Attorney General Pam Bondi removed a senior Justice Department official this week following internal tensions within the administration, according to multiple reports. Abigail Slater, who had been serving as head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, was forced out of her position on Thursday.
Her departure followed complaints from officials who alleged she repeatedly invoked the name of Vice President JD Vance in internal discussions.
According to reporting by The Guardian, Slater’s exit came amid rising friction between her office and senior cabinet officials, including the attorney general. “‘It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG [assistant attorney general] for Antitrust today,” Slater wrote in a post on social media.
Bondi had reportedly informed White House officials weeks before the dismissal that her working relationship with Abigail Slater had deteriorated beyond repair.
The Guardian reported that tensions intensified after Slater sought to block a proposed $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. The transaction drew scrutiny from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
Vance initially supported Slater’s position and instructed aides that she should not face criticism for opposing the merger, according to the report. However, that support reportedly waned as her relationship with Bondi continued to deteriorate.
The vice president was also said to be frustrated upon learning that Slater had repeatedly invoked his name during internal disputes with the attorney general.
Slater’s rise within the Trump political orbit began during the 2024 campaign, when she served as a senior adviser to Vance.
Following Trump’s victory, she was confirmed for her position at the DOJ with the support of 78 senators. MAGA influencers and dedicated Trump supporters are portraying Slater as a champion of antitrust, wary of corporate lobbyists.
However, some critics argue that she has focused more on pushing her own agenda during her tenure as head of the antitrust division.
“Gail Slater was a long-time corporate lobbyist. With her own agenda. She made erratic decisions,” GOP attorney Mike Davis noted on the X platform.
“She went out of her way to knife too many Trump admin colleagues. She leaked, lied, disobeyed, and subverted. She got fired. She’s not the victim,” he added.
Slater told Bondi last year that U.S. intelligence agencies had not raised objections to her effort to block the proposed merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks.
Slater argued that the $14 billion deal would create a duopoly in the cloud-computing infrastructure market and reduce competition.
However, CIA Director John Ratcliffe later informed Bondi that blocking the merger could pose national security risks and expressed concern that he had not been consulted during the review process, the report said.
The development reportedly led Bondi to question whether Slater had fully represented the position of intelligence agencies during their discussions about the transaction.
Tensions between the two officials reportedly escalated further after Bondi declined to approve Slater’s request to attend a conference in Paris. Despite the denial, Slater attended the event, prompting Bondi to cancel her government-issued credit cards, according to The Guardian.
Bondi fired a Department of Justice paralegal in August after the environmental division employee flipped off a National Guard member on her way to work.
The fired staffer, Elizabeth Baxter, works in the same building as fellow fired paralegal Sean Charles Dunn, who was seen in a video earlier this month allegedly throwing a Subway salami sandwich at a Border Protection officer, The New York Post reported.
Baxter arrived for work at the DOJ’s “4CON” building in the NoMa district of Washington, DC, at 8:21 a.m. on Aug. 18 and told a DOJ security guard that she had just made the obscene gesture to a guardsman at Metro Center and said, “F—k the National Guard,” according to Bondi.