Can the President of the United States Order the Attorney General to Drop a Case?

Last month, 15 Democrats and 100 Republicans signed separate letters endorsing the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger and urging the Obama administration to drop the lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to block it. The fact that nearly all of the signatories turned out to have received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from AT&T recently was no surprise; at its most benign, there is nothing untoward about the private s