Attorney General William Barr has spent months taking greater control of the Justice Department's antitrust probes into the big tech companies, a development that could increase the peril for major players like Google and Facebook.

Barr has centralized oversight of antitrust matters under a handful of appointees in his office and that of his deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Those moves have sidelined the Antitrust Division’s current leadership, headed by Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, who for the past year has been the public face of DOJ’s investigations into Silicon Valley’s treatment of its users and customers.


Delrahim and his No. 2, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Barry Nigro, were both recused from the Google probe earlier this month, for reasons that include Delrahim’s prior legal work for the search giant. That has left the antitrust investigation in the hands of Ryan Shores, a lawyer in Rosen's office, and Alex Okuliar, an appointee who joined the department less than a month ago.

Delrahim's chief of staff, William Rinner, is in the process of leaving the agency, according to two people with knowledge of his plans. And Delrahim himself has faced persistent questions about whether he will continue serving under Barr, who had previously clashed with him during a major antitrust fight involving AT&T’s 2018 takeover of Time Warner.

Some Silicon Valley critics see cause for optimism in Barr’s increasing sway over the tech probes, noting that he has had a wealth of antitrust experience as an attorney for companies like Time Warner and Verizon — both major rivals of the dominant online platforms. They view him as more likely than Delrahim to mount a serious antitrust challenge against one or more of the big tech companies.

Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim.

“He has an understanding of what it’s like to be in competition with these monopolists. He understands what’s at stake,” said Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly nonprofit.


“I have more faith in Barr than in Delrahim,” added Stoller, though he still predicted that Barr and the DOJ would bring a narrower antitrust suit against the tech platforms than he believes is warranted.

Barr, who at age 69 is serving his second stint as U.S attorney general, also has few deterrents to waging an aggressive attack, said Hal Singer, an antitrust economist and adjunct professor at Georgetown University's business school. “Barr doesn't need future gigs so he can pursue the tech platforms without worry about his future income," Singer said.

Barr indicated during his confirmation hearing last year that antitrust would be one of his priorities.

“I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” he told senators.


A department spokesperson had little to say when asked about Barr’s antitrust oversight or Delrahim’s future. Delrahim has been in place for two-and-a-half years, about the average tenure for leaders of the Antitrust Division.

“AAG Delrahim has made no announcements about leaving before the November elections," the spokesperson said, while noting that Delrahim has speaking engagements arranged through this summer. The spokesperson declined to comment on Rinner's departure.

Most U.S. attorneys general have had little experience with antitrust and have left the DOJ’s Antitrust Division alone, aside from appearing at the odd news conference to support major cases or settlements. Substantive decisions are often made by the assistant attorney general for antitrust — the position Delrahim now holds — who then gets a sign-off from the attorney general.

Still, it isn't unusual for the attorney general or deputy AG to take a bigger role in department priorities, particularly if they involve more than one component of the Justice Department. The tech probes involve both the Antitrust Division and DOJ's Office of Legal Policy, which is looking at potential changes to a 24-year-old federal law that shields online companies from liability for the user-posted content that has helped them make their fortunes. More pieces of DOJ could join the investigations later.

Barr, who previously served as President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general before going to work in the telecom industry, developed antitrust expertise on both sides of the Atlantic as a top lawyer for GTE and then Verizon. He helped shepherd a number of landmark telecom mergers: the Bell Atlantic-GTE deal that formed Verizon in 2000; Verizon’s merger with MCI in 2006; and Verizon’s $28 billion purchase of Alltel in 2008.

“I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers." Attorney General William Barr

Barr argued before the European Commission in 1998, successfully persuading it to require rival wireless carrier MCI to divest its internet business in order merge with WorldCom — a $1.75 billion divestiture that at the time was the largest ever. (GTE opposed the merger, having offered an unsuccessful rival bid for MCI.)

As Verizon’s general counsel, he also helped defend the telecom company against major antitrust suits and was a key figure in two landmark Supreme Court cases — one in 2003 and another in 2007 — that have made antitrust cases harder for plaintiffs to win.

Barr’s proficiency with antitrust has led some to compare him to former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who headed the Antitrust Division before becoming attorney general in 1940, and whose portrait now adorns Barr’s office.


Barr and Delrahim also have had a history, including being on opposite sides of the 2017 suit in which DOJ’s Antitrust Division unsuccessfully sued to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner.

As a member of Time Warner’s board, Barr alleged in a sworn statement that Delrahim’s recount of a meeting between DOJ and senior AT&T officials was “inaccurate and incomplete.”

"Mr. Delrahim’s position that the alleged harms from this merger and his inexplicable … rejection of remedies short of extreme divestitures were the product not of a well-versed substantive analysis, but rather political," Barr said. "As a former Attorney General, that is disturbing to me.”

Delrahim took over as assistant attorney general for antitrust in September 2017 after serving in the White House counsel's office, where he helped guide now-Justice Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court confirmation. He previously served in the Antitrust Division during the George W. Bush administration, but focused on appellate, policy and international issues rather than on cases.

After leaving the Justice Department, he moved back to Los Angeles where he worked as a partner for Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. In that position, he worked for clients including Google, Apple, Qualcomm and Zuffa, often lobbying for mergers or particular antitrust or intellectual property issues.

In a widely cited speech in Tel Aviv, Israel, last year, Delrahim signaled an openness to investigating tech giants for monopolization and exploring their impact on privacy. But that June speech came only after Barr had taken office and followed 18 months in which Delrahim's remarks on technology companies were mostly laudatory. For instance, he had said in June 2018 that “I define U.S. antitrust law’s success as the fact that we have these innovators."

"We have the Googles and the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the Ubers and the Airbnbs coming out of the United States," Delrahim said in response to a question about other countries' investigations of major tech platforms. "How many of those innovative companies are coming out of Europe or Korea or China?”

Speculation about Delrahim's possible departure was so persistent last year that the American Bar Association, which hosts the world's largest antitrust conference each spring, invited him to address the subject head-on during a scheduled public appearance in late March 2019, according to several people involved in the discussions. Delrahim declined to do so, they said.


Yet Delrahim remained, overseeing a settlement to allow a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint — a transaction on which Barr was recused because of his prior Verizon work.

"We have the Googles and the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the Ubers and the Airbnbs ... How many of those innovative companies are coming out of Europe or Korea or China?” Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim

Barr has overridden him on at least one key decision — an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission to divide their responsibility for probes into the tech industry.

In May, Delrahim and FTC Chairman Joe Simons agreed to divvy up their inquiries into the major tech companies, with the Justice Department opening a probe into Google and the commission focusing on Facebook. (Combined, the two companies claim most of the U.S. market for digital advertising.) The arrangement also called for DOJ to look into Apple, which has faced accusations of delisting rival app-makers for its iPhone and iPad, while the FTC would take on Amazon, the subject of complaints over its pricing and its treatment of third-party sellers.

But two months later, DOJ reneged by announcing an antitrust review of all the major internet companies. The new review pointedly included “social media and some retail services online” as areas the agency intended to investigate — a description that would include Facebook and Amazon.

The department has not spelled out what outcomes it will seek from any of the Big Tech probes, including whether it would seek the drastic remedy of going to court to try to break up the companies. The Justice Department would also have authority to investigate potential fraudulent advertising claims, a plague that a U.K. Parliament report estimated last year costs advertisers between $6.5 billion and $16.4 billion annually. Amazon has also faced criticism for sales of counterfeit goods on its platform, an issue that recently prompted the Department of Homeland Security to say it would work with DOJ to seek fines or other penalties.

In August, Barr elevated a counsel to Delrahim, Lauren Willard, to his office to help coordinate the tech review and keep him up-to-date on progress. Around that time, Deputy Attorney General Rosen began interviewing candidates for an antitrust counsel in his own office. Though not as accomplished as Barr, Rosen also has experience in antitrust, having represented the browser developer Netscape in its complaint against Microsoft in the late 2000s.

Rosen eventually settled on Shores, a litigator with the law firm Shearman & Sterling, who joined the DAG’s office in October to monitor the probe.

At the end of January, the Justice Department announced that Okuliar, a litigator from the law firm Orrick who had previously served at both the FTC and DOJ, would join the Antitrust Division. Within days, Delrahim publicly acknowledged that he is now recused on the DOJ’s Google probe because of his former work for the company. The agency is also considering whether to recuse him on other aspects of the tech review, he said.

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That leaves Okuliar as the point person for the tech probes within the Antitrust Division, helping manage day-to-day questions from the more than 30 lawyers assigned to work on the cases along with Shores. They are also highly involved in the discussions with state attorneys general who have opened parallel probes into Google and Facebook. A meeting at DOJ in February with the attorneys general of Texas, Nebraska and Utah was organized in part to allow them to meet Shores and Okuliar, according to people who attended.


In speeches in December, Barr said he hopes to have the tech platform probes wrapped up by the end of this year.

At the very least, Delrahim is expected to remain at DOJ through May, when the U.S. will host the International Competition Network, an annual gathering of competition enforcers from around the world. The U.S. was a founding member of ICN, along with the European Union and 12 other jurisdictions. Today, the group is made of 126 jurisdictions, including every major country except China.

For the first time, the U.S. will play host for the gathering in Los Angeles — Delrahim’s hometown.