Khan Reached Out to Temu for Dirt on Amazon

January 28, 2025

It has come to light, thanks to The Information, that the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan reached out to Temu to bolster that agency’s antitrust case against Amazon. This was asking the injurer to inflict more injuries on the injured.

This Chinese retailer is making deep inroads into the U.S. online retail market, undercutting not just Amazon, but the online stores of Walmart, Costco, Target, as well as innumerable small brick-and-mortar stores with ultra-low prices. And how does a company manage that? You might say with blood, toil, tears and sweat – and a bit of tariff trickery.

• A Senate Select Committee report documents that there is a high risk that Temu relies on forced labor from Xinjiang, the provincial home of the Uyghurs, where torture, forced sterilization, religious repression, and concentration camps make goods in violation of the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

• Google had to suspend the mobile app Temu’s parent company because it was loaded with sophisticated malware that granted access to user’s private messages.

And this was the company Lina Khan turned to for advice on how to break Amazon.

This Chinese company, which has no warehouses in the United States, is able to dig deep into the U.S. retail market with “fast fashion” at astonishingly low prices. It can do this because of a loophole in which their prices are so low that Temu does not trigger U.S. tariff thresholds. Temu simply sends its products direct from China to the consumer, eliminating the need for warehouses.

Apparently the recent FTC Chair didn’t think twice about asking this outfit to provide ammunition against Amazon, which employs 1,525,000 Americans. Rather than investigate Temu and another Chinese company, Shein, Khan instead pressed a nonsensical case against Amazon, claiming that its discounting policy is somehow raising prices. Khan also wanted to break Amazon’s business model by forcing it to open its nationwide fulfillment network to competitors, destroying a competitive advantage the company spent billions of dollars to create.

I hope this revelation spurs President Donald Trump and the new FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson to mothball the ludicrous and self-negating antitrust case against Amazon. And President Trump might also want to ask: Isn’t it time we stopped giving these two Chinese companies, Temu and Shein, a free ride in our tariff system?