The Trump administration weighed in Monday on Duke Energy's bid to duck a rival's claims accusing the power giant of squeezing it out of the North Carolina market, telling the U.S. Supreme Court that the Fourth Circuit rightly revived the allegations by refusing to view them only "in isolation."

Filing an amicus brief at the justices' invitation, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission argued that nothing about the Fourth Circuit ruling requires high court intervention. The Trump administration instead called the case a "poor vehicle" to bar courts from looking at a series of allegedly anticompetitive acts in the aggregate, something antitrust officials said is permitted by high court precedent.

"When a monopolist engages in a coordinated campaign to squelch competition, no circuit holds that each discrete aspect of the defendant's conduct must be analyzed in isolation. Instead, courts uniformly agree, consistent with this court's precedent, that a holistic analysis is appropriate in circumstances like these. The petition for a writ of certiorari should be denied," the administration said.

Those monopolization allegations, under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, come from NTE Energy. The company hit back with counterclaims for contract and antitrust violations against Duke's 2019 lawsuit accusing NTE of missing payments for a deal that allowed it to connect its power plants to Duke Energy's electric lines.

The parties eventually settled the contract claims. That left NTE's claims that Duke saw NTE's cheaper, more efficient power generation as a threat and sought to block NTE from the "anchor" client, the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, that it needed to sign in order to justify building a new plant in Reidsville, North Carolina.

According to court filings, Duke allegedly offered Fayetteville a steep one-time discount and a four-fold increase in what it paid for excess power from the city to keep its government from switching providers, costs Duke allegedly planned to recoup through future price hikes on both Fayetteville and other customers. Duke also allegedly sabotaged its transmission arrangement with NTE in order to torpedo the Reidsville project, including through a "sham" lawsuit.

A district court granted Duke summary judgment against the claims, concluding that the antitrust allegations were targeting "instances of lawful conduct" that can't add up to something illegal. The Fourth Circuit reversed, in a decision the Trump administration said Monday the high court should leave untouched.

"The court below held that petitioner's campaign was made up of various acts that a reasonable jury could find to be anticompetitive. And while petitioner may disagree with those subsidiary holdings, it has not sought review of those highly fact-bound and case-specific determinations," antitrust officials said.

The government's brief criticized Duke for failing to "precisely articulate the anti-aggregation rule that it wants this court to adopt." Duke's complaint, officials said, isn't with the rule but rather how it was applied. Targeted conduct, they said, needn't be all "different iterations of the same kind of anticompetitive conduct."

According to the brief, there's no circuit split warranting review because "circuits broadly agree about whether and how a court adjudicating a Section 2 claim may aggregate the discrete constituent parts of a defendant's overall course of conduct." And the cases Duke cites declined to look at collective effects "for case-specific reasons."

"More fundamentally, petitioner misunderstands why courts have rejected aggregation-based arguments in particular cases. Courts have regularly held that disconnected acts should not be added up like fractions in an effort to cross some nebulous antitrust threshold," the administration said. "But petitioner is wrong to extend that limit on aggregation to situations where the defendant has devised a scheme through which separate acts are intended to work together. In that circumstance, courts consider those actions' 'synergistic effect.'"

Duke is also wrong, according to the brief, to argue the high court's 2009 decision in Pacific Bell Telephone Co. v. linkLine Communications Inc. stopped courts from concluding that the "overall course of anticompetitive conduct can incorporate multifarious combinations of these diverse exclusionary acts." According to the filing, linkLine was decided on its specific facts, with no broad condemnation of "holistic analysis" when "a scheme consists of multiple anticompetitive parts that do have such synergistic effects."

Counsel for NTE declined comment. Representatives for Duke and the DOJ did not immediately respond Tuesday to requests for comment.

The government is represented by D. John Sauer, Malcolm L. Stewart and Harry S. Graver of the DOJ's Office of the Solicitor General, Abigail A. Slater, David B. Lawrence, Daniel E. Haar, Nickolai G. Levin and Peter M. Bozzo of the DOJ's Antitrust Division and Lucas Croslow of the FTC.

NTE Energy is represented by Derek T. Ho, Christopher C. Goodnow, Matthew J. Wilkins, Caroline A. Schechinger and Jonathan I. Liebman of Kellogg Hansen Todd Figel & Frederick PLLC.

Duke Energy is represented by Jason D. Evans of Troutman Pepper Locke LLP and Jeffrey B. Wall, Morgan L. Ratner and Daniel J. Richardson of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.

The case is Duke Energy Carolinas LLC et al. v. NTE Carolinas II LLC et al., case number 24-917, in the Supreme Court of the United States.