Lauren Feiner

Democrat Alvaro Bedoya will formally step down, while continuing the legal battle against President Donald Trump’s attempted firings of him and fellow Democratic Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Trump’s dismissals broke with Supreme Court precedent saying presidents can’t fire independent agency members without cause. Bedoya says while serving as a commissioner has been his “dream job,” he has to take care of his family by seeking a source of income, without breaking federal ethics rules.

“The line between professional and personal is increasingly blurred,” says a LinkedIn document shown in a video deposition. Then-LinkedIn product executive Kumaresh Pattabiraman explains in the video that in the wake of the pandemic, “we observe that people are bringing their personal and their professional lives a lot closer together,” with people posting about everything from completing a marathon to their views on politics on LinkedIn. This seems to undermine the FTC’s claim that LinkedIn does not compete with Facebook and Instagram for personal social networking. He says friends and family have always been part of the LinkedIn experience, but even more so now.

In a video deposition Judge Boasberg watched a few weeks ago and the media is now being shown, former Morgan Stanley investment banker Ali Esfahani describes the whirlwind few days in which the $19 billion deal came together. The deal followed none of the usual steps Morgan Stanley would typically take contacting buyers and negotiating price on the company’s behalf, he says. Instead, after being called on a Saturday night, he showed up to a meeting to hammer out the deal, but “when we arrived, we realized the price had already been negotiated, the buyer had already been selected.” Esfahani says he felt like he was basically “being thrown a bone because of all the preemptive work that we had done.”

After six weeks, the FTC’s anti-monopoly trial against Meta is finally over. The parties will need to file post-trial briefs, including Meta’s argument to strike FTC expert Hemphill’s testimony, and then it will be up to Judge Boasberg to write his opinion. Boasberg says he plans to “take a welcome respite from thinking about this” until the first brief is due. He thanks everyone for their “hard work over the last four and a half years” — a stark reminder of how long this case has been in the works — and adds that the “issues are certainly interesting, and I’ll await final submissions and get you my decision as expeditiously as I can.”