Monopoly Round-Up: The Harvey Weinstein of Antitrust
Google has a political machine run by an operative Josh Wright. Wright just went down in a sordid scandal. What this saga shows is far more than the antitrust establishment wants you to see.
Before getting to the monopoly-themed news of the week, I want to touch on a lurid story that’s been percolating for months in the antitrust world, but was given huge lift this weekend by the Wall Street Journal.
Over the past few days, the WSJ’s Brody Mullins has published three front page stories on a former Federal Trade Commission official and George Mason University professor named Josh Wright, who was fired last year after multiple women came forward publicly alleging Wright had used his various positions of power to induce sexual relations with them. According to the accusations, Wright was able to advance the careers of students at law firms and in government, and did so, based on whether they were sleeping with him.
It’s a bit weird to have so much Wall Street Journal ink dedicated to someone who seems a bit like a random guy, and over what appears at first like a tabloid-style sex scandal. But Mullins is a very sharp reporter. And the story is not what it at first seems. Because it turns out, if there is one person who carries forward the legacy of Robert Bork’s ideas, and helped structure recent legal thinking on the right around corporate concentration, it would be Josh Wright. And his downfall exposes the entire political machine of firms like Google, Amazon, and Walmart in Washington, D.C., in academia, and in the legal establishment.
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I’ve been on the other side of this machine; in 2017, I was at a think tank called New America, and my team was let go because of a press release we sent praising a European enforcement action against Google. Then-CEO Eric Schmidt called the President of New America, and we were all fired. So while I generally prefer discussing ideas because I think ideas do actually drive policy, it’s important to note that the people who run the antitrust world are, generally speaking, bad human beings.
There are of course exceptions, many in fact. But from what I’ve seen, the white collar antitrust bar tended to tolerate criminality and evil and abuse, or even encourage it. And that’s why the story of Wright matters. It’s not that Wright did bad stuff, it’s that he was allowed to act with impunity for almost twenty years. He was benefitting monopolists, so he could do whatever he wanted. Big tech CEOs and Wright share the fundamental ideological notion that those with power can abuse it if they so choose, as long as it’s good for monopolists. And Wright was good for monopolists.
So who is Josh Wright? Well he wasn’t just a professor, though he published over 150 papers on law and economics, some with powerful people like D.C. Circuit Court Judge Douglas Ginsburg and influential legal scholars like Daniel Crane. He ran George Mason’s Global Antitrust Institute, the heir to the Henry Manne training centers of the 1970s, which helped teach Bork’s thinking about political economy to endless numbers of professors and judges. Under Wright, the GAI funneled millions of dollars from Google, Meta, Amazon, and Qualcomm into fancy events in Napa Valley and Hawaii with judges and foreign officials, so much so that it led to an FBI investigation over potential violations of anti-corruption laws.
Wright posed as a scholar in law and economics, but he was a paid advocate. And it was effective advocacy. His hundreds of papers, blog posts, tweets, and comments were devastating to antitrust enforcement. For instance, the Ninth Circuit cited Wright’s papers in its 2019 decision overturning an antitrust verdict against communications chip maker Qualcomm, which had donated $2.7 million to Wright’s antitrust center in 2017. As another example, Wright’s work, whose funding by Google often went undisclosed, helped persuade Democratic FTC Commissioner Edith Ramirez to kill a potential antitrust suit against Google in 2012.
The dual role of academic and paid advocate is pervasive in academia. But while it confuses or embarrasses some, it never caused any moral problems for Wright. Adam Kovacevich, a key Google lobbyist, hired Wright, and worked with him to attack the possibility of an antitrust case. This back and forth gives a nice snapshot of the moral transactions at work.
After Wright rebutted a Google critic in one of his posts, Kovacevich emailed him. “Thanks for your time spent fighting the good fight this week,” he told Wright.
A few days later, on Oct. 11, 2011, an official from the FTC Bureau of Economics emailed Wright to praise his takedown of the critic: “Very nice work. Man, that guy is an idiot.”
Wright forwarded the email to Kovacevich at Google.
“Also encouraging that they’re actually paying attention to the outside debate,” Kovacevich wrote to Wright the next day.
“Yes,” Wright said. “They are definitely paying attention.”
Two days later, Google donated $180,000 to the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, which published Wright’s research.
It’s no wonder that the first article in the series referred to Wright as Google’s Secret Weapon.
It’s hard to overstate Wright’s political influence. He never ran the FTC, serving as a minority commissioner for a few years. But he had a deep intellectual hold over the politically feeble Democratic Chair Edith Ramirez, with Wright acting as the driving force behind a statement limiting the FTC’s authority to pursue “unfair methods of competition,’” an episode he called “the most fulfilling experiences of my career.” Today Ramirez represents Google in its attempt to ward off privacy limits for children’s data.
Wright placed his people in key positions of authority, including in the office of FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips and Christine Wilson. “Good news is almost nearly everyone on his staff for that committee is a former or current student of mine,” Wright told Kovacevich about Senator Mike Lee, the top Republican on the Antitrust Subcommittee. His students would go on to become government enforcers, big law partners, and judges. But he got them in on the ground floor. From 2010-2020, at least “50 law students from George Mason University worked as FTC interns,” which was “more than the number of students from Yale, Harvard or Stanford universities.” For students, and mid-career lawyers on the right, Wright was a gatekeeper to power and money.
With his power in right-wing academia and the FTC came influence in Congress. As an heir to Bork, he had immense influence over how Republicans thought about antitrust. For instance, in 2016, he co-authored a piece with current House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan. On the Senate side, it was the GOP leader, Mitch McConnell, who put him on the FTC as a minority commissioner under Obama. (Wright nearly became the Antitrust chief under Trump.)
Along with the ability to structure law and enforcement priorities came money. Wright had a $1.5 million annual salary from Wilson Sonsini, one of the most important law firms in D.C., which represented Qualcomm, Google, and many other big firms (and where Wright helped place students, and at least one woman he was sleeping with). He was paid $600,000 a year by Amazon, more than any Amazon lobbyist, and George Mason paid him $400,000+ as well. He also worked for Kirkland & Ellis, the most important law firm in the private equity world.
But the money, in a sense, was less compelling than the power. According to the Wall Street Journal, Wright had been sleeping with students since at least 2006, and continued to do so until he was fired in 2023.
Wright evaded scrutiny over affairs with students because the university, like Wilson Sonsini, found him too valuable to lose, some of the women alleged. His conduct was known around campus, those women said, and complaints to school officials in past years went nowhere.
The level of inappropriate behavior was off the charts tacky, with Wright at one point bringing a student and research assistant on a business trip and booking a room with only one bed. He would interview women for professorships, and then invite them on dates immediately afterwards. I’m not super wired in the legal world, but there are a lot of George Mason grads in D.C., and I’ve heard stories about Wright. He was notorious.
While sexual misbehavior is easy to focus on, there was a level of open lawlessness that is unusual for D.C. While at the FTC, Wright had voted on whether to pursue an antitrust claim against Qualcomm. After he left the commission, he was prohibited from representing Qualcomm under Federal law. But he did so anyway, encouraging his allies at the FTC to drop the case over steak lunches and email. When the inspector general contacted him over the legal violation, he denied it, then conceded it had happened. “The office concluded that Wright had violated a federal law dealing with conflict-of-interest restrictions and recommended prosecution,” wrote Mullins. “The Justice Department didn’t pursue the case.”
What’s unusual here isn’t the influence peddling, but the carelessness. Sending emails to a government official on behalf of a client you are legally prohibited from representing is traceable. Wright apparently just didn’t care. He may have seen himself as above the law. Eventually, goes the story, his arrogance got the best of him, and he started dating multiple subordinate women who found out about one another. One filed a legal complaint with George Mason, and several went public. His clients cut him off, and he resigned in disgrace, though he is now suing several women for libel in Virginia, as well as litigating against George Mason for being unfairly fired.
All of that being said, the story here isn’t about Josh Wright. It takes a village to abuse power the way that he did. Google, Amazon, Meta, and Qualcomm all financed his political power because he helped them. In 2019, people at the law firm Wilson Sonsini discovered he had lied about inappropriate sexual behavior, and sought to have him fired; Susan Creighton, the key consigliere for Google, kept him on payroll. Wright was still working for Google and Facebook more than a year after they learned of sexual improprieties. Everywhere you turned in the conservative and corporate world of antitrust, Wright seemed to be there. “He and his firm,” wrote Mullins, “had contracts with the American Enterprise Institute, $250,000 a year; Walmart, $1,250 an hour; and the law firm Jones Day, $1,500 an hour.”
It’s hard to find people on the right and in the antitrust world who weren’t involved in a sense with Josh Wright. Federalist Society official Dean Reuter helped coordinate funding for one of Wright’s girlfriends, and lobbyist Adam Kovacevich continued to find him useful for years. Christine Wilson and Noah Phillips were his allies. Wilson today touts the women who came forward, but she wasn’t doing much touting when it mattered.
I know Josh Wright, and I’ve known him for years. If you’re in the antitrust world of policy in D.C., it’s hard not to know him. We’ve insulted each other on Twitter, but also joked around and had conversations about politics and antitrust. One interesting nugget about Wright is that he saw the threat that Brandeisians posed to the legacy of Bork far before anyone else. And I think this is for a simple reason.
Unlike most in the antitrust world, Wright is not a hypocrite. He lives his values, believing that those who have power should be able to do what they want with it. He has always been straightforward that he sees antitrust law as a game without principles, and that he thinks everyone in academia and policymaker is corrupt. In a sense, he believes in corruption. Most people, even on his side, do not, and feel that while they must compromise, such things are necessary. Wright never felt that way. He is a deep cynic, morality is for suckers.
What Wright saw in the Brandeisians is that we didn’t want the same social and financial validation that Democrats he knew traditionally had. We did not care if we were liked by economists or the antitrust establishment, and did not care if we looked out of step with the existing framework. We actually believed in the ideas we were putting forward, that power should not be abused. He saw in us a dangerous adversary, a set of people who did not play by the rules he had known for most of his career. His nihilism is why he was so good at his job, and ultimately why he started openly flouting laws and rules he knew at some level he shouldn’t. It’s also why he was so essential to the antitrust establishment, who covered for him every step of the way.
Here are some basic questions that in a healthy intellectual and political world would have real answers.
Will this lead to top lobbying operatives at Google, Amazon, and Facebook to resign?
Will George Mason University and the taxpayers of Virginia face liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act?
Will prestigious antitrust law journals issue warnings about Wright’s financial conflicts?
What did judge Ginsburg know?
Did Wright use the interns he placed at FTC to feed him nonpublic information to benefit his clients?
Kirkland and Ellis, a major law firm that boasts connections to PE, healthcare, and industrial giants, hired Wright. Have they severed all ties?
Will the many Judges who attended GM Foundation antitrust seminars where Wright presented disclose their attendance and recuse themselves in antitrust cases?
Why did Google lie about firing Wright when they became aware of his issues when the reporting suggests they knew much earlier?
And now, the good and bad news of the week.
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