By Dana Mattioli, Rebecca Ballhaus and Josh Dawsey
Gail Slater, then-head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, was reviewing Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion bid to acquire rival Juniper when she got a phone call from one of the company's outside lawyers.
"If you don't approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ," Mike Davis told her, according to a sworn deposition by her former deputy, Roger Alford, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Slater relayed the call to Alford and told him it had badly shaken her, her former deputy testified. Davis had been Slater's friend for years and recommended her to President Trump for the job. Now, he was advising HPE -- and Slater and her team had proved resistant to the settlement terms he proposed.
The fallout was swift. Within months, two of Slater's deputies -- including Alford -- were pushed out of the Justice Department. By February, Slater was gone, too. A senior White House official said Davis played a role in her ouster.
Davis in an interview denied making the phone call to Slater. It was "utter bull -- that I threatened Gail or her job," he said, denying Alford's sworn testimony. He pushed for the deputies' firings because they made "bogus" allegations of corruption against him, Davis said, not because of the HPE deal.
"I'm the best fixer in Washington, period. Full stop," said the 48-year-old Iowan. "I know the people. I know the process. I know their pressure points. I know how to win."
A Journal investigation found that Davis pushed antitrust officials at the Justice Department to approve his deals -- and he went over their heads when they wouldn't comply, according to interviews with more than three dozen DOJ employees, lobbyists, lawyers and others familiar with the antitrust division.
Davis, despite having little experience practicing antitrust law, is one of the most visible practitioners of a change playing out across the division. Current and former antitrust officials said some mergers now get approval or draw mild settlements based on political ties rather than public interest. The new dynamic casts a shadow over the Justice Department's integrity, they said, and has alarmed even some Trump loyalists in the department.
While antitrust enforcement has long been influenced by White House policies, it was largely buffered from day-to-day political involvement in prior administrations, even during Trump's first term, according to former DOJ enforcers. Top Justice Department leaders intervened at most once or twice during a four-year term, they said.
Now, lawyers and lobbyists representing companies under scrutiny by antitrust regulators regularly make their arguments directly to senior DOJ officials. Trump himself intervened in the department's antitrust investigation into the concert promoter Live Nation, urging aides to reach a settlement.
A Justice Department spokesman said that there was nothing unusual about agency leadership providing guidance on cases or consulting with stakeholders. The spokesman said all settlements, including the HPE deal, "are based on the merits."
Davis's clients include such market behemoths as Walmart and the brokerage Compass, and his pay is commensurate -- as much as $300,000 a month, plus seven-figure fees for deals that close. His three most prominent clients over the past year have all had successful outcomes: Two closed their deals. One avoided a breakup.
Davis speaks frequently with Trump, aides to the president said. He also is close to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and others in the Justice Department, said people familiar with the matter.
Lobbyists in Washington, who once thrived behind the scenes, now loudly tout their connections and successes. Davis is "the face of this movement," said William Kovacic, who was appointed by President George W. Bush to chair the Federal Trade Commission in 2008. In previous administrations, he said, "You would never want to be seen holding the knife."
"The cost to the country of this new pay-to-play approach to antitrust enforcement is enormous," Alford -- the fired Slater deputy who testified about her phone call with Davis -- said at a tech policy event in August. "MAGA-in-Name-Only lobbyists are influencing their allies within the DOJ and risking President Trump's populist conservative agenda."
"Professor Alford can go to hell," Davis said.
'My good friend Gail'
Slater and Davis were once close. Slater developed an interest in curbing Big Tech's power after working at The Internet Association, a trade group representing large technology companies. She had previously spent a decade at the FTC. In 2019, while working at Fox Corp. as a senior vice president, Slater persuaded Davis to create a right-leaning Big Tech watchdog called the Internet Accountability Project. They sometimes spoke several times a day.
Davis in recent years has cultivated a crass street-fighter online persona, posting on X about conservative censorship, immigration and what he called lawfare by Democrats who "went after Trump." He wrote, "F -- off, Gabby," in response to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- who was shot in 2011 during an attack that killed six people -- after she posted about gun violence. His inflammatory comments have gotten him suspended from X on several occasions.
Davis has ties across the federal government. He clerked for Neil Gorsuch when he was a federal judge and helped shepherd support for Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court in Trump's first term. Davis subsequently spent a year as a law clerk for the new Justice, and then served as chief nominations counsel for the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in 2022 as part of an investigation into Trump's handling of classified information, Davis came to his defense. It was a time when many other conservatives had distanced themselves from Trump after the Jan. 6 attacks at the Capitol.
"I have a very good relationship with the president. And it became very strong when I was just about the only person who was defending him on TV after the Mar-a-Lago raid," Davis said. He estimated he made more than 5,000 media appearances, he said, most of them defending the president and serving as Trump's "biggest outside legal supporter."
At a campaign rally weeks before the 2024 election, Trump predicted a bright future for Davis. "This guy is tough as hell," Trump told the crowd. "We want him in a very high capacity."
When Trump won, Davis said he recommended Slater to head antitrust at DOJ and Andrew Ferguson for chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which also handles antitrust matters. Trump went along with Davis's picks.
On the day of Slater's Senate confirmation hearing, Davis posted a picture of them together on X. "Very proud of my good friend Gail Slater, " he wrote. "She will help make America competitive again." Slater was confirmed last March.
When Ferguson and Slater began their new roles, they joined Davis one night at a bar in Chinatown in Washington. Over drinks, Davis told them that clients were "beating his door down" because of his ties to Trump and he asked their permission to represent clients on antitrust matters, he said.
After spending $2.5 million to fund the Article III Project, a group he had started to support Senate judicial nominees, Davis said he told his companions that it was time to "refill his coffers."
Davis said he has done "zero business development." Instead, he said, clients come to him. With all the companies he is representing, Davis told the Journal he could retire right now.
No more lobbyists
Hewlett Packard Enterprise was one of the companies that helped fill Davis's bank account. HPE was in the process of acquiring Juniper in a deal that would merge the second- and third-largest wireless networking providers for large corporate customers. HPE said the deal was intended to double its networking business.
Ten days after Trump's January 2025 inauguration, the Justice Department sued to block the acquisition, arguing that it would substantially reduce competition in the wireless networking industry. HPE hired Davis after the DOJ lawsuit.
In settlement talks, DOJ antitrust lawyers took the position that HPE should divest Juniper's Mist business, which uses AI to manage networks, according to people familiar with the matter.
In April, Davis instead proposed an unusual settlement idea to Slater over a drink: The combined company would spend more than $100 million on factories in America, and fund networking engineering programs at universities, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for HPE said that the DOJ antitrust division initiated the idea for this plan, not HPE or Davis.
Slater was surprised. The proposal didn't address the department's concerns about competition or its request to spin off Mist. DOJ antitrust staff made clear it was inappropriate, the people said. That was when Slater received the call from Davis about destroying her career, according to Alford's sworn deposition in a subsequent lawsuit over how the department reached its settlement with HPE.
At a June 5 meeting with HPE, Slater told their representatives to keep lobbyists out of negotiations. At the end of the meeting, Slater's deputy reinforced the point, telling the company's representatives as they shook hands, "No more lobbyists. I'm serious," according to the people familiar with the matter.
They didn't know that earlier in the day, Davis had lunch with Chad Mizelle, then the chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, said people familiar with the matter. Mizelle said the lunch wasn't about HPE.
Davis told the Journal his work "includes appealing decisions to up the food chain in the Justice Department." He did just that for HPE, according to people familiar with the matter. Slater and her team were soon sidelined from settlement talks, the people said. Instead, Mizelle fielded HPE's settlement proposals.
A spokesman for HPE said the company felt that the antitrust leadership wasn't giving proper consideration to national-security issues and appealed to senior DOJ leadership. A Justice Department official said the antitrust division wasn't cut out of the talks and that several meetings were held between DOJ leaders and antitrust officials.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who is DOJ's third-in-command and close to Davis, entered Slater's office on June 27 and placed a document on her desk, according to people familiar with the matter. It was a term sheet of the settlement drafted by HPE's lawyers, the people said. It made no mention of the company divesting the Mist business, a settlement condition HPE opposed.
Slater asked Woodward, her superior, what would happen if she didn't sign. He said she was too difficult to fire, but he would fire her deputies, according to people familiar with the matter.
Slater later told people she felt like she had a gun to her head. She quickly read the agreement, and was only permitted to make minor edits, some of the people said.
A Justice Department official said several settlement drafts were exchanged among the parties, including the antitrust division. Mizelle said Slater and her team were instrumental in editing the draft after Woodward presented it, "including adding/deleting specific substantive terms."
The next day, the DOJ announced its settlement. Weeks later, two of Slater's deputies were fired.
In mid-September, Alford, one of the ousted deputies, called Davis "unprincipled" while speaking at an antitrust panel. Davis texted Alford that night saying that if he had a problem with him, to contact him directly. Slater, who had connected the two via text, also was on the text thread.
Alford responded with a Bible verse from the Gospel of Matthew: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" according to texts viewed by The Journal.
"You're a coward. And a clown," Davis texted the next day.
In subsequent texts to Slater and Alford, Davis derided the pair and called their initial decision on HPE "idiotic." "I realize neither of you have served as attorneys with actual clients for a very long time," he wrote, accusing them of "attacking an attorney and punishing his clients" for appealing their decision.
Davis had "bled a lot for Trump," he wrote in the text thread. "I have things you both lack," he said. "Good judgment, discernment, and loyalty...I'm not going to keep taking this."
Slater and Alford interpreted his last sentence as a threat.
A day after Davis's texts, the Justice Department filed a complaint seeking Alford's permanent disbarment with the Florida Bar, where he is a member. The complaint cited his public comments about the HPE acquisition process. The case is ongoing.
New deal
After the HPE deal, the antitrust staff noticed that rather than allowing career experts to address competitive concerns in mergers, senior leadership at the department hammered out terms themselves, overruling staff recommendations.
A Justice Department official said leadership officials were obligated to intervene when bureaucrats make moves inconsistent with the agency's enforcement policies.
In October, Davis's Article III Project hosted Blanche, Woodward, Ferguson, FBI Director Kash Patel and other Justice Department officials at the Italian restaurant Cafe Fiorello. The party toasted Mizelle's departure as chief of staff, as well as Woodward's recent confirmation.
Around this time, the DOJ antitrust staff was evaluating real-estate brokerage giant Compass's $1.6 billion acquisition of its rival, Anywhere Real Estate. Anywhere owns Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran and Sotheby's International Realty. Compass and Anywhere were the first- and second-biggest brokerages, respectively, by volume in 2025. An acquisition would create a company accounting for more than a fifth of home-sales volume nationwide, according to Real Trends Consulting.
Compass hired Davis on the acquisition. The company wanted to avoid a "second request," a routine part of antitrust enforcement where an agency asks for more information to evaluate whether to block or approve a deal. Slater wanted one.
Davis appealed to Blanche's office to say that any worries could be addressed without one. Blanche's office agreed, the people familiar with the matter said. Slater and the antitrust staff were overruled. The deal closed in January without a second request.
A Justice Department official said, "The entire DOJ leadership determined that Slater's flawed understanding of the deal required a different approach." The official said that "many of the markets affected in housing are very local" and didn't have national implications that would justify using Justice Department resources to investigate.
Antitrust lawyers said it was highly unusual for Justice Department leaders to intervene at that stage to prevent antitrust staff from collecting more information.
During the Biden administration, the Justice Department sued to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, alleging that the company drove prices higher for fans and suppressed competition. Slater's team inherited the case.
After Trump's election, Live Nation hired Davis to advise on the Justice Department case.
The company faced an uphill battle. Trump last spring pledged to crack down on bad behavior in the ticketing and concert industry to bring down prices.
As the relationship between Davis and Slater soured, Davis's involvement in Live Nation's dealings with the Justice Department waned. Kellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to Trump whom the company also hired last year, advised the company on settlement talks.
In response to overtures from Live Nation to settle, the antitrust team proposed the company, which controls roughly 50% of the concert promotion market, divest a significant number of the 50 to 60 large amphitheaters it owns or operates, according to people familiar with the matter.
Before a settlement was reached, Slater was fired. Davis cheered her removal on X in more than a dozen posts. In his later deposition, Davis acknowledged recommending firing Slater to "anyone who would listen," including Woodward, Blanche and Bondi, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump heard about the Live Nation case from friends, including Hollywood talent agent and former Live Nation board member Ariel Emanuel, who told the president it should be settled, according to people familiar with the conversations.
After the trial began in March, Trump began calling around to ask why it hadn't been settled. What's the holdup? he wanted to know, according to people familiar with the matter. It was an extraordinary role for a president to play in a routine antitrust investigation.
On March 5, both sides met at the White House to hash things out, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino and the company counsel joined officials, including Bondi, White House counsel David Warrington and Slater's acting replacement. The settlement was signed that day, said people familiar with the matter.
Four days later, the Justice Department and Live Nation announced a tentative agreement that would allow the company to avoid a breakup. There would be no venue divestitures, though the company agreed to divest 13 exclusive booking agreements with amphitheaters, as well as open its amphitheaters to all promoters.
Several states said the settlement would benefit the company at consumers' expense. The Justice Department said the settlement would yield "more independent amphitheaters." Dan Wall, Live Nation's executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, said the settlement was in the public interest and included most of what Slater had sought.
In court that day, the DOJ's lead lawyer in the trial said he had learned of the settlement that morning. "I only saw the term sheet when you did," he told the judge.
Write to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com and Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 20, 2026 19:00 ET (23:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
