Trump Expected to Nominate FCC Counsel Adam Candeub as DOJ Antitrust Chief, Filling a Vacancy Left by Omeed Assefi's Departure
The White House plans to nominate FCC General Counsel Adam Candeub to lead the DOJ Antitrust Division as acting chief Omeed Assefi prepares to leave, the second leadership turnover since February.
Editor's Note ·
- Clarification:
- The article presents inside quotation marks the phrase "lost its Senate-confirmed head Gail Slater in February" attributed to The Capitol Forum. The Capitol Forum's actual wording is "lost its Senate-confirmed antitrust head, Gail Slater, when the White House ousted her in February." The quoted text compresses the source (dropping "antitrust" and the clause "when the White House ousted her") rather than reproducing it verbatim. The substance — that the division lost its Senate-confirmed head Gail Slater in February — is accurate and supported by the source.
Overview
The White House plans to nominate Adam Candeub, the general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, to lead the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, according to PYMNTS. The move would fill a leadership gap created as the division’s acting chief, Omeed Assefi, prepares to step down, leaving the agency that polices the country’s largest technology companies without a confirmed head for the second time this year.
Candeub is being considered for the post of assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News. He has “emerged as a leading candidate to be nominated to lead DOJ’s antitrust division,” according to The Capitol Forum.
What We Know
Candeub currently serves as the FCC’s general counsel, where he has worked on matters tied to communications regulation and agency enforcement, according to PYMNTS. CBS News describes him as working for FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and as a government lawyer who led an effort to crack down on social media companies during President Trump’s first term.
His professional record sits outside the usual profile for the role. The Capitol Forum reports that Candeub’s career “has focused largely on telecommunications and lacks direct antitrust enforcement experience,” making him “an atypical choice to lead the antitrust division,” according to The Capitol Forum.
Candeub is a law professor at Michigan State University, where he first joined the law faculty in 2004, and he has long been a vocal critic of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, according to TechCrunch. The same outlet reports that he joined the Trump administration in 2019 as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for telecommunications and information, also assuming the role of acting assistant secretary, and joined the Justice Department as deputy associate attorney general in the waning weeks of Trump’s presidency in late 2020, per TechCrunch. His background also includes contributions to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report, according to Investing.com, citing Bloomberg.
If nominated, Candeub would still face the Senate. His nomination would require Senate confirmation, which could take several months, according to Investing.com, citing Bloomberg. Candeub met with President Donald Trump earlier this week, the same report says.
A Second Leadership Change This Year
The nomination would follow a period of turnover at the top of the division. Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed Assefi, who currently leads the Antitrust Division, is preparing to leave the position later this month, according to PYMNTS. The Capitol Forum reports that Assefi is set to go on paternity leave in June and is not expected to return.
Assefi has run the division on an acting basis since February, according to Investing.com, citing Bloomberg, which reports he took over after the Senate-confirmed leader, Slater, left the role. The Capitol Forum likewise notes that the division “lost its Senate-confirmed head Gail Slater in February.” The pending change would mark the division’s second leadership transition in roughly five months.
Candeub is not the only name that has surfaced. The Capitol Forum reports that Adam Cella, a senior House GOP counsel, and Michael Murray, a former DOJ official in Trump’s first administration, “were interviewed recently at the White House for the position.”
Why the Timing Matters
The Antitrust Division shares federal antitrust authority with the FTC and oversees ongoing enforcement actions against Google, Apple, and Visa, according to Investing.com, citing Bloomberg. The most prominent of those is the long-running search-monopoly case against Google, which has moved into the appellate phase.
In that case, the trial judge rejected a blanket payment ban and left Google’s arrangement with Apple largely intact: “Google gets to keep paying Apple to be the default (albeit not exclusive) search engine on Safari,” according to 9to5Mac. The ruling instead prohibits exclusivity arrangements and exclusivity-adjacent incentives and imposes a 12-month default limit on Google’s revenue-share conditions with Apple, the same outlet reports. The Justice Department and a group of states have cross-appealed the final judgment, entered on December 5, 2025, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, according to 9to5Mac.
What We Don’t Know
The nomination has not been formally announced, and the Senate timeline is unsettled. As of late June, no permanent assistant attorney general for antitrust had been confirmed. It also remains unclear how a leader without direct antitrust enforcement experience would steer the division’s active technology cases, or how the gap between Assefi’s departure and any confirmation would affect the day-to-day handling of those matters.