Those are 2 different things. Political appointees (not the same as politicians) might be in charge of deciding whether to bring antitrust lawsuits, but politicians do not, and in any case these things are mostly worked on by career civil servants.
They didn't delete his repos. He's just been shadowbanned, and is now running the Kafkaesque gauntlet of trying to figure out why he's been banned and then getting reinstated (maybe).
I mean if the end result is that no one can access the repos how is that not basically deleting them? Are we just arguing semantics because the end result is the same?
The difference is that deleting them would mean that they're gone forever, and if he didn't have backups he's screwed. Shadowbanned means that he can still access his code and move it elsewhere even if he doesn't have backups. It also means that if he gets the shadow ban reversed, the code will once again be available. If it were deleted, that would not be possible.
