Lawsuit Claims Labor Sec Interfered In Oracle Case

The New York Times reports:

A senior Labor Department lawyer contends she faces removal from her job after objecting to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s intervention in a pay discrimination case against Oracle, a tech giant with close White House connections.

Oracle has a lot at stake in the case, which originated in the Obama administration: potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in back pay for female, African-American and Asian-American employees who the department said were paid less than white and male counterparts.

Ordinarily such a case would be left to career employees. But Janet Herold, who has overseen the litigation, asserts in a complaint filed last week with a federal investigative agency that Mr. Scalia broke with normal department practice in seeking a settlement and abused his authority, according to her lawyers.

Amazon is currently suing the Trump administration, claiming that Trump directed a $10 billion Pentagon contract to Oracle in order to punish Jeff Bezos. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has come under fire for hosting a lavish Trump fundraiser at his California estate.