Antitrust Investigation Results in Lawmakers Referring Amazon to Justice 

Amazon and some of its senior executives committed “potentially criminal conduct,” five bipartisan members of the House Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week—requesting that the Justice Department investigate the tech giant’s actions.

Via that 24-page correspondence, the committee’s Chair Gerry Nadler, D-N.Y., Antitrust Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline, D-R.I., Ranking Member Ken Buck, R-Colo., and Vice Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., referenced an extensive lawmaker-led investigation into competition within digital markets that kicked off during the last Congressional session.

“Throughout the investigation and in follow-up inquiries, senior executives at Amazon engaged in a pattern and practice of misleading behavior before the committee,” they wrote. 

The long-going antitrust assessment the committee embarked on is part of broader work lawmakers are pursuing to ultimately tweak national policies associated with competition in the tech industry. Whether Amazon exploited third-party seller data to gain an unfair competitive edge was one focus of their probe.

In the letter, the members of Congress essentially argue that the company’s leaders lied when they claimed Amazon “did not use any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them.” Among other issues, the lawmakers also allege that the company tried to hinder their investigation.

They cited multiple news articles and materials as evidence for their claims.

“The committee spent 16 months exercising [its] fundamental truth-seeking function to uncover facts about competitive conditions in digital markets, and committee members have since proposed legislation to correct the problems uncovered by that investigation. Yet throughout this process, Amazon repeatedly endeavored to thwart the committee’s efforts to uncover the truth about Amazon’s business practices. For this, it must be held accountable,” the lawmakers wrote. “We therefore refer this matter to the department to investigate whether Amazon or its executives obstructed Congress or violated other applicable federal laws.”

Amazon rejected the allegations.

“There's no factual basis for this, as demonstrated in the huge volume of information we've provided over several years of good faith cooperation with this investigation,” a spokesperson for the company told Nextgov on Friday.

This article was updated to include a comment from Amazon.