Good morning. The Trump administration sued Walmart, accusing the retail giant of helping to fuel the nation’s opioid crisis by inadequately screening for questionable prescriptions despite warnings from its own pharmacists. The Justice Department’s lawsuit claims Walmart sought to boost profits by understaffing its pharmacies and pressuring employees to fill prescriptions quickly. That made it difficult for pharmacists to reject invalid prescriptions, enabling drug abuse nationwide, the suit alleges.

Walmart responded in a public filing, saying the lawsuit “invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context.”

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“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors [the Drug Enforcement Administration] approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” Walmart said, adding that it “always empowered our pharmacists to refuse to fill problematic opioids prescriptions, and they refused to fill hundreds of thousands of such prescriptions.”

The country’s largest retailer by revenue, Walmart has been expecting this complaint and sued the federal government in October to fight the allegations pre-emptively. That suit accuses the Justice Department and DEA of attempting to scapegoat the company for what it says are the federal government’s own regulatory and enforcement shortcomings.

Brian Rabbitt, the acting chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division, will depart this week as part of a wave of expected turnover before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Mr. Rabbitt took the helm of the criminal division, which oversees major corporate enforcement programs, on a temporary basis in July. David Burns, a senior official who was serving in the department’s national security division, will succeed Mr. Rabbitt as chief of the criminal division, a Justice Department spokeswoman said.

The U.S.’s move to deny China’s leading chip maker access to advanced manufacturing technology comes with exceptions that mean its impact may be mainly political and have limited effect on the company’s business. Under the restriction the Commerce Department imposed on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. over the company’s alleged links to the Chinese military, suppliers need an export license to sell technology originating in the U.S. to the Shanghai-based chip maker.

The regulation applies the toughest licensing standard—a presumption of denial—to equipment dedicated to making the most advanced chips in the world with transistors 10 nanometers or smaller, the department said, using a measurement loosely referring to semiconductor size. But the chips SMIC currently sells generally are larger and not covered by that rule. And, industry officials said, the tougher U.S. restrictions don’t cover more versatile tools that can be used to produce both older technology and more cutting-edge chips.

The SEC approved the new kind of direct listing—which could help startups save on bank fees and capture more of the gains in their share price when they go public—in an order posted on its website Tuesday. The decision was a victory for the New York Stock Exchange, which sought to change its rulebook to make the new process available to companies going public.

• An antitrust lawsuit against Google has given legal voice to publishers who have been skeptical of assurances that the Alphabet Inc. unit’s online advertising tools were designed to help them make more money. Communications between Google employees, much of it redacted, suggest the employees were aware Google advertising tools didn’t always help publisher clients make more money than other ad tools, according to the suit.
   
• A Texas bankruptcy judge approved McKinsey & Co.’s settlement with Justice Department watchdogs over how the firm discloses potential conflicts of interest, effectively ending a legal battle on transparency in the U.S. bankruptcy system.
   
• China’s market regulator has ordered the country’s tech giants to tighten oversight of an emerging e-commerce purchasing model, the latest in a string of moves by authorities to rein in the powerful internet sector.
   
• Servers and other workers who receive tips could be required by their employer to share that gratuity with non-tipped staff members such as dishwashers, under a final regulation the Labor Department announced Tuesday.
   
• Sixteen Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of the National Rifle Association’s federal lawsuit against Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James, saying she targeted the nation’s largest and most powerful gun-rights group because she disagreed with its politics.
   
• The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit claiming Ripple Labs Inc. violated investor-protection laws when it sold a bitcoin-like digital asset called XRP.
   
• Hunter Biden’s Family Name Aided Deals With Foreign Tycoons

• China’s do-everything app, WeChat, has become one of the most powerful tools in Beijing’s arsenal for monitoring the public, censoring speech and punishing people who voice discontent with the government. Authorities are increasingly using the app from Tencent Holdings Ltd. to justify arrests or issue threats, say dissidents, consumers and security researchers.
   
• President-elect Joe Biden promised a forceful response to the suspected Russian hack of the federal government, faulting President Trump for not prioritizing cybersecurity and saying digital threats were among the most grave problems facing the U.S.
   
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation has determined that Iran is responsible for an online attempt this month to incite violence against FBI Director Chris Wray and federal and state officials who pushed back on election-fraud claims advanced by President Trump and some of his supporters, according to people familiar with the matter.

The National Football League has brought in former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to help investigate allegations of misconduct among the owners of the Washington Football Team, people familiar with the matter said.

The NFL is in the midst of an arbitration involving a feud between Washington principal owner Dan Snyder and the team’s minority owners, including FedEx Corp. chief executive Fred Smith, Black Diamond Capital chairman Robert Rothman and Dwight Schar, the board chairman of NVR Inc.

President Trump—who is currently able use Twitter with less risk, compared with private citizens, of having tweets taken down or his account suspended—won’t receive special privileges when he becomes a private citizen, Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio said. The loss of privileges reserved for world leaders would mean that if Mr. Trump violates the site’s rules, those tweets would be taken down rather than labeled in the future, Mr. Pacilio said.

Mr. Trump’s tweets have been labeled by the company repeatedly both before and since the election, often with a warning that “this claim about election fraud is disputed.” Twitter could face a politically delicate decision about how far to go if Mr. Trump does violate the rules after he leaves office. The company has yet to decide how it would treat future policy violations by Mr. Trump and plans to examine his account on a case-by-case basis, a person familiar with the matter said.

In July 2007, a few months after Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to federal charges of misleading the public about the addictive risks of OxyContin, a confidential memo warned one of the company’s owners that its assets are best protected overseas. The family-owned company faced “uncapped liabilities” and had to protect itself from the risk of a wave of lawsuits akin to decadeslong asbestos litigation, said the memo, written by Peter Boer, then an adviser to Jonathan Sackler, the Purdue co-owner and a board member.

A committee of Purdue creditors says unsealed records supply evidence for their probe into whether Sackler family members unlawfully moved $10.3 billion in profits out of the company from 2008 to 2017 to thwart future judgments, an allegation the Sacklers deny. Purdue is trying to resolve those lawsuits through bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, hospitals pushing ahead with Covid-19 vaccinations are facing calls for more transparency into how they decide who gets the earliest shots, as manufacturers rush to distribute limited early supply of vaccine.

Send comments to the Risk & Compliance editor, Jack Hagel, at jack.hagel@wsj.com.

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