The Biden Adviser Who Brawls With Big Tech

Gene Kimmelman, the consumer advocate preparing the incoming Biden administration to take over antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department, has been exasperating lawmakers, regulators and even his peers in the public interest community for more than 35 years.

In the late 1980s, Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, grew so frustrated over a failed negotiation involving a pending product liability bill that he threw his office phone at Kimmelman, then a young attorney at a public interest group. Boucher, who left Congress in 2011, wasn’t the only person on Capitol Hill to resort to hurling objects. When Kimmelman was serving as chief counsel for the Senate antitrust subcommittee in the 1990s, an aide to a key Democratic senator threw a phone at Kimmelman after it became clear that legislation sponsored by the staffer’s boss was going nowhere.