The top Democrats at the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) are hosting an unofficial “hearing” to attack the Trump Administration for settling the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case on Monday. According to Capital Forum, it will feature California AG Rob Bonta and fired Trump antitrust official Roger Alford.
When the case was settled, Roger Alford wrote in Bloomberg, “When I joined the DOJ in 2025 as the second highest-ranking antitrust enforcer, I was committed to bringing Live Nation-Ticketmaster to trial.” He continued, “The president ran on a populist agenda of improving the lives of the average American. Former Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater and I took those words to heart.”
Alford had previously portrayed these issues as “a battle between genuine MAGA reformers” like himself and Slater “and MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists” like Kellyanne Conway and Mike Davis who worked for Live Nation.
However, Slater and Alford had both pushed for the settlement.
As Axios reported: “The settlement comes just weeks after former DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater left the department. The senior DOJ official said Slater supported a settlement that did not include a breakup of Ticketmaster prior to her departure.”
Moreover, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to Breitbart News that before he was fired, Roger Alford and his Deputy Mark Hamer had a meeting with Kellyanne Conway and Richard Grenell to try to effectuate a settlement in the case.
Beyond this, Slater and Alford’s MAGA credentials are quite dubious as well. As Breitbart previously reported, Slater has troubling items on her resume prior to becoming the DoJ’s top antitrust official. Slater worked with the “Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online” spearheaded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn, which praised Big Tech for or “removing apps like Infowars for spreading COVID-19 disinformation” and “deleting misleading tweets from major political figures such as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.”
Roger Alford has a longer history of promoting left wing causes. As Breitbart previously reported,
- Alford attacked the Trump FCC and FTC under Ferguson and Carr for going after DEI, saying: “I agree with you that there is a legitimate concern that the antitrust enforcers in at the FTC and to and the FCC . . . embracing the culture wars with gusto, rather than focusing on the sort of core concerns of the American worker, which are. . . more pocketbook issues.”
- In China, he gave a speech entitled “Donald Trump’s Proposed Trade War with China.” According to contemporary reports, Alford called Trump’s anti-China posture “ludicrous and uninformed”
- He praised Black lives Matter
This is not the first time an antitrust official has seemingly turned on the administration and teamed up with Democrats. A source familiar with the situation compared Alford’s conduct to his former colleagues John Elias, chief of staff to antitrust AG Makan Delrahim during the first Trump Administration, who also testified for House Democrats with frivolous complaints of politicization.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.