In its continuing assault on Retail Brand (private brand) and online retailer Amazon, the House Judiciary Committee accused online retailer Amazon of lying about its use of third-party seller data. Late last week, (March 9), the committee wrote a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) which called for an investigation. The chairs of the committee, Jerrold Nadler, David N. Cicilline, Ken Buck, Pramila Jayapal and Matt Gaetz asked the prosecutors to investigate the online giant for alleged criminal obstruction of Congress.

“Amazon lied through a senior executive’s sworn testimony that Amazon did not use any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them,” the letter says.

The committee asserted that the testimony was untrue, there were repeated attempts made towards Amazon to rectify their mistake. The company was repeatedly asked to correct the record and provide proof to support its claims. However, Amazon ignored or rebuffed the requests that required them to provide evidence.

As a part of a 19-month antitrust investigation at the time of these hearings, lawmakers enquired of the Amazon executives about the third-party seller data. They questioned whether seller data was used to Amazon private brands or to give the retailer’s own products an advantage in search.

“We do not use any seller data to compete with [third parties],” Nate Sutton, associate general counsel for competition, told Congress in testimony in July 2019. “we do not use any of that specific seller data in creating our own private brand products.”

However, investigations conducted by Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, asserted that Amazon employees accessed sellers’ data.

Lawyers representing Amazon informed the lawmakers in later communications of an internal investigation taking place. They specified that they did not find any evidence of employees wrongly using third-party data. Amazon added that the search engine of their site was not involved in prioritizing any of their own brand products either. The attorneys of the retailers refused to submit any documents connected to the internal investigation.