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https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/12/gail-slater-steps-down-as-dojs-antitrust-chief-00778156
Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater is stepping down from the Justice Department’s antitrust division, she announced Thursday.
“It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG for Antitrust today,” she wrote in an X post. “It was indeed the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role.”
Slater, who was confirmed to her role last March, led some of the agency’s most prominent antitrust cases during her time at DOJ, particularly against the tech industry. The department scored its first major win under the Trump administration in April when a federal judge in Virginia ruled that Google monopolized the ad tech market. However, the DOJ failed to convince a federal judge in D.C. to break up Google’s search empire in a separate case in September.
The department’s antitrust division has seen its share of turmoil during Slater’s tenure. Two senior antitrust attorneys were fired in July following conflicts over DOJ’s approval of a merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. Higher-ups in Main Justice allowed the merger to go through, overruling Slater’s antitrust division. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Slater did not support the firings or the settlement. One of the terminated attorneys, Roger Alford, would go on to deliver a fiery speech in August accusing “MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists” of interfering in the merger decision.
More recently, Semafor reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi last Friday reversed Slater’s decision not to renew the contract for Sara Matar, Slater’s chief of staff. Slater’s second-in-command, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Hamer, also stepped down from his position on Monday, after less than a year at the department.
Bondi said in a statement, “On behalf of the Department of Justice, we thank Gail Slater for her service to the Antitrust Division which works to protect consumers, promote affordability, and expand economic opportunity.”
Her approach: During her confirmation hearing last year, Slater said she envisioned using a “scalpel” for antitrust enforcement in the tech industry and offered a qualified yes when asked if she’d continue ongoing antitrust litigation against Google and Apple.