# Gail Slater **Abigail "Gail" Slater** (b. 1971, Dalkey, Dublin) ran the [[Department of Justice]]'s [[Antitrust Division]] for eleven months, from her confirmation on **March 11, 2025** to her resignation on **February 12, 2026**. She was the populist right's chosen enforcer, an "America First Antitrust" appointee backed by [[JD Vance]]. Her exit is the clearest test the vault has of whether the New Right's hostility to concentrated corporate power survives contact with merging parties who can hire people close to the President. On the record of her tenure, it did not. ## Background Slater trained in law at University College Dublin and Oxford, practised at Freshfields, and spent a decade at the [[FTC]] (2004–2014): first as a staff attorney, then as an adviser to Commissioner Julie Brill. She then went into the tech industry's trade association (the Internet Association, 2014–18). In Trump's first term she was the National Economic Council's special assistant for tech, telecom and cyber policy (2018–19), followed by policy jobs at Fox Corp. and Roku. She was then an economic-policy adviser to Senator Vance. The DOJ biography and Wikipedia agree on this sequence. ## The tenure The Senate confirmed her **78–19**. She kept the inherited big cases, including Google search, Google ad tech and the [[Live Nation Antitrust Case]], and the 2023 [[Merger Guidelines]]. That continuity with the [[Lina Khan]] / Jonathan Kanter era was the point of her nomination. The break came through settlements, not cases: - **HPE–Juniper (June–July 2025).** The Division settled the $14 billion [[Hewlett Packard Enterprise]]–Juniper merger on terms its staff opposed. Her principal deputy Roger Alford and merger deputy William Rinner were fired in July. In an August speech Alford described a fight between "genuine MAGA reformers and MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists" and said Chad Mizelle and [[Stanley Woodward]] had "perverted justice." - **The exit (Feb 12, 2026).** Bloomberg Law reported that the White House requested her resignation. CBS, via TheWrap, attributed the ouster to [[Pam Bondi]] and [[Todd Blanche]]. The reported clashes were Compass–Anywhere (cleared over her push for deeper review), HPE–Juniper, and lobbying by Mike Davis for a soft Live Nation deal. Three weeks later the Division settled Live Nation mid-trial without the Ticketmaster divestiture it had sued for. - **The Tunney Act coda (Aug 2026).** Judge P. Casey Pitts approved the HPE–Juniper decree. He also found that HPE had failed to disclose its lobbying contacts and that Division leadership had been overridden. See [[Antitrust Division]] for the full ruling. ## After DOJ - **Slater:** in March 2026 she joined [[American Compass]] as its Competition and Technology Policy Chair, which returned her to the New Right policy shop that had championed her appointment. - **The Division, acting leadership:** Omeed Assefi ran it as acting AAG until about the end of June 2026. Since then, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward has been reported as running it day to day. - **The Division, nominee:** Trump nominated FCC general counsel Adam Candeub on **July 21, 2026**. The Judiciary Committee advanced him on a 12–10 party-line vote on **Sept 24**. As of Sept 30 he has not been confirmed. ## Why it matters Slater's arc is the antitrust version of a pattern the vault tracks elsewhere: the populist program survives as rhetoric while the decisions move to whoever controls access to the Attorney General's office. See [[New Brandeis Movement]] for the toolkit she kept, and [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]] for the sequence. ## See also - [[Antitrust Division]] · [[DOJ Component Tree]] · [[Department of Justice]] - [[Antitrust]] · [[New Brandeis Movement]] · [[Merger Guidelines]] - [[JD Vance]] · [[American Compass]] · [[Live Nation Antitrust Case]]