Latest Article|September 3, 2020|Free
::Making Grown Men Cry Since 1992
6 min read
Get ready to juggle some acronyms. It might feel like a game of Scrabble, but the results are far more important.A whistleblower from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has accused Attorney General William Barr of organizing investigations into cannabis business mergers that were based entirely around his marijuana position. But the DOJ says that antitrust prosecutors didn’t violate any rules or regulations and is letting itself off the hook.A June 11 memo from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) said, “Two anonymous whistleblowers made allegations that the Antitrust Division (ATR) violated the Clayton Act and the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act by conducting pretextual investigations of, and placing onerous demands on, merging companies in the cannabis industry through the issuance of Second Requests, even though such mergers presented no competitive concerns.”The memo states that the whistleblowers identified a number of transactions in which they claim Barr inappropriately targeted cannabis company mergers for antitrust investigations.During a congressional committee hearing on oversight of the DOJ, Rep. Steve Cohen brought up the issue and asked John Elias, one of the department whistleblowers, about the allegations. “You’ve testified to cases that [DOJ] and [ATR] took up concerning areas that … your Justice Department superiors didn’t think were worthy of antitrust investigations. One was cannabis. Did that cost the cannabis folks a lot of money?” Elias answered that it had. “So it was harassment by Bill Barr of an industry he didn’t like. Is that right?” Cohen asked. “I think that’s a fair way to categorize it,” Elias answered. Elias told the committee that mergers in question were “not even close” to meeting the criteria to warrant an investigation.The ATR denied the allegations and argued that even if they were true, there would have been no violation of any laws or regulations. The agency said that the cannabis industry “exploded overnight, with multiple mergers taking place in a matter of months.” The speed with which the industry was expanding and consolidating—argued ATR—made it impossible for the agency to fulfill its obligation to conclude whether the mergers taking place provided “competitive concerns” within 30 days. Nothing to see here.