Judging Freedom - Amazon's Potential Criminal Obstruction of Congress (128 kbps)

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

House Judiciary Committee accuses tech giant of withholding information during antitrust probe; Amazon has denied any attempts to mislead. #amazon #bigtechSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, March 9th, 2022. It's about 1040 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States in northwest New Jersey. It's a blizzard, 70 degrees two days ago. Now it's 30 and snowing like mad. It's probably snowing like mad somewhere in northwest Washington on the other side of the country because the House Judiciary Committee has just made a referral to the Department of Justice accusing executives at Amazon of engaging in obstruction of justice. Aye, aye, aye. What's this all about? So the House Judiciary Committee is investigating Amazon

and other high-tech entities for antitrust violation. An antitrust violation, very simply, is any contract or agreement between two competitors that restrains trade. So if competitors agree on fixing a price or not marketing a product, anything that would restrain trade, make trade commercial activity more expensive or non-existent? We don't know exactly what they were investigating, but it probably had to do with the rates that Amazon charges its vendors and the amount that Amazon takes from the vendor. So if you order a book from Amazon and they don't have the book, they go to a vendor and they buy the book from the vendor and then they sell it to you. The antitrust issue is, can the vendor compete with Amazon and compete with other vendors?

If Amazon, for example, were to say to the bookseller, well, you can sell books to us, but you can't sell it to anybody else, that would be an antitrust violation. I'm just giving this to you as an example. I don't know, because these investigations are not always in public, exactly what the House Judiciary Committee is looking for. Anyway, in the course of its investigation, the House Judiciary Committee stumbled upon some documents of Amazon, which it had sought from Amazon, and Amazon said it didn't have them, and the Judiciary Committee got them from somewhere else. So now the allegation is, when the Amazon executive said, in response to the subpoena from the Judiciary Committee, if you're still with me, we don't have these documents that

you've subpoenaed, And it turned out they did. Again, this is just an allegation. Amazon says that was an attempt to obstruct justice, and it may have been perjury. And so they sent it to the Department of Justice to examine. Now, Congress can't indict people, thanks be to God. There's a clause in the Constitution called the Bill of Attainder Clause. A Bill of Attainder was legislation enacted by the British Parliament that declared somebody to be an outlaw. It was so horrifically used and just for political purposes that when the framers wrote the Constitution, mainly James Madison, he assured that Congress could issue no bill of attainder, and the same with the state legislatures. So Congress can't

indict, and the state legislatures can't indict. Only a grand jury can. That's why the House Judiciary Committee, which has this beef with Amazon, sent whatever evidence it has over to the Department of Justice. It's up to the DOJ to decide what, if anything, we'll do. It's a small piece of a big picture. The DOJ is investigating all of big tech to see if there's any agreement among them to restrain trade or any compulsion by them to restrain trade. If there is, they'll either sue Amazon or indict Amazon one way or another. If there isn't, then all of this is a kerfuffle about nothing. We'll see. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.