The Trump Justice Department is embroiled in a corporate coup attempt, exposing major rifts within the GOP coalition and a rampant culture of pay-to-play corruption. The graft reaches the highest levels of the agency, resulting in the ouster of top department prosecutors and threatening to undo a number of ongoing Joe Biden–era lawsuits against corporations like Apple, Visa, and Ticketmaster.

After a scorched-earth lobbying campaign, the Department of Justice walked back its own lawsuit blocking a $14 billion tech megamerger pursued by tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) just weeks before the case was set to go to trial.

Instead, the Justice Department approved the deal with a weak consent decree — a legally binding order imposing some obligations on the combined firm to maintain market competition. In doing so, officials overruled their own antitrust division, whose initial complaint on the merger laid out a litany of anticompetitive concerns.