This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio.
Today, we are announcing campaign finance, bribery and conspiracy charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City. As the indictment alleges Mayor Adams engaged in a long running conspiracy in which he solicited and knowingly accepted illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors and corporations. As we allege Mayor Adams took these contributions even though he knew they were illegal.
Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams announced the first federal charges ever against a sitting mayor of New York City. The indictment charges Eric Adams with engaging in years of sustained corruption and accepting more than one hundred thousand dollars in lavish bribes from foreign nationals. Williams said that Adams repeatedly crossed bright red lines, leading to the charges of bribery, conspiracy, and breaking campaign finance laws.
The conduct alleged in the indictment, the foreign money, the corporate money, the bribery, the years of concealment, is a grave breach of the public's trust.
Public office is a privilege.
We allege that Mayor Adams abused that privilege and broke the law flaws that are designed to ensure that officials like him serve the people, not the highest bidder, not a foreign bidder, and certainly not a foreign power.
These are bright red lines, and we.
Allege that the Mayor crossed them again and again for years.
That is the only reason we are here today.
Adams denied wrongdoing and struck a defiant tone in a press conference, vowing to remain in office.
My day to day will not change. I will continue to do the job for eight point three million New Yorkers that I was elected to do.
Joining me is Richard purflt. A professor at Columbia Law School. Rich this was a really detailed indictment. What struck you most?
Good question? I think the level of fact that the government has put in the indictment means that at least some of the counts there are five counts, my sense is that at least four of them are pretty straightforward, and if the government is able to prove in court the facts that they're alleging in the indictment, it would be very hard to defend against them.
What are the four that seemed straightforward.
So they are the two that are about foreign campaign contributions, and that's one for the twenty twenty one campaign and one for the twenty twenty five campaign. That is flat out illegal. I mean in fact when you actually get to the count I mean, obviously there's a long factual backdrop, but those counts are like two paragraphs long. It's extremely
shortened to the point. And if they can show that he kind of intentionally and with his team his associates worked with foreign donors knowing they were foreign donors to get them to contribute to his campaign, that's pretty close
to open and shut if the facts prove out. And the other the other two that are pretty close those two just served very powerful is the federal funds ribery ones, which is the ones that basically charge him with kind of bilking the New York City Matching Funds program through various ways, again getting the foreign donations, but also other donations where they broke them down and then persuaded the donors to use straw donors so that larger donations were
funneled through smaller donors so that they were matchable under the New York City Matching Funds program. That also is again, if they can prove that, that does seem like a straightforward effort on the part of the mayor to the City of New York. And you know that's what the federal funds bribery thing is. You know, is he in effect using this for his own benefit?
Since this is an indictment of the first indictment of a New York City mayor on federal charges, and you know that this has been cleared all the way to the top of the Justice Department. I mean, are you pretty confident that they have the evidence to back up what they allege?
No? I mean, I don't know enough, but certainly the indictment is very, very detailed, So they certainly have laid out a set of facts that if they can prove them, you know, are pretty strong. They've laid out a lot of facts. There are no gold bars in this one like Menendez, but they've laid out a lot and a lot of detail.
So the US Attorney a big focus of his press conference was that Adams accepted luxury travel. And they had a poster board.
Right showing pictures of the fancy hotels and.
Things, right and showing the undisclosed travel benefits which are also listed. It was almost a duplicate of what's in the indictment. Is that because it catches the public's eye or is that a very important part of this.
I'm sure they use of the photographs are designed to catch the public eye, just like in the Menendez case when they were showing off the gold bars or pictures of the gold bars. Obviously it's playing them the court of public opinion. All was on the court of law. It's not clear that having pictures of fancy hotel rooms in istan bulas that the pictures of the fancy hotel rooms are crucial. The fact that the rooms were renting for a certain rate and night that he wasn't paying.
That's actually enough.
And it might be surprising to many that this goes back nearly ten years. I mean they went to the time before.
He was mayor, right, well, I mean his initial interactions with the Turkish representatives go back to time he's borough president. Of course, he was beginning to organize his campaign to become mayor, so a lot of the fundraising, you know, goes back two years before the election. But he knew he was running and he was borough president, so he did have an official position and had some prestige that's connected to that. Some official powers, powers that borrow president
are not great. But you know, the one official thing that he's accused of doing is actually kind of borderline because it's pressuring the Fire Department to accelerate the approval of the opening of the new Turkish building. He actually wasn't mayor yet and he had no formal power over the Fire department. On the other hand, and he was just in the process of winning the election, and he was a city official, and the looral presidents have some
role in city government. But I think in some sense there, I think the issues goes more to the fact that at that point he was on the verge of becoming mayor, So you know, at that point he didn't have any formal leverage over the Fire Department, but he would soon.
Williams also spoke about how Adams failed to disclose this free and discounted travel. Where does that fit in.
That's a good question, because I think a lot of what they described in course are violations of New York City conflict of interest law, which is not a violation of federal law. I mean, the failure to disclose all of these things violated city law. They're giving that as all background, but they're not charging him per se for
not disclosing, because that's not a federal violation. I think it goes to the idea that he was hiding it, that he knew that he was getting these benefits, and that there was something improper about the benefits that he was getting, and that he was getting them in order to subsequently influences official actions. So to me, it's more a sense of maybe guilty conscience, but that he was covering his tracks. Because even receiving benefits from these Turkish
interests don't necessarily violate federal law. They might have violate at New York City conflicts law, but it was ultimately the connection between getting the benefits and then using them either for his own personal benefit or to get people to support his campaign. That's where I think the connection
comes in. There's not a federal crime to violate New York City conflicts laws, but I think they were using it to show that this is part of a broader scheme to get money from these Turkish interests, either just support his campaign and or in exchange for him ultimately doing them favors official favors.
There's also allegations that he created a fake paper trail to suggest that he had paid for this. It's the cover up, of.
Course, the idea that it wasn't just sloppy, it wasn't just unintentional, that this was all part of a conscious plan.
The business is circumventing the city's ban on corporate contributions. How has that been to a federal.
Again, so I think part of this idea that he was using the wires, because they says all technically wire fraud to defraud New York City. Because again he was taking those corporate contributions, turning them into individual contributions and matching them. So in effect, this was again part of a scheme to use the wires to defraud New York City. And New York City received federal funds. That's why it's federal program bribery aten US Code six sixty six. I mean,
the foreign donations are clearly illegal under federal law. The domestic corporate ones, no. But what they're saying is that he was engaged in a scheme to defraud New York City. Because it's not so much that he got the donations, as he was leveraging the donations to get matching fund money, and that's taxpayer dollars.
They mentioned a lot of techs. Most of the texts, though, that are long and outlined, are with a businessman, a Turkish official, a staffer, not Adams himself. There are a few references to Addam, but it's mostly other people and.
Right, they're going to have to show that he was part of this, that his staff was doing it on his behalf, and that he knew what they were doing.
So the indictment doesn't name names, but there's an unnamed Adam's staffer, and airline manager and several businessmen. Do you think they're already cooperating with prosecutors.
I can't speak to that. I mean they've obviously interviewed them and gotten this information from them. Whether they have arrangements with them or not, I don't know, but they wouldn't be going forward and I think unless they felt they had the evidence that they could bring it to court.
Do you see any defenses?
I didn't know, you know one of the I didn't know. I mean that somewhere along the lines that where you were just hinting, which is these are my staff. I didn't know what they were doing. It's hard to say I didn't know this was illegal, and it could be a I didn't know this was happening, And certainly I think it's probably the strongest defenses if they're already would be in some sense that taking all of these Turkish
benefits really, you know, didn't violate the federal law. The government isn't going to have to link up of all the benefits he got to the fact that he took them knowing they were intending to influence him in official actions. That's the bribery standard, that he knew that he was being influenced, that he took them knowing they were intended to influence his official actions. That may be frankly, that may be a challenge for the last count. I haven't
really spoken about the last count until now. And that's the straightforward bribery that he took these things. He took all these benefits in exchange for basically pressuring the fire
department to accelerate the approval of that building. The challenge there is that he was taking benefits for years and years before, so I think the government is going to have to kind of link up all of the free travel and the free hotel rooms that he got and connect that to the fact that he then did this favor for the Turkish government.
Yeah, that's what struck me is that it just seemed like there was one thing that he did after he'd been you know, graegidly taking these trips, etc.
That's going to be the hardest count because you've got the quid and you've got the quote, but do you have the pro you have the linkage, Whereas I think the easiest counts for the foreign funds because to me, if they made the payments and he knew about it or was involved in making that happen, that's all you need to show for the foreign funds, and for the
matching funds, it's pretty close. If he knew him he was directing his team to work with these donors to break up their donations into smaller ones and funnel them through employees so that they were all matchable. That's also, you know, a violation of the city law. It connects up with the federal law that makes it a crime basically to defraud a government that's receiving federal funds.
Coming up next, I'll continue this conversation with Columbia Law school professor Richard Brefalt, could Adams be removed from his position as Mayor of New York. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg. Manhattan. US Attorney Damian Williams announced the first criminal charges ever filed against a citty of New York. Today, Eric Adams was indicted on charges of bribery, conspiracy, and breaking campaign finance laws, and Williams promised, or rather warned, there's more to come.
This investigation continues.
We continue to dig and we will hold more people accountable, and I encourage anyone with information.
To come forward and to do so before it is too late.
The charges were made public hours after FBI agents entered the mayor's official residence, Gracie Mansion, and seized his phone and electronic devices. It caps an extraordinary few weeks in New York City that have seen a drumbeat of raids, subpoenas, and high level resignations of members of Adam's inner circle. Adams said the indictment didn't come as a surprise.
The actions that have unfolded over the last ten months. Yeah, the leaks, the commentary, the demonizes, This did not surprise us that we reached this day.
The mayor vowed to stay in office. I've been talking to Richard Brfalt, a professor of Columbia Law School. Rich the Supreme Court has been narrowing the scope of anti corruption laws for more than a decade.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a legitimate point. So one thing, those will not affect the foreign campaign contributions, Well, I think those are the ones that's going to be the hardest term to fight. That should not affect the foreign campaign contributions. For the others, they do require either the showing of an official action. And you know, that's the question of whether or not pressuring the fire department
was an official action. It may be in that it was trying to affect a government decision and he was making phone calls or whatever he was doing to do that, but that's going to be the issue. The issue there will be did he take an official action and was it sufficially tightly linked up to the benefits he received.
That one, I think is going to be tricky. And even the first one about the scheming to get the matching funds again is going to have to show that he was kind of showing that he would be influence in some way by these supportive people, So that's what I'm saying. I think the most straightforward is the accepting of foreign funds. First campaign, the foreign campaign contributions.
Is that against campaign finance laws?
Yes, yes, absolutely. The federal ban on foreign campaign contributions applies to federal, state and local elections.
And I think it was on the last day of the term that the Supreme Court came down with that controversial opinion six to three, with the conservatives of course and the majority basically finding that the federal law that prescribes bribes to state and local officials doesn't make it a crime for those officials to accept gratuities for their past acts.
Snider, yes, so on about right illegal gratuities, but that he hadn't been charged with taking a bribe, so that's not the same thing. They are charging bribery here. The problem in that case is the way the government framed what the man did is first he did the favors for of the private companies, and then he went to them and said, you know, give me a no show job or something like that. The government didn't charge bribery.
The government basically charged accepting an illegal gift. Here they're charging bribery.
And I'm wondering if the fact that they in the indictment keep repeating that he solicited it, you know, Adam solicited, whether that's just to be sure that they don't end up with a Snyder situation.
Right, the language is corruptly solicit anything of value.
You never know what the Supreme Court would do. He could get convicted below and the Supreme Court could say.
Wait a second, yeah, And the Supreme Court has rejected many many corruption convictions.
Is there a reason why?
It's hard to say? I mean, one argument is the Supreme Court. These are all involved state and localists, and maybe the Supreme Court is a little nervous about federalizing the state and local misconduct. Maybe they think it should be better handled by local DA's. I don't know. And sometimes there's sort of a First Amendment element that which I think is pretty thin about. You know, people are trying to influence government all the time, and we don't want to make it a crime to try and to
be a lobbyist, for example. But I think a lot of the concerns of federalism concerned and almost all those cases have involved the Snyder case involved a small city, Indiana. I mean McDonald, he's a governor, you know, Kelly was port authority, the Buffalo billions or state officials one of them. One of the early cases did involve a pecharive agriculture.
So it's not like they're they're always going to support the federal and addictments of federal officials, but most of the cases have involved state and local officials.
Now he vows he's going to continue in his role as mayor, right, explain how he could be removed?
Okay, Well, so obviously the metre of factive indictment doesn't mean anything in terms of his eligibly to hold office. I actually have to don't know what happens if he's convicted. So let's hold off on that. The city law city charter does not have any provision for impeachment. It does have a provision for removal of the mayor for either temporary inability or permanent inability, but it creates a committee
on Inability that does this. That committee is supposed to have five members, actually right now it only has four if there's a vacancy and when the positions the Corporation Council and require the votes of four out of the five. Are now require four out of the four. One of them is a deputy mayor, who is, of course an
appointee of the mayor. At the moment, I'm skeptical that the deputy mayor who is his appointee, and I think the deputy may is Sheena Wright, who is also connected with some of these other scandals, would actually be part of a group that would vote to declare him unable to continue in office. There's no impeachment. There is this procedure to have the mayor declared unable, either temporarily or permanently.
But the first step in the process requires the action by this committee, and the way the committee is set up that would currently require the agreement of the deputy mayor.
I've been reading that the governor could remove him.
The governor can remove him. The governor has authority under state law to remove the mayor, and I think Sdr when he was governor, came very close to removing Mayor Walker, who resigned while he was subject to the procedure for removal. The state law says very little about the grounds for removal. It gives a little bit more on the process. The kinds of the little bit of due process that the governor would have to afford the mayor in terms of being able to you know, the charges against him and
being able to present a defense. But yes, state law most definitely, very vaguely, but definitely does authorize the governor to remove the mayor.
Who would be the next mayor? Is it the barble?
I think then it we'd go back to the New York City Charter for filling vacancies, so then it would become again the public advocate.
Is there any case in history that compares with this or they say that no New York City mayor has been into on federal charges. I don't know if there was any mayor that's been indicted on SI.
I don't know that they were ever indicted, and I you know, my sense is, of course, thinking about Greater New York, Greater New York only goes back to eighteen ninety eight, so I'm I'm not quite sure in the Tammany era whether anybody was ever indicted. But there were some scandals involving mayors. I mean, obviously I mentioned Mayor Walker, and then there's also Mayor O'Dwyer who resigned from office.
And I'm not quite sure to what extent they grew out of a kind of a police corruption scandal or around nineteen fifty and I think there were hints of some corruption, but he was never charged with anything. I think even in the Tammany era, a lot of the corruption was all around the mayors, but I'm not sure of any of the mayor's.
William said there's more to come. I mean, federal investigators have been pursuing several corruption investigations involving Adams, his senior aides and some of their relatives. And in the last two weeks alone, the police commission and the school's chancellor have resigned. Neither has been charged with a crime or even publicly accused of wrongdoing, right, And.
You know, based on the news so far only, it's not clear how those really, if at all, to these The police commissioner who resigned, it sounds like he was caught up in some misconduct involving his brother, some kind of corruption, so I don't know if that relates to this.
I have no idea what was what was going on with the school's chancellor, but the bank's brothers, I think, based on the media accounts, the issues I think more involved the one of the bank's brothers who wasn't in government, But I don't know about the ties of the ones who were in government.
With the mayor under indictment and all these investigations and city officials resigning, how is he going to run a challenging city like New York.
I mean the challenge is really there's the time distraction, and he's got to spend time on his legal defense. And I think also, you know, how effective can he be in kind of dealing with people and either making promises about things he can do or making threats against people who don't go along with him when he wants to adopt certain policies or propose certain laws, And you know, I just think he's likely to be less effective. I mean, it's true that much of the day to day of
New York City will keep going. You know, there are many commissioners who have jobs to do, and they'll be doing their jobs. And obviously the vast majority of New York City public employees are going to continue to do whatever they do. But I do think you know, whether it's for can neew initiatives or even you know, at some point they've got to make a budget for the next year. We have a budget for this year, but
some point they'll be a budget for next year. You know, at some point it's going to interfere with the ability to move the city forward.
It's really a terrible day for the City of New York, no matter which way you look at it. And Adams will be in court tomorrow to be arraigned on corruption charges. Thanks so much, Rich for your insights. That's Columbia law professor Richard Ruffault coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show. The Biden administration is turning its anti trust attention to the financial services industry, suing Visa. I'm June Grosso and
you're listening to Bloomberg. The Biden administration is turning its attention to the financial services industry with its latest anti trust suit. The Justice Department sued Visa on Tuesday, alleging the global payments giant illegally monopolized the debit card market.
Antitrust enforcers alleged that Visa, which handles more than sixty percent of the more than four trillion dollars in US debit transactions each year, entered into a series of agreements penalizing merchants who sought to use alternatives and paid potential rivals to stay out of the market. Joining me is Ronald Mann, a professor Columbia Law School, explain the charges against Visa. It's about the debit card market. Tell us about the allegations by the government.
So the way that the debit card market works is individual consumers obtain debit cards from the banks which they have accounts, and then they can use these debit cards to make purchases at merchants that take Visa cards, which in the United States is as a practical matter, substantially all retail locations and many online locations. When a merchant accepts it the Visa card for a payment, there's a fee that they pay to Visa for the service of
this mulitating the payment. And so if the merchant sells something for one hundred dollars, they don't get to keep one hundred dollars. They get, you know, less than hundred dollars to take a fee. The comb out of the amounts of the consumer since in their bank account through the Visa networked the merchants for decades, is not like the fees they wish the fees will lower. These thinks the fees are the proper amount. The merchants are unhappy.
Often consumers are inhappy to be class action litigation. Both consumers believe that prices would be lower if the fees were lower. At this point's happened as the JUST Department has entered into litigation by buying a lawsuit against Visa, and the Just format claims that Visa has acted improperly, violating the any Trust laws by taking steps that make
it difficult for people to compete with them. So the things that they challenge are things like provisions in contracts with merchants that make it difficult for competitors to get. In provisions with other people in the industry like Apple, they might make it difficult for other people to get. But it's an any trust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice suing Visa under the any trust laws, and the merchants are very happy about this course.
The Attorney General Merrick Garland said that this conduct affects the price of not one thing, but the price of everything. Do they say how much money is involved? You're like, how much extra consumers are paying?
Well, I think reasona lines can differ on the extent to which consumers are paying extra, because that depends on the extent to which the prices are elevated by the paying of the fee, and it's hard to know what the caunterfactual is. So, from Visa's perspective, is the only reason merchants are agreeing to take decent pay the speed is because the costs of competing payment systems are much
higher than the fee they're charging. So if merchants instead took cash, it'd be much more expensive for merchants to accept cash, and it would be to accept debit cards, the cost of keeping the cash safe and transporting into the bank, to say nothing in the fact that many people like me don't really carry cash, and so I can't really buy things that stores that only took cash. If they took personal checks, the cost of processing personal checks dwarfs the amount of the interchange piece, so it's
hard to know what the counterfactual is. I think economists on both sides could have started that the prices are higher because the level of these fees, but economists would also say that some comest so they're not And I tend to be skeptical these fees are raising prices because they're lower than the cost of competing payment systems by a lot.
How important is it to the Justice Department's case that consumers are being hurt by higher prices? I mean, if no one's being hurt by this, someone might say, what's the harm.
The merchants feelings as the consumers, as they do believe that the prices are higher, and that the consumers are being hurt. I'm just saying, as a matter of economics, it's not easy to tell that they're being heard of what the amount is. What I'll say in this case is the government isn't saying, because the price is too high,
you need to lower the price. The government is saying, you have these contracts that keep out competitors, and we think that these competitors are in the pressure from the competitors would force the price down. So that's somewhat different, and so it's not as necessarily dependent on proving up the amount by which consumers are harmed as it is necessary to prove that these contracts every strained trade by improperly keeping out competitors.
According to the complaint, these have viewed Apple pay as an existential threat, and there was also PayPal and Block. Can you explain what happened with these other companies that Visa saw is a threat?
Well, PayPal is an needs example to see. You can imagine a world in which PayPal would have developed as a system where people use it without putting credit or debit cards into it, and they kept money loaded at PayPal, and so they could actually process payment transactions without using a credit card or a debit card. And if they did that, those transactions would have been transactions that went off of Visa and MasterCards platforms somewhere else, and that
would have been really bad for them. I think historically the way its developed, the overalling majority by size and volume of transactions that are cleared with PayPal, the money comes from a branded credit card debit card, and so that hasn't happened. In theory, the same thing could have
happened with Apple Pay. I don't think at this point though, there are any large umber transactions that are made on Apple Pay that don't use a branded credit card or debit card so that don't pay an interchange fee.
The complaint alleges that Visa pays Apple hundreds of millions of dollars each year do we know what their agreement is.
I actually don't know anything about the arrangement with Apple to discuss there, and the complaint lays it out as if Visa has agreed that it will pay Apple money so that Apple won't compete with it. I think it's highly unlikely there's a contract between Visa and Apple that says we're paying you this money so you won't compete with us. I think Visa thinks it's paying the money for a different reason, would be my guess.
The lawsuit is asking the court to order Visa to stop these anti competitive practices, but it's not asking that Visa be broken up.
It is not. It's not obvious from the outside how you could break Visa up in irrelevant way. I mean, you could say they can do credit cards in that debit cards, but I mean the problem is there an association of banks essentially that issues payment cards, and the functional difference this decade between debit cards and credit cards is pretty thin. It's it's just not obviously what you would make them still off to break up the company,
but anything, I think that's not the motive litigation. The motive litigation I think is actually pretty smart because I think if they were saying, your practicing very process, we want you to lower interchange rates by fifty percent, I think that would be a case that Visa just couldn't settle. It would be impossible Visa sell in the case it has to go to trial, and just because they just couldn't be inflexibility about that. The case that says we
want you to change to Visit your contracts. So I can imagine them getting some relief that Visa could agree to voluntarily and Visa might change them to the contracts rather than have a trial. I mean, I mean, that's a lawsuit that could go somewhere, I think successfully, as compared to one just trying to lower the price.
So Visa's general counsel Julie Rottenberg said the lawsuit ignores the reality that Visa is just one of many competitors in a debit space that is growing with entrants who are thriving. Is it the debit space growing It seems to be.
But I haven't looked at the day of the last year or so, but the share of payment transactions that use debit cards as opposed to other payment devices, it's much harder now than it was twenty years ago, in part because people that are younger, we're more likely to pay with debit cards, and people that are older more likely to pay with credit cards. So the debit cards
share is growing now. I think from Visa's perspectives, the competition is between Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and offshore issues like Union paying jay Shub, and there's probably some other ones
that I'm not directly familiar with. From the just farmer's perspective, the competition is between Visa because they're the largest debit card person and these what you might call fintech companies that aren't really card networks, that are providing some kind of services trying to get around the card network, like Square and Flat and these kinds of things. It's just a different perspective on what the middle of the competition is. I mean, Visa clearly has competitors that they are, you know,
in a next throttling battle with MasterCard and Discover. I mean, and you might say they're winning. May mean are those are large payment networks?
Mean?
I say, to competing against each other robustly. That's not what this solicit is about.
Though, the Justice Department's Anti Trust Division has been bringing case after case after case, and it's also been targeting middlemen that take a kind of transaction fees like the Live Nation suit and part of the case against Apple. Is this a new road for the Justice Department?
I would say that any trust division is not much more active under this administration that wasn't in the least administration. I mean there's a different assistant ry Jaler used to be, and I think that they're more active. I think they have a focus on that. I think part is a matter of just kind of updating the kinds of people that you sue. If you're looking at the modern economy, that's what a lot of the biggest people do, is
they facilitate transactions. Why get into the middle of transactions and making it cheaper for one person to get together another person in the charge fees for that. It's very difficult to know exactly how think any trust laws should apply to those relationships. Mean, when I went to law school, those kinds of companies didn't really exist, and there aren't any Supreme Court cases that really actually tell you exactly
how to think about it. So I think there's some want to be made on exactly what to think about those companies and they're a big part of the economy. They decided they're going to try and make some of it, and some of that they would like to make is going to make it harder for those companies to have a free handed design in the way their platforms work.
Last month, a federal judge found that Google violated antitrust laws. Do any of the findings in that case apply to this case.
It's not obvious to me that it does. I think the relevance of that case really it's more performative. It's the just Department showed that they have the stamina to take one of these big companies to trial and do such a good job at trial that they win. I mean, Google has highly paid, highly experienced, highly skilled counsel, and they didn't win, and the Justice Department waged them out
and won that case. And I think that's sort of a warning of Visa and Visa can't just assume we'll take this to trial and the government will lose patience or the governments flawyers won't be very good. The people who work in any trust vision who do these cases are highly skilled and know what they're doing, as evidenced
by winning the Google case. I mean, I think that's the significant case really, is that this is not twenty years ago when the Just Department could just get more easily outlawyered by skilled private any trust lawyers.
Between the Justice Department and the FTC, there are so many anti trust cases. Thanks so much for being on this show. That's Professor runold Man of Columbia Law School. And that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Podcast. Remember you can always get the latest legal news by subscribing and listening to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at Bloomberg dot com, slash podcast, slash Law. I'm June also, and this is Bloomberg