Good morning. The second Trump administration seemed poised to deliver on MAGA’s embrace of aggressive antitrust enforcement. Instead, those efforts have run headlong into power brokers with close ties to President Trump who have snatched up lucrative assignments helping companies facing antitrust threats.

The injection of politically-connected lobbyists and lawyers into antitrust investigations is a shift in an arena that for decades was a niche area dominated by specialized lawyers and economists.

• Company goals: Through these power brokers, companies have also been able to appeal to some of the president’s broader economic priorities to limit enforcement. Working through Mike Davis—a longtime Trump ally—and other consultants, Hewlett Packard Enterprise made commitments, not disclosed in court papers, that called for the company to create new jobs at a facility in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter. The unusual offer was designed to ease the government’s opposition to the company’s merger with a major rival, Juniper Networks, which would reduce competition in the wireless networking market.
   
• MAGA views: Vice President JD Vance has long attacked Big Tech’s power, and Trump embraced a tough stance on antitrust by picking Gail Slater as the Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson. Slater and Ferguson, whose agencies share antitrust authority, have both decried monopolies in the technology industry and said they would be tougher than an earlier generation of Republican enforcers.
   
• Potentially more lobbyists: Other companies facing antitrust investigations are now looking to hire lawyers or lobbyists close to Trump after witnessing the favorable settlement that HPE reached, according to several defense lawyers who regularly represent merging companies before the Justice Department.

Also:

• FTC Files Lawsuit to Block Edwards Lifesciences’ Purchase of JenaValve Technology

Developer of crypto mixer Tornado Cash found guilty on one criminal charge.

A co-founder of Tornado Cash, a digital-currency “mixing” service that was used by North Korean cybercriminals to launder stolen funds, was convicted of one of the three criminal charges he had faced, after a three-week trial in New York federal court.

A jury on Wednesday found Roman Storm guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, a disappointment for crypto proponents who had backed the software developer’s defense. The charge carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

• A jury last week ruled against Nielsen in its lawsuit alleging patent infringement by the upstart measurement firm HyphaMetrics, the first jury verdict in a bevy of such cases brought by the longtime TV ratings king. But the long-running cold war over media measurement continues.
   
• The U.K. competition watchdog has cleared advertising holding company Omnicom’s planned $13 billion acquisition of rival Interpublic Group.
   
• The U.S. Justice Department has closed parallel criminal and civil probes into Charles River Laboratories’ monkey imports from Cambodia.
   
• Estonia initiated over 100 proceedings through Aug. 1 for origin fraud related to customs declarations for timber shipments from Kazakhstan, the Estonian Tax and Customs Board said.
   
• Nvidia reiterated that its chips don’t—and shouldn’t—have back doors or kill switches, days after Beijing summoned the U.S. artificial-intelligence chip giant over national-security concerns.

Russia says Putin and Trump will meet in coming days.

The Kremlin confirmed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was expected to meet with President Trump in the coming days, saying that the meeting was being planned for a location that would be named later.

The Russian statement on Thursday came hours after Trump said there was a “good chance” he would meet with Putin. The idea was raised by Russia during a meeting between special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian leader on Wednesday. Witkoff relayed the idea to Trump.

• The U.S. has sanctioned a prominent Mexican rapper over his alleged ties to a narcotics trafficking group, a move that comes as the Trump administration pushes to use the financial crimes enforcement apparatus to target drug cartels.
   
• North Korea has accelerated construction of a launch site for spy satellites in recent months, including the addition of a seaport that could facilitate deliveries of new components from Russia.~
   
• President Trump’s tariff war has inflicted almost $12 billion of losses on global automakers, the biggest hit they have faced since the pandemic. The scary reality: This may be just the beginning.
   
• India’s growth outlook has been weighed by President Trump’s punitive tariff on the South Asian economy but there’s still hope negotiations will ease the impact.
   

• The controversy over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein matter has roiled Trump’s MAGA base while also creating a fresh line of attack for Democrats, as they try to drive turnout and win back swing voters in next year’s midterms.
   
• Major League Baseball’s current labor contract expires shortly after the 2026 World Series. And the negotiations for a new one are expected to be ugly, with the entire industry already bracing for an extended work stoppage with potentially devastating ramifications.
   
• President Trump is ramping up his attacks on public universities. After months of waging a campaign against private, largely Ivy League institutions, the Trump administration has turned to the University of California, one of the nation’s biggest public-school systems. 

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Send tips to our reporters Max Fillion at max.fillion@dowjones.com, Mengqi Sun at mengqi.sun@wsj.com and Richard Vanderford at richard.vanderford@wsj.com.

You can also reach us by replying to any newsletter, or by emailing our editor David Smagalla at david.smagalla@wsj.com.