Warren Has a Good Point
- Everyone from both parties in the Swamp have been, are currently on or would like to be on some special interest's payroll.
- How do we protect internet freedom of speech when the head "investigator" worked for the people he is investigating?
(Washington Examiner) - Elizabeth Warren, the presidential candidate who has campaigned on breaking up Silicon Valley giants, says conflicts of interest should keep the Trump administration's antitrust enforcement chief from overseeing a Justice Department investigation of Google and Apple.
Makan Delrahim, who heads the agency division overseeing the investigations, was paid to lobby for approval of Google's $3.1 billion takeover of online advertising firm DoubleClick in 2007, Warren wrote in a letter to Delrahim and ethics officials at the Justice Department.
Not only did Delrahim earn $100,000 from Google that year, he was paid by Apple in 2006 and 2007 to lobby the George W. Bush administration on patent-reform issues, she said.
"Your past work as a lobbyist for two of the largest and most scrutinized tech companies in the world creates the appearance of a conflict of interest," Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, wrote to Delrahim. "As the head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, you should not be supervising investigations into former clients who paid you tens of thousands of dollars to lobby the federal government."
While the Justice Department acknowledged receiving the letter, a spokesman declined to comment further. Federal law requires government officials to recuse themselves from matters when the circumstances would prompt a reasonable person to question their impartiality, Warren noted.
"Given your extensive and lucrative previous work lobbying the federal government on behalf of Google and Apple, particularly your work to aid Google in its acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., any reasonable person would surely question your impartiality in antitrust matters involving Google," Warren said.
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