William Baxter

Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust (1981-83) who, within the same January 1982 stretch, dismissed the 13-year United States v. IBM suit as "without merit" and signed off on the AT&T divestiture settlement that became the largest breakup under the Sherman Act. He matters to this vault as the single point where its two largest 1970s-80s antitrust threads meet — one dropped, one enforced — and as the namesake of an unresolved sourcing question: whether the two events actually happened the same calendar day, and whether the case-size figures attached to the IBM suit (300+ lawyers, 2,500 depositions, 66 million pages) hold up against a primary record.

References

• claim-baxter-dismissed-ibm-case-same-day-att-breakup-finalized
• claim-att-case-dismissed-august-1982-not-january-complicates-same-day-narrative
• claim-time-1982-attributes-66-million-pages-to-ibm-spinoff-suits-not-doj-case
• claim-ibm-market-share-fell-during-antitrust-suit-price-strategy
• claim-cullinane-called-ibm-unbundling-software-industry-origin-myth
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-baxter-ibm-att-same-day.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-24-did-baxter-dismiss-us-v-ibm-the-same.md