(Bloomberg) — A coalition of progressive advocacy groups urged the Justice Department to allow the agency’s top antitrust official to take part in antitrust cases against Alphabet Inc.’s Google and reject efforts to recuse him because of his previous work for critics of the search giant.
Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter has been barred from working on the agency’s monopoly investigations into Google while the Justice Department considers whether he should recuse from the probes, Bloomberg reported.
Before joining the agency, Kanter represented Microsoft Corp., Yelp Inc.
and other Google detractors. The search giant asked the Justice Department in November to look into whether he should be recused.
“Google’s demand that Mr. Kanter recuse himself from scrutiny of the company is an effort by a corporate giant to bully regulators into submission,” the groups said in a letter sent to the Justice Department Friday.
“If the DOJ does not grant Mr. Kanter a waiver to continue to participate in scrutiny of the company, it will not only be bending to these petulant and dangerous tactics, but giving other powerful corporate actors incentive to engage in similar behavior.”
The agency has sued Google for allegedly illegally monopolizing the search market in a case set for trial in September 2023.
The Justice Department is separately probing the search giant’s dominance in the online advertising industry.
The letter was signed by 28 organizations including the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust advocacy group; Progressive Democrats of America; and Our Revolution, an organization forged from Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a progressive ally of Kanter’s, also called on the Justice Department to allow him to work on the Google cases.
“Google’s naked attempts to bully law enforcement must be rejected, and the Justice Department should make it clear that no company is above the law,” she said in a statement last week.
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