DOJ'S POKY ANTITRUST STAFFING — Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter has started his new job, but his "front office" — the deputies and staffers who help run the division — isn't yet in place because of disagreements over whether Kanter's proposed staff picks are diverse enough, two people familiar with the discussions told MT. The selection of DOJ's antitrust deputies is a delicate negotiation between the White House and DOJ. In previous administrations, top deputies often started work even before the Senate had confirmed the department's top antitrust official. But the Biden White House has opposed filling slots piecemeal, the people said, and instead wants to OK the entire slate in one go. The Information first reported on the delay. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. So who's in the running? Those in contention for top jobs include: — Sally Hubbard, a former antitrust official for New York state who has spent the past three years at the anti-monopoly advocacy group Open Markets Institute. — Michael Kades , a longtime FTC staffer who worked on detail for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) before joining the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. — Eric Citron, a partner at the appellate and Supreme Court litigation firm Goldstein & Russell, who helped represent Qualcomm in its recent win against the FTC. — Josh Tzuker, a senior policy adviser to Oracle and one-time adviser to former FTC Commissioner (and former Biden aide) Terrell McSweeny. — Andrew Forman, a former colleague of Kanter's at the law firms Paul Weiss and Cadwalader. — Sarah Oxenham Allen , a 20-year antitrust veteran in the Virginia attorney general's office and current chair of the antitrust task force at the National Association of Attorneys General — a group that helped to coordinate the cases against Google and Facebook behind the scenes. The only problem? All those individuals are white, and four are men — not a great look for an administration that has prided itself on diversity. At the moment, Kanter has appointed Doha Mekki as his acting principal deputy. A Black woman born in Sudan whose family sought asylum in the U.S., Mekki has spent seven years at DOJ, most recently helming the agency's initiative to combat no-hire pacts and wage-fixing among companies. Keeping Mekki in a top role could help assuage some of the White House's concerns about the rest of the proposed slate. WHITE HOUSE KEEPS FCC, FTC NOMINATIONS IN PLAY — The White House on Tuesday formally sent its nominations of Gigi Sohn for FCC commissioner and Alvaro Bedoya for FTC commissioner back to the Senate, a move MT previously reported was in the works. The renominations show that despite GOP blowback surrounding both picks, the administration is committed to trying to advance them. — And don't worry about NTIA: Although an administration official initially described plans to re-up National Telecommunications and Information Administration pick Alan Davidson too, there's actually no need. A Senate agreement kept his nomination in what's known as status quo; now all three nominations are ready for further Senate consideration. CES STARTS TODAY! — Who showed in person? What are the coolest new gadgets? POLITICO's Alexandra Levine and John Hendel will have all the deets about CES 2022 in a special newsletter focusing on the event's policy-related aspects. Sign up today to get updates on the conference each evening. LAWMAKER THREATS JUMP — The Capitol Police logged some 9,600 threats against members of Congress last year, a 20 percent jump over the previous year. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger disclosed the number, normally not released to the public, to reporters Tuesday during a news conference about the safety of the Capitol ahead of the one year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot. That number includes calls, emails and social media posts, though not all of them rose to the level of a crime, Manger said. The Capitol Police are most alarmed by people who make repeated threats, rather than anonymous emails or social media statements, he said. Manger didn't break down where most of the threats came from. But Facebook users made as many as 10,000 posts a day with baseless claims about the election and calls for political violence in the leadup to the insurrection, a joint investigation published Tuesday by the Washington Post and ProPublica found. The news orgs discovered 650,000 posts in public groups between Election Day and Jan. 6 — a figure that's likely an undercount because it excludes private groups and posts. Facebook parent company Meta rejected the idea that its platform should bear the blame for the violence. "The notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd," Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri said. "The former President of the United States pushed a narrative that the election was stolen, including in-person a short distance from the Capitol building that day. The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them." HOW EXTREMISTS HAVE ORGANIZED SINCE JAN. 6 — Just ahead of the anniversary of the Capitol Hill riots, the Atlantic Council's DFR Lab is out with a report about how white supremacists and nationalist groups fractured — and then built themselves up again — over the last 12 months. Not all of this activity happened online. But as Covid-19 restrictions kicked in again and major social media platforms began to crack down, many groups scattered themselves across a number of social networks. — The good news: None of these extremist groups managed to carry out anything like the Jan. 6 insurrection, mostly thanks to a combination of law enforcement actions and infighting among these notoriously paranoid groups. Conspiracy theories ran rife that subsequent far-right extremist rallies were actually organized by antifascists and left-wing activists or were efforts by the federal government to round up those involved in the Jan. 6 riots. — The bad news: The last 12 months has led to a growing sophistication in these groups' online tactics. These tactics include the increased use of encrypted messaging apps to avoid detection, coordinated digital campaigns against what these domestic extremists view as threats and a deep-rooted belief in the debunked conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. "There have been evolutions. There have been different tactics. But we've got a growing political violence problem in this country, and that's not going away," Graham Brookie, DFR Lab's director, told MT. More reading: The Tech Transparency Project also issued a report finding Facebook has been a breeding ground for extremist militia groups in the year since the Jan. 6 insurrection. — A separate report out today found that Parler and other alternative tech platforms that cater to conservatives played critical roles in driving election misinformation leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to data studied by the tech policy think tank New America, Arizona State University and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University. The report finds that the loose moderation standards on Parler have made it a hotbed for dis- and misinformation and conspiracy theories, and Parler 1.0 — the first version of the platform, before it was taken offline by Amazon on Jan. 10, 2021 — had "a networked effect on the information ecosystem that, left unchecked, will likely continue to reverberate far into the future of American democracy." Although Parler has a smaller reach than more mainstream platforms, increased content moderation actions by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Google have driven more users to join Parler since its founding in 2018, along with other alternative platforms. — Congressional impact : A third of the 147 members of Congress who raised an objection to the 2020 Electoral College count have joined Parler. Content from lawmakers posted on the original Parler site received millions of impressions each day before the platform was taken offline by Amazon. | 
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