Kamala Faces Her First Political Test: Defend Lina Khan, or Buckle to Corporate Power

By Ryan Grim

The first domestic policy contest over the direction of the Kamala Harris campaign has broken into full view, with major Democratic donors pressing the vice president to break with the Biden administration’s popular and populist antitrust policy by ousting Lina Khan from her post as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. “She’s a dope,” said Barry Diller, chair of IAC, a multibillion dollar global media and web company. 

Diller, who added that he would lobby Harris to dump Khan, made the comments on CNBC, with Paris’s Arc de Triomphe serving as a fitting backdrop for the restorationist push. His shove against Khan came a day after LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, who sits on the board of Microsoft, similarly urged Harris to fire Khan in a television interview. He did not mention, nor did he need to, that Microsoft has been in Khan’s crosshairs for anti-competitive acquisitions. A New York Times article about Harris earlier this week, headlined ominously, “Kamala Harris Works to Build Bridges to the Business World,” included an unnamed donor boasting that the veep “has expressed skepticism of Ms. Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers.”

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Source: Drop Site