The House Judiciary Committee referred Amazon to the Department of Justice in a letter dated Wednesday that cited “potentially criminal conduct” and accused the e-commerce giant of lying about anticompetitive practices.
The committee didn’t mince words. Addressing Attorney General Merrick Garland, members called out the company over its “pattern and practice of misleading conduct” and called for the DOJ to investigate.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A confluence of issues appears to be at play: Amazon’s allegedly shady business behavior, the “potential” crime committed by the company and some executives, and the lies and obstruction to hide it from the House Judiciary’s probe, of which the bipartisan committee seems absolutely certain.
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The 24-page letter highlighted articles from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Politico and The Markup that contradicted Amazon’s testimony in the committee’s probe into competition in digital markets during the last Congress. The lawmakers accused Amazon executives of lying when it denied using data from third-party sellers to compete with them or rigging search results to favor its own products.
At the time the company attempted to distinguish individual, or identifiable, records from aggregated data across numerous sellers, which is a typical way tech platforms glean insights, while still preserving data privacy. But in an October 2021 story based on internal documents, Reuters cast this distinction as meaningless for some products. It also reported that employees often violated the policy with the knowledge of senior executives.
“After Amazon was caught in a lie and repeated misrepresentations, it stonewalled the committee’s efforts to uncover the truth,” the document read. “The committee gave Amazon a final opportunity to provide evidence either correcting the record or corroborating the representations it had made to the committee under oath and in written statements.” But the company declined to submit materials that to “corroborate its claims or correct the record.”
This pattern of misleading behavior suggests it was “acting with an improper purpose” to influence or block the investigation, the lawmakers claimed.
The text of the letter attributed some form of the words “lie,” “misled,” “obstruct” or “impede” specifically to Amazon’s behavior as many as 25 times. That averages out to more than once per page, which is an impressive feat, considering some pages were half- or mostly filled with citations.
The sources, mainly House committee documents, mention Jeff Bezos. It’s not clear if or how much jeopardy there may be for the Amazon founder and former chief executive officer. Though he vacated that role in July 2021, some of the alleged actions would have taken place under his leadership and his congressional testimony and statements are on record.
His successor, Andy Jassy, has been on the job for less than a year. Despite touring Capitol Hill in September 2021 on a charm offensive — a holdover from his Amazon Web Services days, when he regularly connected with officials — the new CEO still found himself on the receiving end of a House Judiciary letter one month later, right after the Reuters story published.
“Credible reporting” by outlet and others prompted the correspondence, as the coverage “directly contradicts the sworn testimony and representations of Amazon’s top executives — including former CEO Jeffrey Bezos,” the previous letter read.
The current referral to the DOJ is a bipartisan effort, as Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) cosigned the letter.