I'm not implying anything is broken about the process, but they're clearly timing their actions around the election. As just one example: out of the 36 Antitrust press releases from the Attorney General's office (the tags on this press release) [0], 13 (36%) were in 2024 and 7 (19%) were just in the months of August and September of this year. A regular cadence of 36 Antitrust announcements since the administration started would be <1 per month, so 3.5/mo over the past two months (one of which isn't even over) is a clear outlier. There's some allowance to be made for the time it takes to put a lawsuit together but not enough to account for that large a difference.
Again, that's not to imply anything about the ethics or motives of the people involved, nor to say they were sitting on their hands until now. All I'm saying is it's a reality of our political system that sometimes the answer to "why now?" is "because we saved it up for the election".
I'm not implying anything is broken about the process, but they're clearly timing their actions around the election. As just one example: out of the 36 Antitrust press releases from the Attorney General's office (the tags on this press release) [0], 13 (36%) were in 2024 and 7 (19%) were just in the months of August and September of this year. A regular cadence of 36 Antitrust announcements since the administration started would be <1 per month, so 3.5/mo over the past two months (one of which isn't even over) is a clear outlier. There's some allowance to be made for the time it takes to put a lawsuit together but not enough to account for that large a difference.
Again, that's not to imply anything about the ethics or motives of the people involved, nor to say they were sitting on their hands until now. All I'm saying is it's a reality of our political system that sometimes the answer to "why now?" is "because we saved it up for the election".
[0] Using filters here, unfortunately I can't directly link to a filter view: https://www.justice.gov/news/press-releases