President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday tapped Gail Slater, an antitrust veteran and economic adviser for JD Vance, to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division and take charge of a full docket of blockbuster monopoly cases against companies including Google, Visa and Apple.
Slater is expected to continue the department’s crackdown on Big Tech, including cases brought during Trump’s first term in the White House, Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform.
“Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” Trump said.
Slater served on the White House’s National Economic Council in 2018, where she worked on Trump’s executive order on national security concerns over Chinese telecommunications equipment.
Before joining Vance’s office, Slater worked at Fox Corp. and Roku.
Vance, the vice president-elect, has said antitrust officials should take a broader approach to antitrust enforcement, and praised the work of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
Slater grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and began her law career in London at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, which brought her to Washington.
She spent 10 years at the FTC, first as an antitrust attorney where she brought cases to block mergers including Whole Foods’ acquisition of organic grocer Wild Oats, and later as an adviser to then-commissioner Julie Brill, who later became an executive at Microsoft.
Slater also represented Big Tech companies including Amazon and Google at a now-defunct trade group called the Internet Association.
She is still viewed as an antitrust hawk among Washington tech skeptics, who welcomed her appointment.
Garrett Ventry, a former adviser to Republicans in Congress and founder of GRV Strategies, said Slater’s nomination shows Trump is “serious about taking on Big Tech.”
“Antitrust enforcement is here to stay,” Ventry said.
The Tech Oversight project, a group that backed the work of Biden’s DOJ antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, said the nomination shows antitrust has staying power as a bipartisan political issue.
“Gail Slater is a strong candidate to continue that work,” said Sacha Haworth, the group’s executive director.
Slater will take over a number of high-profile cases in which some of the world’s largest companies are accused of illegally building and protecting monopolies.
Trump said Slater will “ensure that our competition laws are enforced, both vigorously and FAIRLY, with clear rules that facilitate, rather than stifle, the ingenuity of our greatest companies.”
The appointment would put Slater in charge of the DOJ’s bid to make Google sell off its Chrome browser and take other measures to curb its dominance in online search.
The DOJ filed the case in 2020, during the first Trump administration. But the proposals for fixes came under Kanter.
The judge overseeing the case has said Trump officials will not get extra time to reevaluate the proposals ahead of an April trial.
Google faces a second battle with the DOJ over its online advertising technology, while Apple faces allegations that it monopolized the US smartphone market.
Kanter also filed the DOJ’s first case alleging algorithmic price fixing against property management software company RealPage.
In another case, the DOJ is seeking to break up LiveNation and TicketMaster over practices that prosecutors say harm eventgoers and artists.
Slater would have wide latitude over the cases, though most are also being pursued by bipartisan state coalitions.
A case the DOJ brought in September alleging Visa unlawfully dominates the market for debit card payment processing does not involve state antitrust regulators.
Slater would also be in a position to continue or end probes, such as an investigation into Nvidia, the chip company that rode the artificial intelligence boom to become one of the world’s most valuable companies.
A juror has been dismissed from the Sean “Diddy” Combs sex-trafficking trial after hearing five weeks of evidence.
Judge Arun Subramanian said he had “concerns” about the jury member’s “candour” and made the decision after it emerged the man – Juror 6 – had given inconsistent answers about where he lives.
This could indicate he potentially had an agenda, that he wanted to be on the panel hearing the Combstrial for a purpose, the judge said, and there was nothing the juror could say that would “put the genie back in the bottle”.
Image: Combs hugged one of his lawyers as he arrived in the courtroom. Pic: Reuters/ Jane Rosenberg
Questions over whether the juror, a black male, resided in New York or across the Hudson River in the state of New Jersey first arose at the end of last week – but defence lawyers argued dismissing him would disrupt the diversity of the jury.
However, the judge rejected this argument ahead of the start of Monday’s court session, excusing the juror and replacing him with one of the alternates, a white male.
A review of the juror’s answers to questions about his residency during jury selection, along with his subsequent responses to similar questions, revealed “clear inconsistencies”, the judge said.
“Taking these all together, the record raised serious concerns as to the juror’s candour and whether he shaded answers to get on and stay on the jury,” Judge Subramanian said.
Leaving the juror on the panel could threaten the integrity of the judicial process, he added.
“The court should not, indeed cannot, let race factor into the decision of what happens. Here, the answer is clear. Juror number six is excused,” Judge Subramanian said.
The charges against ‘Diddy’
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is charged with one count of racketeering conspiracy, two charges of sex-trafficking, and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has strenuously denied all allegations of sexual abuse. The hip-hop mogul’s defence team has described him as “a complicated man” but say the case is not.
They have conceded Combs could be violent and that jurors might not condone his proclivity for “kinky sex”. However, they argue this was a consensual “swingers” lifestyle and was not illegal.
Special agent and paralegal testify
Following the juror’s dismissal, the sixth week of the trial began – with testimony from a paralegal specialist and a special agent, who both gave evidence as summary witnesses.
This means they were not involved in the criminal investigation into Combs, but were tasked with reviewing some evidence, including charts, phone records and data. In court, the aim is to provide context to the testimony heard so far and how it relates to the charges against the hip-hop mogul.
During paralegal specialist Ananya Sankar’s testimony, the court heard about texts appearing to reference “freak offs” – sexual encounters with male escorts which former girlfriends Cassie Ventura and “Jane”, two of three alleged victims to give evidence during the trial, both say Combs forced them into.
Cassie was in an on-off relationship with Combs from 2007 to 2018, while Jane – a pseudonym – dated him on and off from the beginning of 2021 to his arrest in September 2024.
Image: Cassie Ventura gave evidence against Combs during the first week of the trial in May. Pic: Reuters/ Jane Rosenberg
Chicken soup and $4,000 cash
In messages from March 2016, Combs’s then chief of staff Kristina Khorram appeared to ask an assistant to set a hotel room up, with items requested including Gatorade, water and chicken noodle soup. “He wants you to go right away now please,” a message said.
In another text, Khorram asked workers to fetch $4,000 in cash and to ensure a male escort was given access to the hotel room, the court heard.
The court also heard about messages sent around the time of the bombshell civil lawsuit filed against Combs by Cassie in November 2023 – which was settled within 24 hours for a then undisclosed sum, revealed to be $20m during the trial.
By this time, Combs was seeing Jane. According to an audio file of a conversation, Jane told Combs after finding out about Cassie’s lawsuit: “I don’t know what I’m feeling… this is so word for word, it is crazy and it just feels sick to my stomach.”
On 28 November 2023, about two weeks later, Jane told Combs she felt he exploited her with their “dark and humiliating lifestyle”.
The following month, the court heard Jane said in a message to Khorram: “He said he would expose me and send videos to my baby daddy… I am traumatised by my time with him.”
Image: Diddy at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2023. Pic: Evan Agostini/ Invision/ AP
Jane said she would not normally involve Khorram in such matters, but told her she needed help as Combs was having one of his “evil-ass psychotic bipolar” episodes.
Jane told Khorram that she was heavily drugged in the tapes.
Although it was not clear exactly what she was referencing, a message sent to Combs by Khorram around the time of the lawsuit seemed to show some friction between the pair.
“If you cannot be honest with me this doesn’t work,” she told him, according to the messages. Combs “keeping things” to himself put them in the “situation we are all in right now”, she added.
Towards the end of the court day, videos entered into evidence under seal were played by the prosecution. This means the jury and lawyers could see and hear what was happening, but members of the public in court could not.
Prosecutors have said they expect to conclude their case later this week. After this, Combs’s defence team will begin theirs.
Last week, Kanye West turned up at the court in Manhattan, New York, to support the rapper, spending about 40 minutes in the building watching proceedings on a monitor in an overflow room.
Combs’s mother, Janice Combs, and several of his children have also consistently shown up throughout the hearing.
Diddy denies charges of sex-trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution and racketeering conspiracy.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historical child sexual exploitation cases.
Image: Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
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3:18
Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
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3:07
From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Image: Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.
A man accused of killing a US politician and her husband went to the homes of other lawmakers that night, intending to kill them, officials said.Â
Vance Boelter, 57, meticulously planned his attacks, carrying out surveillance missions, taking notes on the properties and people he targeted and disguising himself as a police officer, according to Minnesota’s acting US attorney Joseph Thompson.
Authorities believe Boelter wore a mask as he posed as a police officer and shone a torch in the face of some of his victims to disguise his identity.
Image: The FBI released this image of Vance Boelter posing as a police officer. Pic: FBI.
“It is no exaggeration to say that his crimes are the stuff of nightmare,” said Mr Thompson.
Boelter, 57, allegedly shot and wounded Senator John Hoffman, a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, in their Minneapolis home in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Image: John Hoffman. Pic: Facebook/Senator John Hoffman
He then travelled to the home of another state lawmaker but she and her family were on holiday, so they didn’t answer the door, said Mr Thompson.
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Video showed that Boelter rang the doorbell at around 2.24am on Friday but left when the family didn’t respond.
Image: Vance Boelter. Pic: Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office/Reuters
He then drove to the home of an unnamed state senator, but after the Hoffmans’ adult daughter called emergency services to say her parents had been shot, a police officer was dispatched to conduct a wellness check.
That officer saw Boelter’s car parked up the street but thought he was another officer, said Mr Thompson.
Boelter had reportedly altered his car to make it look more like a police car.
He then left and drove to the home of lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, according to an FBI affidavit.
Local police officers, also conducting a check, arrived to see Boelter fatally shoot Mark Hortman through the open door of the home, according to the document.
Melissa Hortman was found dead inside.
Boelter was arrested on Sunday evening after a huge manhunt in a rural area in Sibley County, southwest of Minneapolis.
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He faces two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder in the deaths of the Hortmans and the wounding of Mr Hoffman and his wife.
Before his arrest, the father of five texted his family group chat saying: “Dad went to war last night … I don’t wanna say more because I don’t wanna implicate anybody,” according to the affidavit.
His wife got another text that said: “Words are not gonna explain how sorry I am for this situation… there’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around,” the document said.
Several AK-style firearms and a list of about 70 names, which included politicians and abortion rights activists, were allegedly found inside his vehicle.
A Minnesota official said politicians who had been outspoken in favour of abortion rights were on the list.