July 19, 2019
The highest-ranking Iranian-American in the Trump Administration is expected to soon make some of the biggest waves in the administration as he takes on the social media giants with an investigation that could end by calling for them to be broken up into smaller firms.
Makan Delrahim, a 49-year-old assistant attorney general, has been in the spotlight since The Wall Street Journal reported May 31 that the antitrust division, which he heads, was planning an expansive probe of Google. It is an investigation that could shape the search giant’s future and the broader competitive landscape for a generation.
In his first extended interview since then, Delrahim told The Wall Street Journal this month that today’s dominant tech companies have developed an array of innovative products that consumers enjoy, from search to social media, many of them with low or no prices. But that didn’t mean there aren’t issues for the government potentially to address.
“You have some of these technology companies touching so many aspects of people’s lives,” he said. “The question is: Do they harm competition and, if so, how?”
Delrahim said he sees interest across the political spectrum in addressing concerns about the power of Silicon Valley and, more broadly, about decreasing competition. “The call for stronger antitrust enforcement is bipartisan,” he said. “This transcends political parties or views.”
The Justice Department hasn’t confirmed that it is preparing a Google investigation and Delrahim steered away from discussing any one company’s specific business practices. But Delrahim, who came to the Justice Department after a nine-month stint in the White House counsel’s office at the start of the Trump Administration, acknowledged that any Big Tech examination could present challenges, including for government resources.
“We have incredibly smart lawyers … that really understand how the law applies to these industries,” he said. “I absolutely have all the confidence that we have the people to dig into this.”
Delrahim immigrated to the US from Iran at the age of 9, during the revolution. He learned English and spent his teenage years in suburban Los Angeles, working weekends and summers at his father’s service station.
Known widely around Washington simply as Makan, he has served in various roles in the executive and legislative branches, including as a top aide to former Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the George W. Bush Administration. He also spent more than a decade in private practice, a stint that included antitrust counseling and lobbying.
He once advised Google on its acquisition of Internet ad company DoubleClick in 2007, a client that has prompted Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate and top Big Tech critic, to call for Delrahim to recuse himself in any Google probe.
After Delrahim joined the Trump Administration in the White House, he was a central figure in shepherding Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch through the confirmation process.
In two years as Justice Department antitrust chief, he has now crafted a blend of antitrust enforcement that follows neither the traditional Republican nor Democratic playbooks, at times confounding both his supporters and critics.
Seven weeks into the job, he stunned the business world by bringing a lawsuit challenging AT&T’s planned acquisition of Time Warner, which the government lost. Now, he is engaged in down-to-the-wire deliberations over whether to allow T-Mobile to buy wireless rival Sprint, a decision viewed as one of the most important of his tenure.
Several large mergers have passed muster under his watch—with strings attached—such as Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto, in which the antitrust division mandated the sale of a record $9 billion in assets to preserve competition.
While some lawmakers at both ends of the political spectrum have called for the splitting of megacompanies into parts, such a drastic remedy is rare, and Delrahim has professed to be a fan of compromise.
Throughout his tenure, Delrahim has been adamant that politics plays no role in his antitrust decision-making, and that he hasn’t been steered by the White House.
“Still, there has been no influence in our decisions,” he said in the interview.
President Trump’s public comments continue to complicate Delrahim’s tenure, however. Trump pledged as a candidate to block AT&T’s deal for Time Warner, which owned CNN, a network the president has denounced. Recently the president suggested that customers stop using AT&T’s services to force CNN to pull back on “negative” coverage.
Separately, the president last month accused Google of favoring Democrats and trying to “rig” the election. “We should be suing Google and Facebook and all that, which perhaps we will,” Trump said.
The whirlwind of the past couple of years has left some in the antitrust division dissatisfied, according to Wall Street Journal sources, who say there is a trust gap between some career staffers and Delrahim’s office, which runs a tightly controlled, top-down decision-making process.
Delrahim said he recently began holding a meeting each week with every career head of the different sections within the antitrust division to talk about pending business, as well as implementing a quarterly question-and-answer session for anyone in the division who wants to attend.
The Justice Department’s planned push on Big Tech comes as Delrahim has a new boss, Attorney General William Barr, who in his January confirmation hearings cited an interest in antitrust issues, especially in the tech sector.
After Barr’s confirmation, many in antitrust circles speculated that Delrahim’s days at the antitrust division could be numbered.
The two men had clashed during the AT&T case, when Barr was a member of Time Warner’s board and one of a handful of people in a confrontational meeting with Delrahim two weeks before the department sued. They later offered conflicting recollections of the meeting in legal papers, with Barr questioning the Justice Department’s motivations.
But after settling in at Justice, Barr, who has known Delrahim for years, sought out his antitrust chief, put his arm around him and assured him he was on solid footing at the department, people familiar with the matter said.
“I have no intentions to leave,” Delrahim told the Journal.