Exclusive: Decision comes after Slater lost the support of JD Vance and Pam Bondi, the attorney general

Gail Slater, the head of the US justice department’s antitrust division, was forced out of theTrump administrationon Thursday after a turbulent tenure and months of simmering tensions with senior cabinet officials, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

“It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG [assistant attorney general] for Antitrust today,” Slater said in apostannouncing her departure.

Her defenestration followed a strained relationship with the attorney general,Pam Bondi, who had reiterated to the White House in recent weeks that their differences over the direction and management of the division were irreconcilable.

Slater also found herself isolated outside the department, most notably withJD Vance– once her most powerful ally – who grew weary of hearing complaints that Slater had invoked his name, one of the people said.

The decision is a victory for Bondi and a clutch ofDonald Trumplobbyists who started to growincreasingly frustrated with Slaterlast summer, when she sought to block a $14bn merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, a cloud-computing and software company.

Supporters of Slater have portrayed her as an antitrust purist deeply skeptical of Trump allies and lobbyists. But her skepticism of corporate mergers led critics to allege she was more interested in advancing her own agenda than the business-friendly stance of the administration.

In the Hewlett Packard Enterprise case, according to three people directly familiar with the episode, Slater opposed the deal because it potentially created a duopoly for cloud-computing and wireless-networking systems.

But Slater claimed to Bondi that the US intelligence community had not raised any national security concerns about blocking the merger – a consideration that provides a legitimate basis for allowing a deal to proceed.

That prompted a scramble inside the justice department when the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, said blocking the mergerwould in fact pose national security risksand questioned why he was never consulted.

Source: Drudge Report