The Biden administration’s antitrust tentacles continue to tighten their grip on almost every American industry.

For the second time in five months, the FTC, led by its hard-left chair Lina Khan, narrowly approved an oil industry merger — but only on the condition that the chairman of the acquired company be barred from serving on the buyer’s board of directors.

Last year, Chevron announced it would buy the Hess Corporation for $53 billion with the stipulation that Chevron would “take all actions necessary” to add Hess CEO John Hess to its board.

But Kahn’s FTC staff is convinced that Hess has privately consulted with OPEC officials to keep oil prices high and that having him on Chevron’s board would “undermine free and fair competition.” By a 3 to 2 vote, the FTC only approved the deal this week if Chevron broke its promise and kept Hess off its board.  In May, the FTC similarly held a deal involving ExxonMobil hostage unless it excluded an executive from its board.

The obvious flaw in the FTC’s witch hunt is that U.S. oil companies compete fiercely AGAINST OPEC, and it would be impossible for a single U.S. driller to meaningfully inflate global oil prices.

While Khan’s chaos theory of competition claims to protect consumers, it is clearly all about politics. And one of Khan’s colleagues on the FTC is publicly saying so:

“Unfortunately for Mr. Hess…the author of every fairy tale must also fabricate a villain, and today’s action unjustifiably gave him that label,” Republican Commissioner Melissa Holyoak wrote in her dissent.