Overview

• White House and U.S. intelligence officials overrode the Justice Department’s initial antitrust objections in June to clear Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks as a measure against Huawei.
• DOJ antitrust deputies Roger Alford and Bill Rinner were fired for insubordination after they opposed the merger settlement.
• Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Richard Blumenthal have petitioned U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts for a Tunney Act hearing to reexamine the merger terms.
• Those senators also urged the Justice Department’s inspector general to probe whether political or lobbying pressures influenced the settlement process.
• Under the DOJ settlement, HPE must divest its Instant On division and license Juniper’s AIOps code while pursuing a unified U.S. networking stack to challenge Huawei’s market dominance.