Good morning.  I want to begin by thanking my friend, Attorney General Racine, for inviting me to join you today. Karl, thank you for your leadership of the National Association of Attorneys General.

I also want to congratulate President-elect Tom Miller of Iowa. Tom began his second tour of duty as Attorney General right around the time that I returned for my second tour of duty at Main Justice – as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division. Tom’s second tour has been continuous since then. Mine took an almost 25-year judicial detour.

I appreciate the opportunity to join all of you today – at least virtually. My association with NAAG is not new. It stretches all the way back to the 1980s when, as a lawyer in private practice, I served on NAAG moot courts to prepare state Attorneys General for their Supreme Court arguments.

It continued into the 1990s when, as a Justice Department official, I helped organize joint NAAG/DOJ meetings in Washington.

And just this September, I had the chance to meet with several of you as part of the most recent convening of the Executive Working Group on Prosecutorial Relations. I am grateful for that productive discussion and for our ongoing work to ensure public safety and building trust with the communities we serve.

The spirit of working to find common ground, wherever and whenever we can, has defined the partnership between the Justice Department and the National Association of Attorneys General for more than a century. In 1907, Attorneys General from across America – from Minnesota to Mississippi, from Colorado to Massachusetts – joined together in Missouri to form this association. Its mission was to devise a coordinated strategy to deal with the largest corporate monopoly of the day: Standard Oil.

There can be no doubt that that cooperative approach was essential to the government’s success in its case against Standard Oil. On April 4, 1909, the New York Times reported that the case had already amassed a record of evidence that “when stacked up makes a pile about seven feet high. It is the largest record ever taken in a lawsuit in this country.”

Imagine that: a whole seven feet high!

Our cooperation remains essential today, as we see anticompetitive practices deployed in a wide range of industries – from agriculture to pharmaceuticals to tech – practices that are similar in many ways to those that led to the founding of this association 114 years ago.

Since the beginning of this year, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has brought criminal charges against more than 20 individuals and companies for violation of the antitrust laws.  The division is currently preparing for 17 trials – the most in decades – against 10 companies and 33 individuals, including eight current or former corporate executives.

We have also brought civil enforcement actions to protect competition in a wide range of industries. For example, over the summer we blocked an attempted merger of two of the three biggest insurance brokers in the world – brokers that many American companies depend upon to craft and administer health and retirement benefits.

In September, we joined together with Attorneys General from across the country to challenge an unprecedented maneuver that would have further consolidated the domestic airline industry, in which four companies control over 80% of the market. The merger would have eliminated competition that is essential to ensuring that Americans – who rely on air travel every day for work, to visit family or to take vacations – can fly affordably and safely.

And just last month, we challenged an attempt by the world’s largest book publisher to acquire one of its biggest rivals and obtain unprecedented control in an already-concentrated industry.  

No matter the industry and no matter the company, the Justice Department will vigorously enforce our antitrust laws. We will aggressively protect consumers, safeguard competition and work to ensure economic fairness and opportunity for all.

I doubt that the founders of this association could have imagined that one day many of us would join together to sue a digital platform called “Google;” or that I would be participating in today’s meeting on a digital device; or even that the record in an antitrust case would ever make a pile higher than seven feet. But I am certain that they would be proud of our continued cooperation and partnership over the past century. I look forward to continuing that work together.

Since I was sworn in as Attorney General in March, I have set out three co-equal priorities that should guide the Justice Department’s work: upholding the rule of law; protecting civil rights; and keeping our country safe.

We work to uphold the rule of law by adhering to the norms that have been a part of the DNA of the Justice Department since Edward Levi’s tenure as the first post-Watergate Attorney General.

Those norms include the principled exercise of discretion. They include independence from improper influence – we must follow the facts and the law, and that is all.

And they include treating like cases alike. There cannot be one rule for friends and another for foes; one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless; one rule for the rich and another for the poor; or different rules, depending upon one's race or ethnicity.

Adhering to those norms and upholding the rule of law is how we safeguard the public trust that is essential for both our department and our democracy to succeed.