US: Trump’s Delrahim sees no problem with the AT&T-Time Warner merger

President Donald Trump has nominated a former corporate lawyer — who previously said that AT&T’s bid for Time Warner doesn’t pose a “major antitrust problem” — as the US Justice Department’s next competition chief.

The White House announced yesterday that it had selected Makan Delrahim, who is already aiding the Trump administration, as its pick to be the assistant attorney general for antitrust, a key government position with the power to approve or deny mergers and investigate companies for potential competition threats.

Publicly and privately, Trump has blasted the deal, even though the president stressed in January that he hadn’t “seen any of the facts.” Delrahim, however, said in an interview on Canadian television last year that he didn’t see the problem with AT&T’s latest business gambit, given that the wireless giant and Time Warner are not direct competitors.

“The sheer size of it, and the fact that it’s media, I think will get a lot of attention,” he said in October. “However, I don’t see this as a major antitrust problem.”

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