Two days after he was fired by President Donald Trump, Democratic FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said Thursday morning that his and fellow commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter’s firings open the door for “corruption and corporate pardons.”
Joining MSNBC anchor Ana Cabrera for his first TV interview since his Federal Trade Commission ouster, Bedoya recounted his termination. “I was after work at my daughter’s gymnastics class, and I got an email purporting to fire me because I don’t think I’ve been fired. I think I’m still a commissioner,” he explained. “There was no cause. This is a naked power grab by the president that, in my view, is going to open up the door for corruption and corporate pardons.”
Created in 1914, the FTC is comprised of five commissioners — three from the same party as the sitting president and two from the opposing party. In 1935, following the attempted firing of FTC commissioner William Humphrey by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Supreme Court ruled that FTC commissioners can only be fired with just cause.
“This has never happened. In the 111 years of the FTC’s history, a president has never tried to remove two commissioners without cause,” Bedoya told Cabrera. “The last time a president did it was FDR, and you know what the Supreme Court said? ‘Can’t do it. You cannot fire an FTC commissioner from an independent agency for no reason whatsoever.’”
You can watch the interview in the video below:
“We can’t make this about laws and precedents,” Bedoya added. “We have to make this about who it helps and the people it helps are the billionaires over Donald Trump’s shoulder at the inauguration.” He went on to namecheck Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceX/Tesla/X tech billionaire-turned-senior Trump advisor Elon Musk.
“I am right now today suing or enforcing court orders against each of those men’s companies,” Bedoya revealed. “Take Amazon. Right now, we are suing Amazon because they’re ripping off small business owners. We allege they forced them to pay up to $0.50 on every dollar they make on the site.”
“In a world where the president can fire me or any other law enforcer for any reason at any time, it is easy to see how calls are going to be made to the FTC to drop those lawsuits,” he continued. “And if my colleagues there don’t comply, what happened to me is going to happen to them.”
After listing active lawsuits that he and Slaughter, the FTC’s only other Democrat, have launched against corporate entities like John Deere, grocery retailers like Kroger and powerful pharmaceutical managers for allegedly raising the price of insulin, Bedoya concluded, “In a world where hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing to the president’s pockets, in a world where he thinks he can fire us at any time — something we contest in court — it’s hard to see how this will not result in corporate pardons for all of those companies.”
Watch Bedoya’s interview above.
