President Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, announced Monday via video that the U.S. Justice Department is “going after Big Meat.”
That’s not a euphemism, as the DOJ is pursuing U.S. meat producers for price fixing months after President Trump warned the industry over high beef prices that fueled negative consumer sentiment and the “affordability” narrative that Trump decried as “fake news.”
Navarro says that the upcoming trial, slated for next month, “should expose just how the biggest meat processors are turning market intelligence into price fixing and profiteering.”
He added, “Now the DOJ is going to court against a company called Agri Stats, which the DOJ says helps the biggest chicken, pork and turkey processors share detailed competitive information in ways that blunt real competition” and “push prices higher” for Americans.
@TheJusticeDept is going after Big Meat, alleging analytics firm Agri Stats helped power a scheme to blunt competition and push prices higher. pic.twitter.com/mxRv10iYi6
— Peter Navarro (@RealPNavarro) April 20, 2026
What Navarro doesn’t mention is that the lawsuit was filed in 2023 by the DOJ during the Biden administration.
In the 2023 DOJ press release (which is shown briefly in the video), then-Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said: “This case is the latest effort by the Justice Department to protect American consumers, farmers and workers from anticompetitive practices in the agriculture industry.”
Kanter also oversaw the Biden DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, accusing it of violating antitrust laws by “operating an illegal monopoly that stifles competition and hinders innovation in the live entertainment industry, driving up ticket prices for millions of fans.”
Last week, as the trial got started, Trump’s DOJ reached a settlement with Live Nation, though 34 of the 40 plaintiffs that had joined the federal lawsuit rejected the settlement terms, and pursued and won a jury victory in court.
The jury concluded Live Nation “has operated as a monopoly in violation of federal and state antitrust laws.”