Thanks to assists from billionaire Elon Musk and the conservative-controlled Supreme Court, President Donald Trump has managed to make his mass firing of federal officials one of the hallmarks of his lawless second term.
This included the firing of Democratic appointees across multiple government agencies, including former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who has claimed that his removal was not just illegal but a part of Trump’s scheme to “enrich his billionaire besties.”
In this ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ interview, Bedoya tells Mehdi what he and his former colleague Rebecca Kelly Slaughter’s firing from the Federal Trade Commission says about the Trump administration’s “naked open corruption.”
“We were suing Mark Zuckerberg for his acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and suddenly Mark Zuckerberg pays $23 million to the presidential library, and he has Oval Office meetings where he can lobby the president to drop that lawsuit against him,” Bedoya tells Mehdi. “I don't know why I was fired, but I know that it helps the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and the oil executives of the world to do whatever they want.”
The former FTC commissioner also talks about why Democrats’ failure to embrace Biden’s progressive FTC chair Lina Khan during the past presidential election was a “mistake” and that the party needs to “stop listening to their own oligarchs”. For Bedoya, the way forward for the Dems in 2026 and 2028 is to drop the dated left versus right approach and frame the struggle as “billionaires at the top versus everyone else.”
He also discusses the moment he was fired and when the FTC controversially dropped a lawsuit against PepsiCo after the company donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. PepsiCo previously denied the allegations put forth in the lawsuit, calling it “wrong on the facts and the law.”
Bedoya further explains to Mehdi how Trump is undoing much of the FTC’s previous work in fighting C-suite level corruption by citing last year’s order banning former Pioneer CEO, Scott Sheffield, from gaining a seat on Exxon’s board of directors due to his alleged attempts at colluding with OPEC countries. “We banned him from that board and as soon as the next administration comes in, he's allowed to join the Exxon board,” Bedoya tells Mehdi. (Exxon responded to the FTC’s initial concerns by saying it will not add Sheffield to its board, and in July, he said he is no longer interested in joining.)
It’s not just big oil that benefits from people like Bedoya getting booted from the FTC, but big tech too. Take AI for example, where in 2023, the FTC banned drug store chain Rite Aid from using AI-based facial-recognition technologies that falsely accused customers of crimes and targeted people of color. Rite Aid denied the allegation but still agreed to a 5-year ban.
Under the Trump administration, Bedoya warns, “this is the kind of investigation that'll be stopped.”
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