00:01:39.660And then you've come back in and you head the Antitrust Division for the Justice Department.
00:01:44.720That's like, I mean, it's like you, Harmeet Dillon, so many people who know are at these senior level positions really running the Justice Department.
00:01:51.880And all of us are honored to be there.
00:02:15.160They have a controlled economy, et cetera, et cetera.
00:02:17.880We win all these races, and history has taught us this too, Steve, by our free market system, by letting the ball rip, by letting companies compete, by out-innovating one another.
00:02:30.060And the reason why antitrust matters to that picture, to the free market system, is because we're the cop on the beat at the end of the day.
00:02:36.400We step in when competition is not working, and we ensure that markets remain competitive.
00:02:41.780So people would say that's odd coming from the populist nationalists, the MAGA movement.
00:02:48.820And you've been MAGA to your core, right?
00:02:52.520People, if you want to know what heavy duty was, the first term was pretty tough, and we were literally surrounded.
00:02:57.640As today, we know, we're going to have posts on others on as, you know, it looks like Brennan and Kobe have a criminal investigation about Russiagate, right?
00:03:05.580As you know, it's kind of Fort Apache every day at the White House as we were besieged by the deep state.
00:03:11.000How do you take in that thing about competition and what you're trying to do and breaking up these, really going after the concentration of these oligarchs with the populist nationalist movement?
00:04:26.880And so you end up with one guy with all of the business.
00:04:29.100And so today, fast forward to 2025, under President Trump's leadership, the DOJ under Pan Bondi has been tasked with looking at the ways in which competition is not working in live entertainment in general.
00:05:31.000We also have non-prosecution agreements already in place with Oakview Group and with Legends, which would have been the competitor bidding for that business.
00:05:40.420So that's an example of the kind of thing that we're bringing to the table.
00:07:02.200The Bidens litigated both cases to the liability phase.
00:07:06.500Two district courts now have fined Google liable for monopolization.
00:07:10.080One in here in District Court in D.C. in the search engine market and the other in this ad tech market was the technology that's used at the back end of the Internet to serve ads between publishers and us, consumers.
00:07:23.260That's the reason that you have thousands of companies competing in different or hundreds of companies competing in different sectors.
00:08:57.980And when you say Bush and Biden and even Obama, when you talk about the antitrust, what's the difference in Chicago School versus the Neo-Brandeisians?
00:09:05.720So one, we would say, was under-enforcement.
00:09:48.280We're not going to hold on to your filing just because we can, right?
00:09:51.120At the back end of deals, one of the things I said at my confirmation hearing, different than my predecessor, was, not to get too arcane, but yes, about nomenclature.
00:10:00.340If there's a merger that we can settle, we'll settle it.
00:10:04.680We don't have to go to court to sue to block every merger.
00:10:08.880And so we've already racked up three, four settlements that we think meet the competition challenge, but let the deal, the rest of the deal go forward and close.
00:10:18.620So that's a concrete example of how we're different than the Bidens.
00:10:22.540But at the same time, we've carried forward with these big monopolization cases we just talked about.
00:10:26.680When people look at the populist nationalist movement and you want more competition, deconstruction in the administrative state, still with a regulatory aspect to it, and people say, no, you guys speak out of the two sides of your mouth because China is an existential threat and you need national champions.
00:10:59.280In the global, in the world we live in today, with China doing what they're doing, right, as a totalitarian, essentially authoritarian government versus ourselves, how do you balance that?
00:16:35.300This after the Supreme Court yesterday imposed an administrative stay on a lower court ruling
00:16:40.800that would have put limits on the actions that the president can take.
00:16:45.980NBC News reports the justices made it clear that their order is not about the legality
00:16:52.560of any individual agency reduction in force or reorganization plan, only the legality of
00:17:00.360Trump's executive order and an administration memo related to workforce plans.
00:17:06.360Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson provided a written dissent in which she called the decision, quote, senseless.
00:17:13.960Trump administration's efforts to politicize intelligence and U.S. national security.
00:17:19.160It is also the culmination of a long and mostly fruitless nine-year campaign by Team Trump to rewrite history when it comes to Russia and the 2016 presidential election.
00:17:31.040In the wake of furious backlash from some of Donald Trump's most prominent supporters over the Justice Department debunking their conspiracy theories about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,
00:17:44.920not 12 hours after that happens, comes news that DOJ has launched investigations into two people Donald Trump has singled out and attacked and smeared over and over and over again.
00:17:57.160A Justice Department spokesperson tells NBC News that officials have opened criminal investigations into both former CIA director John Brennan and former director of the FBI, Jim Comey.
00:18:10.180The FBI declined to comment to NBC News and Jim Comey has not responded to a request for comment.
00:18:17.180Now, exactly what conduct is being investigated is unclear at this hour.
00:18:21.320But when it comes to John Brennan, who we should note is a senior national security and intelligence analyst right here at MSNBC, NBC News is reporting that his successor at the CIA,
00:18:33.780director John Ratcliffe, made a criminal referral over John Brennan's handling of a 2017 assessment.
00:18:40.840That assessment found with a high level of confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help the Trump campaign.
00:18:48.180Let's go to Jack Posobiec is sitting here.
00:18:51.560By the way, Gail Slater, that was Gail Slater's first interview here in the war room.
00:18:58.040You know, though, because I see her at events and I always assume that I've seen her.
00:19:02.220I didn't realize she hadn't actually been in front of the camera before.