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OAN Commentary by: Gayle Trotter
Monday, December 9, 2024
On December 9th, Alina Habba, who will serve as Counselor to the President in the incoming Trump White House, stated that, upon taking her post, her top priority will be to end the “lawfare” and “political witch hunts” of the Biden-Harris administration.
Good. The Biden-Harris administration and the Democratic Party have weaponized the justice system like never before.
Their lawfare was most evident in the multiple and almost endless prosecutions of Donald Trump. But the lawfare was not limited to just his presidential predecessor. Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have made a habit out of suing businesses they don’t like, exacting an economic toll on everyday Americans.
While Biden has decried “corporate greed,” his administration’s lawyers have made themselves busy suing everyone in business from grocery stores to pharmacy negotiators to, yes, 7-Eleven convenience stores. The Biden team has filed a record number of challenges to proposed business mergers, and they are currently suing four out of the five most successful American tech companies.
To take just one example, earlier this year, Biden’s FTC sued to stop a proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons grocery chains, whose supermarkets provide food to tens of millions of Americans. The companies agreed to merge because Walmart and Amazon had entered the food business, and traditional grocery stores need more power and efficiency to stay competitive. The move was pro-competition and pro-consumer, yet the government tried to block it.
Why? Simple — So Biden-Harris looked like they were doing something about the high grocery prices that they created. Thanks to the record inflation that the Biden White House induced, groceries are up 30% since January 2021.
While the Kroger-Albertsons merger became an easy target for the administration, the truth is that it did not matter who got blamed so long as Biden-Harris found a political pass for the high prices of the runaway inflation that, in 2021, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assured us all would be “transitory.”
Kroger and Albertsons are not alone. One recent analysis found that companies representing 40% of the S&P’s market cap are currently being investigated by the Biden government. With prices up in just about every sector since Biden-Harris took office, the administration knew that it needed to get busy scapegoating private businesses.
Another example is the FTC’s lawsuit against pharmacy benefit managers, companies that insurance companies and health plan sponsors hire to negotiate lower drug prices with the drug manufacturers.
The Biden administration sued the nation’s most effective PBMs, claiming they’d artificially inflated the price of insulin. Never mind that insulin prices have plunged in recent years, PBMs had nothing to do with their prices once being high, and the savings PBMs pass on to patients are substantial. The Biden-Harris administration would rather pass the buck to the private sector for the high overall healthcare costs on its watch. And that’s exactly what this lawsuit was designed to do.
By crusading against big business, Team Biden has gotten not only a political out for the rampant inflation it’s caused, but it has also been able to posture on the side of the little guy against “big, evil companies.”
On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris’s very first economic policy position was to attack so-called corporate “price gouging.” She never missed a chance to blame companies for inflation rather than her own administration’s actions.
Capitalizing on reports showing that housing inflation was a top concern among voters, a favorite topic Harris liked to hit on the trail was pricing software used by landlords, which employs artificial intelligence to make pricing recommendations. The DOJ claims this technology has ushered in the sharing of “confidential, competitively sensitive information” that enables landlords to “align their rents.” In reality, it merely provides pricing data—there’s no collusion or even any kind of agreement at all among the competing landlords. But that does not stop the White House from deploying lawfare against an easy scapegoat for soaring housing prices.
At times, the Biden administration has even used DOJ and FTC in naked attempts to protect the administration’s own power.
When Virginia tried to stop illegal immigrants from voting in elections—in line with federal law—the Biden DOJ sued. When Elon Musk offered a $1 million prize to encourage voter registration—a good thing if you are pro-democracy, but not if you are pro-Trump—Biden’s allies in the Philadelphia DA office sued.
From Alvin Bragg’s politicized charges in New York to Fani Willis’s shenanigans in Georgia, the entire country has seen how Democrats’ use of lawfare against Donald Trump is old hat. Trump understands lawfare all too well because he has been forced to live it.
Thankfully, so too does Alina Habba, his longtime attorney.
When Trump takes office in January, Habba, along with soon-to-be Attorney General Pam Bondi, should end the weaponization of the legal system against not just the sitting president but all businesses and political groups that have been targeted by the government’s lawsuits. Enough is enough.
Already, Elon Musk has said the lawsuit-happy Lina Khan will be fired once Trump assumes office. That’s a good start, but let’s hope the Trump team goes even further to protect Americans and restore sanity to our justice system.
Gayle Trotter (@gayletrotter), a conservative attorney, is the host of “The Gayle Trotter Show: RIGHT in DC,” and is a frequent commentator on TV news programs.
