Transcript
Michael Popak (0:00)
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Legal AF Host/Co-host (0:01)
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Lifelock Representative (0:21)
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Joe from Vanta (0:30)
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Michael Popak (1:00)
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. 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. 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. And Abigail Slater had been with the Department of Justice for a long time in antitrust. Antitrust is the 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. 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. 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 got 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. And then he would add one of the crown jewels, cnn, through his buddy, 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. My Department of Justice is going to handle that, which we know he's captured and completely controls. But here's the clip.