WASHINGTON, D.C. - House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) delivers his opening statement during today's hearing with FTC Chair Lina Khan.
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Transcript:
At a speech in Berlin in 2022, Chair Khan told an audience that the challenges facing anti-trust today were quote, "the result of a choice made 40 years ago to follow the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork" In other words, according to Chair Khan, the prevailing view over the last 40 years, a bipartisan view, shared over more than 20 Congress's, six presidential administrations, and adopted and developed by all 50 states in their enforcement is now somehow wrong.
Consider that over those 40 years the U.S. economy grew from about a $3 trillion annual economy to $25 trillion. It was the single greatest period of wealth creation in human history. But everyone who oversaw economic policy for those four decades, according to the Chair, was wrong. She knows better. She's trying to usher in a radical departure from the norms that made the American economy great to a system where her and her cronies have unchecked power over business practices in our country, untethered from any reasonable reading of precedent or statutory law.
So, if you should ask now, over the two years into her tenure, how has her approach to anti-trust been playing out, as she has one of those critical agencies in our government. The short answer is that it's been a disaster. She's pushed investigations to burden parties with vague and costly demands without any substantive follow through, or frankly, logic for the requests themselves. She's centralizes the decision making at the Commission within her office, eliminating any pretext of due process or transparency in that decision making. Her approach is best characterized as one of intimidation followed by inaction.
The best example of this, which was only brought to light because of our work on the Weaponization Select Committee, was her targeted harassment of Twitter. After Mr. Musk bought the company and following pressure from Democrat senators, left-wing activist groups, the FTC issued over 350 requests for information from Twitter. These requests included asking for every communication about Mr. Musk inside the company, and most troubling, for information about Twitter's work with journalist working to shed light on the government-driven censorship practices that existed, and I think in some cases still exist at Big Tech. In fact, we got a great court decision last week that talked about this, how pervasive this effort was, and a preliminary injunction from that federal court in the Western District of Louisiana.
Just this morning though, in a filing in federal court, we have learned that the situation is actually even worse than we could have imagined. This wasn't harassment, it was a shakedown. The FTC as is, as is common practice pursuant to the consent order, required Twitter to hire an independent assessor. An independent assessor whose legal obligation is to be truly independent and objective, not for one party or another. Well, it turns out, objectivity was not what the Federal Trade Commission was interested in here. Here's what the filing said about Ernst and Young, the independent assessor hired in this matter. Quote, "the FTC was so adamant with Ernst and Young conveying that this is absolutely what you will do, and this is going to occur, and you'll produce a report at the end of the day that would be negative about Twitter, that senior Ernst and Young leaders feared that if Ernst and Young resigned as the independent assessor, the FTC would take exception to their withdrawal and create other challenges for Ernst and Young over time." This is not conjecture from Twitter, this is from sworn testimony of the independent assessor in the deposition itself, taken just last month.
This is outrageous, this is unacceptable, and it's the kind of behavior that occurs in banana republics, not in the United States of America. And so it's no wonder, Chair Khan has no interest in providing information to the people's representatives in the Congress, to the people on this committee when we ask for it.
Today, the FTC has not fully complied with a single request for documents from this committee, and because of her mismanagement, not even her own staff is impressed with Chairman Khan's leadership. In 2020, the last year under the Trump administration, 87% of FTC employees agree that senior leaders maintain high standards. Under Chair Khan, that figure fell to 53% in 2021, has declined even further to 49% in 2022. In 2020, 83% of surveyed FTC employees agree that they have a high level of respect for the FTC senior leaders, again under the Chairman, that figure plummeted to 49%, and these numbers were before it was revealed recently that the chair was advised by FTC’s Ethics Counsel to recuse herself from a major case. She did not recuse herself, and then appears to have misled Congress about taking that advice. We have a lot of questions today to get through. We look forward to the response from the Chairman of the FTC.
Source: House Committee On The Judiciary