, lobbyists, lawyers, and others familiar with the Antitrust Division — found that Davis pushed antitrust officials at the Justice Department to approve his deals, and went over their heads when they wouldn't comply. By Davis's own count to the Journal, his three most prominent clients over the past year all got what they wanted: two closed their deals, and one avoided being broken up. His pay, he told the Journal, runs as much as $300,000 a month, plus seven-figure fees when a deal closes.
It helps to know how Davis got there. When Trump won in 2024, Davis said he recommended two people for the jobs that would matter most to his future clients: Gail Slater to run the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and Andrew Ferguson to chair the FTC, the two federal agencies that decide which mergers go through. Trump went with both picks. Davis, in other words, didn't just influence antitrust enforcement from the outside — by his own account, he helped choose the people who'd be doing the enforcing, and later got paid by companies that needed those same people to look the other way. Three of the government's own senior antitrust enforcers, Slater included, have since left the building — two fired, one forced to resign. This is what that looked like, deal by deal, with the paper trail behind each one.
Case One: HPE-Juniper, and the Phone Call Under Oath
This outlet has covered the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks case in detail before: the $14 billion merger, the DOJ's initial move to block it, the settlement that followed, and the Tunney Act proceeding — the 1974 law letting a judge check whether a settlement serves the public interest — that state attorneys general used to challenge whether the deal was cleared on the merits or on connections. On August 12, 2026, Judge P. Casey Pitts approved the settlement anyway, but not without finding two real Tunney Act violations along the way: HPE failed to disclose lobbying contacts with the CIA and the Pentagon, and the administration withheld information about alternative remedies it had considered. The violations didn't block the deal, Pitts wrote, because twelve states and the District of Columbia had already forced the concealed information into public view themselves.
What's new since that piece ran is how much more the Journal's own reporting has filled in — and how personal it turns out to have been. Slater and Davis weren't strangers. Slater developed her interest in reining in Big Tech after a decade at the FTC and a stint at a tech-industry trade group; in 2019, while at Fox Corp., she talked Davis into co-founding a right-leaning Big Tech watchdog with her, and the two reportedly spoke several times a day for years. On the day of her Senate confirmation hearing, Davis posted a photo of the two of them online: "Very proud of my good friend Gail Slater. She will help make America competitive again."
That friendship is the backdrop for the call at the center of this story. HPE hired Davis after the DOJ sued to block its $14 billion Juniper acquisition in early 2025. DOJ's own antitrust lawyers wanted HPE to divest Juniper's AI-networking business, Mist, as a condition of approval. In April, according to people familiar with the matter, Davis instead pitched Slater a different idea over drinks: the combined company would spend over $100 million on U.S. factories and instead fund networking engineering programs at universities. Slater's staff considered it non-responsive to their actual competition concerns; an HPE spokesman disputes that framing, saying the idea originated with DOJ's own antitrust division, not HPE or Davis. It was around this point — after DOJ staff made clear the counterproposal was inappropriate — that, according to a sworn deposition Roger Alford gave in the later Tunney Act litigation over the settlement, and reviewed directly by the Journal, Davis called Slater and told her: "If you don't approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ." Slater relayed the call to Alford and said it had badly shaken her, Alford testified. Davis, in his own on-record interview with the Journal, called the allegation "utter bull," and said he pushed for Alford's firing over "bogus" corruption claims against him, not the HPE deal.
What happened next isn't disputed the way the phone call is. On June 5, Slater told HPE's representatives directly to keep lobbyists out of the negotiations; her deputy reinforced it on the way out the door: "No more lobbyists. I'm serious." That same day, unbeknownst to them, Davis had lunch with Chad Mizelle, then Attorney General Pam Bondi's chief of staff — Mizelle says the lunch wasn't about HPE. Three weeks later, on June 27, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward — DOJ's third-ranking official, and described by the Journal as close to Davis — walked into Slater's office and put a term sheet on her desk that HPE's own lawyers had drafted, with no mention of the Mist divestiture DOJ had been asking for. When Slater asked what would happen if she didn't sign, Woodward told her she was too hard to fire, but that he'd fire her deputies instead. She later told colleagues it felt like having a gun to her head, and said she was only permitted minor edits before the DOJ announced the settlement the next day. Mizelle disputes that characterization, saying Slater's team was "instrumental in editing the draft" after Woodward presented it, including adding and deleting substantive terms. Weeks later, two of her deputies — Alford among them — were fired.
The aftermath got uglier and more personal. In mid-September, Alford called Davis "unprincipled" on an antitrust conference panel. Davis texted him that night to take it up directly — with Slater, who'd originally introduced the two by text, still on the thread. Alford answered with a line from the Gospel of Matthew about a man who gains the world and forfeits his soul. "You're a coward. And a clown," Davis wrote back the next day, adding in a later message that he had "good judgment, discernment, and loyalty" that Alford and Slater lacked, and that he wasn't "going to keep taking this" — a line both Slater and Alford took as a threat. One day after that exchange, the Justice Department filed a complaint with the Florida Bar seeking Alford's permanent disbarment, citing his public comments about the HPE process. That case is still open.
By February 2026, Slater was gone too, forced out before the Live Nation-Ticketmaster settlement described below was even reached. Davis celebrated her removal in more than a dozen posts on X. A senior White House official told the Journal that Davis played a role in her ouster; in his own later deposition, Davis acknowledged recommending Slater's firing "to anyone who would listen," including Woodward, Deputy AG Todd Blanche, and Bondi herself. This outlet's prior HPE/Juniper coverage already documented the Tunney Act proceeding that followed and Judge Pitts's August 12, 2026, ruling. What the Journal's reporting adds is the texture in between: a friendship, a term sheet placed on a desk by the department's own third-in-command, and a disbarment complaint filed against the man who testified about all of it, one day after he was told to stop talking.
Case Two: Compass-Anywhere, or How to Skip a Deeper Look
In September 2025, Compass announced a $1.6 billion all-stock acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate, a deal that would create the world's largest real estate brokerage — roughly 340,000 agents across 120 countries — with a combined value near $10 billion. In December, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote directly to the DOJ and the FTC, warning that the deal could allow a dominant brokerage to dictate how listings are shared, entrench Compass's already controversial private-listings strategy, and keep commissions artificially high in a housing market already unaffordable for most buyers. They asked the agencies to "thoroughly investigate" and block the deal if it didn't hold up under antitrust law.
It didn't get that investigation. Compass hired Davis specifically to help it avoid a "second request" — the routine antitrust step where regulators ask for more information before deciding whether to block or approve a deal. Slater wanted one; the combined company would have controlled more than a fifth of home-sales volume nationwide, according to Real Trends Consulting. Davis appealed directly to Deputy AG Blanche's office, which agreed the concerns could be handled without a deeper look. Slater and her antitrust staff were overruled, and the deal closed on January 9, 2026, without the second request — months ahead of the timeline the companies themselves had originally projected, and while Warren and Wyden's letter asking for exactly that scrutiny was still sitting unanswered. A Justice Department official defended the call on the record: "The entire DOJ leadership determined that Slater's flawed understanding of the deal required a different approach," adding that housing markets are mostly local and didn't warrant the resources of a federal investigation. Antitrust lawyers told the Journal it was highly unusual for department leadership to step in at that stage specifically to stop staff from collecting more information in the first place.
Case Three: Live Nation-Ticketmaster, and a President Asking "What's the Holdup?"
Davis's involvement in this case began before the HPE rift and ended before the case was resolved, which says something in itself about how this works: when he was no longer the right person for the job, someone else on retainer simply took over. The Biden DOJ sued to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2024, alleging the merged company suppressed competition and drove up prices for concertgoers; Slater's team inherited the case, and Trump had publicly pledged to crack down on ticketing fees. Live Nation hired Davis after Trump's election to work on its relationship with the DOJ. But as Davis and Slater's relationship soured over the course of 2025, his involvement in the Live Nation matter waned — and Kellyanne Conway, also hired by the company, took over advising it on settlement talks.
What moved the case wasn't a lobbyist phone call this time. It was the president himself. Trump heard about the case from friends, including former Live Nation board member and Hollywood agent Ariel Emanuel, who urged him to see it settled. After the trial began in March, Trump started personally calling around asking why it hadn't been resolved yet. On March 5, Live Nation's CEO and counsel met directly with Attorney General Bondi, White House counsel, and Slater's acting replacement at the White House, and the settlement was signed that same day. Four days later, DOJ and Live Nation announced the deal: no venue divestitures, just 13 exclusive amphitheater booking agreements given up and a commitment to open amphitheaters to other promoters — far short of the breakup the original suit sought. Several states said the deal favored Live Nation at consumers' expense; the department called it a win for "more independent amphitheaters." Perhaps the most telling detail: DOJ's own lead trial lawyer told the judge that morning he'd only seen the settlement's term sheet when the court did. His department's leadership had cut its trial attorney out of his case.
Case Four: Amex GBT-CWT, and the Dismissal That Skipped a Judge
The DOJ filed its case against the $540 million merger of American Express Global Business Travel and CWT Holdings in mid-January 2025, in the waning days of the Biden administration, arguing it would combine the two largest players in corporate travel management. A trial was scheduled for September 2025. Instead, on July 29, 2025, DOJ filed a notice of voluntary dismissal — not a settlement, a dismissal, a distinction that matters because a settlement would have gone to Judge Jed Rakoff for a Tunney Act review of its own. A dismissal skips that step entirely. According to three sources who spoke to The American Prospect, the decision to dismiss rather than settle was made deliberately by DOJ leadership, specifically to avoid the same kind of judicial scrutiny that was then closing in on the HPE-Juniper case.
The lobbying disclosures here are a matter of public record, not anonymous sourcing: Ballard Partners registered to lobby the Justice Department on Amex GBT's behalf on "Antitrust issues" in 2025, billing the company $200,000 in the first half of the year alone. Ballard Partners is the firm Attorney General Pam Bondi worked at before taking office — and in her own signed ethics agreement, Bondi pledged not to participate in any matter involving a party Ballard Partners personally represents unless specifically authorized to. The Justice Department did not answer the Prospect's questions about whether that recusal held. Ballard's overall lobbying revenue jumped from roughly $14 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $20.6 million in the second — the single largest haul of any lobbying firm in Washington that quarter. The dismissal landed one day after two of Slater's top deputies, including Roger Alford, were fired for alleged insubordination. Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater told the Prospect at the time that "the Antitrust Division, alone, made the decision to dismiss the case," and a DOJ spokesman said Bondi "had no involvement." One source close to the department's internal workings put it more bluntly to the Prospect: "Companies can fire their expensive lawyers and hire lobbyists instead."
The People Who Said No, and Aren't There Anymore
Line up the personnel moves, and the pattern isn't subtle. Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, the Antitrust Division's head of merger enforcement, were fired in July 2025 amid the HPE-Juniper corruption allegations. Alford went public afterward with what he called DOJ decisions made by lobbyists rather than by facts and law, leading to what he described as "perverted justice" — remarks this outlet has previously covered in full. Principal Deputy AAG Mark Hamer resigned in early February 2026. Three days later, Gail Slater was gone too, forced to choose between resigning and being fired, in a move that followed her resistance to a lobbyist-driven push to settle the DOJ's monopolization case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. House Judiciary Ranking Members Jamie Raskin and Jerrold Nadler wrote to Bondi within two weeks demanding an immediate briefing, noting that Slater's departure left "no longer any principled antitrust experts left to guard the Antitrust Division from this cascade of corruption" — and that it happened while the division was actively reviewing Netflix and Paramount's competing bids for Warner Bros. Discovery, the government's landmark Google Search appeal, and ongoing cases against Apple, Visa, and Live Nation-Ticketmaster. As of this writing, DOJ has not provided that briefing.
Davis isn't operating alone, either. Kellyanne Conway took over the Live Nation account as Davis's own role in that case faded. Kash Patel, Woodward, Ferguson, and Blanche all showed up last October at an Article III Project dinner Davis hosted at a Washington restaurant, toasting Mizelle's departure from DOJ and Woodward's confirmation — a portrait, on its own, of how small and social this circle actually is. William Kovacic, who chaired the FTC under George W. Bush, told the Journal that Davis has become "the face of this movement" of lobbyists who no longer bother working quietly: "You would never want to be seen holding the knife," he said of how things used to work. Reporting from the American Prospect separately names Arthur Schwartz and Brian Ballard of Ballard Partners as additional lobbyists moving through the same DOJ leadership offices on other companies' behalf, and lists UnitedHealth's acquisition of home health provider Amedisys as one more merger caught up in the broader pattern — though the paper trail connecting named lobbyists to that specific outcome is thinner than what's documented in the four cases above. This piece is not asserting the same level of proof for it. The UnitedHealth-Amedisys deal, notably, did draw a real divestiture requirement — 164 home health and hospice locations sold off — even as a coalition of Democratic lawmakers still called the settlement too weak.
Three Honest Ways to Read This
The system worked exactly as designed for someone. Every one of these outcomes was legal. Lobbying DOJ officials isn't illegal. Voluntary dismissals aren't illegal. Going over a division head's chain of command to a Deputy Attorney General isn't illegal. Nothing described above required anyone to break a law, which is precisely what makes it a structural problem rather than a prosecutable one.
The people who tried to say no are gone, and the people watching now have less to work with. Alford, Rinner, Hamer, and Slater collectively represented most of the Antitrust Division's senior institutional resistance to exactly this kind of pressure. All four are out within about seven months of each other. Whoever replaces them inherits a division that just watched what happened to those who pushed back.
The single worst-sounding line is still, legally, one man's word against another's — but it doesn't stand alone. The phone call itself — "I will destroy you" — rests on a sworn deposition from one side and an on-record denial from the other, and readers should weigh it accordingly. What isn't in dispute, because DOJ's own officials confirm parts of it on the record: a term sheet HPE's lawyers wrote landed on Slater's desk via the department's third-in-command, she was told her deputies could be fired if she didn't sign, and a disbarment complaint was filed against the man who later testified about it, one day after he suggested in writing that he wasn't going to "keep taking this" from Davis. A reader doesn't need to resolve who said what on one phone call to find the rest of that sequence unusual.
Corporatocracy is not always a conspiracy. Sometimes it's a phone call nobody can fully verify — and sometimes it's a term sheet somebody else already wrote, walked in by the department's own third-in-command, and placed on a desk in broad daylight.
What You Can Actually Do With This
- Watch the cases Raskin and Nadler flagged as still pending when they wrote in February — Warner Bros. Discovery's sale and the Google Search appeal chief among them, plus the Apple and Visa cases — for the same pattern that played out in Live Nation-Ticketmaster: leadership-level intervention, a settlement that avoids judicial review, or a sudden change in the officials assigned to the case.
- This is one of the few current storylines where oversight interest crosses party lines in principle, even if not yet in practice — a Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee has real subpoena power over the DOJ itself, if it chooses to use it. Telling your representatives you want a public accounting of DOJ merger reviews isn't a partisan ask, even if it's currently unanswered.
- If you follow real estate, healthcare, or telecom consolidation professionally or personally, the throughline in every case above is the same: check who a company hired to handle its "regulatory" strategy, not just its lawyers. The lobbying disclosure database at disclosurespreview.house.gov is public and searchable by client name.
A closing word. I said at the top, I think the system worked exactly as it was built to work. I'll close by saying why that matters more than any one phone call or any one lobbyist's personality. You don't have to resolve whether Mike Davis actually said "I will destroy you" to see that a company can, apparently, buy its way past a federal antitrust review with the right retainer and the right relationships — a term sheet walked into an office by the department's own third-in-command, a "second request" that simply never happens, a trial lawyer who finds out about his own case's settlement in open court alongside the judge. None of that required Mike Davis specifically. It required a system in which the people picking the regulators and the people being regulated increasingly know each other by first name, and in which the penalty for saying no is losing your job, while the penalty for saying yes is a bigger client list. That system didn't start in 2025, and it won't end when this administration does. Both parties have spent forty years letting campaign finance law, lobbying disclosure, and revolving-door ethics rules get weaker, one bipartisan carve-out at a time, while insisting the corruption was always the other side's. I don't have a clean legislative fix to hand you at the bottom of this piece, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they do. What I have is a documented paper trail and one request: the next time someone tells you that's just how Washington works, treat that sentence as an accusation, not an excuse.
— V64OTD
Sources
Mattioli, Dana; Ballhaus, Rebecca; Dawsey, Josh. The Threats and Bare-Knuckle Tactics of MAGA's Top Antitrust Fixer. The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2026 — primary reporting on Davis's DOJ conduct and finances, the HPE-Juniper, Compass-Anywhere, and Live Nation-Ticketmaster narratives, Davis's on-record quotes (including "best fixer in Washington" and his denial of the "I will destroy you" allegation), on-record quotes and denials from DOJ spokespeople, HPE, and Chad Mizelle, on-the-record commentary from former FTC Chairman William Kovacic, and the sworn deposition from Roger Alford reviewed by the Journal. This outlet read the full article text on September 2, 2026, provided directly by the site's operator, who confirmed having legitimate access to the piece; wsj.com itself remained paywalled to this outlet's own fetch and browser tools beyond the opening two paragraphs, which were independently confirmed via direct browser access the same day.
Raw Story. 'I will destroy you': Trump fixer accused of threatening DOJ official — then got her fired, March 20-21, 2026 — direct quotation of the Journal's reporting, including Davis's on-record denial and the sourcing of the threat allegation to Alford's sworn deposition.
Techdirt. WSJ: Lobbyists Easily Destroyed Any Semi-Serious Antitrust Enforcers Left In MAGA, April 2, 2026 — direct quotation of the Journal's characterization of the Antitrust Division's internal dynamics and Davis's self-description.
RealEstateNews.com. Lawmakers Sound the Alarm About Compass-Anywhere Deal, December 18, 2025, and How Did the Compass-Anywhere Deal Get Cleared So Quickly?, January 9, 2026 — Senators Warren and Wyden's December 16, 2025 letter, its specific antitrust concerns, and the Journal's reporting (via this outlet) on Slater being overruled by Deputy AG Blanche's office and Davis's direct involvement, including DOJ's on-record response.
The American Prospect (David Dayen). DOJ Does MAGA Lobbyist Bidding Again, Shutters Another Antitrust Case, July 29, 2025 — the Amex GBT-CWT dismissal, Ballard Partners' lobbying disclosures and revenue figures, Bondi's ethics agreement language, and on-record statements from Gail Slater and a DOJ spokesman.
The American Prospect (David Dayen). Real Talk About Lobbyists Buying the Justice Department, February 16, 2026 — naming Arthur Schwartz, Brian Ballard, and Kellyanne Conway alongside Davis, listing the broader pattern of mergers, and confirming the Tunney Act deposition thread in the HPE-Juniper case.
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democrats (Raskin, Nadler). Raskin, Nadler Demand Answers Following Ouster of DOJ Antitrust Chief Gail Slater, February 25, 2026 — the Hamer and Slater departure timeline, and the list of pending cases (Warner Bros. Discovery, Google Search appeal, Apple, Visa, Live Nation-Ticketmaster) affected by the leadership vacuum.
Healthcare Dive. UnitedHealth Closes $3.3B Amedisys Buy After Long Regulatory Battle, August 15, 2025 — settlement terms (164 divestitures) and Democratic lawmakers' criticism of the settlement as too weak.
Concurrences / SDxCentral / Bloomberg / The Capitol Forum coverage of Judge P. Casey Pitts's August 12, 2026 final judgment in the HPE-Juniper Tunney Act proceeding — the two Tunney Act violations found (undisclosed CIA/Pentagon lobbying contacts, withheld alternative-remedies information) and the court's reasoning for approving the settlement despite them.
v64otd.com. HPE/Juniper Dispatch, original piece and September 2 update — this outlet's own prior, separately fact-checked reporting on the HPE-Juniper case, referenced above, rather than re-reported in full here.