Twelve Democratic-led states on Monday sued to stop Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing that a merger of two of the country’s largest media companies would hurt American consumers.
The attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington joined together to file the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit argues that the merger will hurt the market for film distribution and give the new company too much power over the market for distributing basic cable channels.
“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
If Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. is successful, the company would own two major news networks in CNN and CBS News, the movie studio Warner Bros., and the streaming service HBO Max. Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, staunch supporters of President Trump, own Paramount Skydance, and would effectively have their own conservative media empire.
The merger has also raised concerns that CNN would be overhauled to reflect the conservative political views of the Ellisons. The two Trump allies have already steered Paramount’s CBS News to the right, causing its ratings to plummet and, in the process, an employee exodus from its flagship 60 Minutes program.
Trump is very much in favor of the merger, holding a longtime vendetta against CNN over its critical coverage of him, and has discussed who he wants to be fired at the network once the takeover is complete. Other officials in the Trump administration, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have openly cheered on pro-Trump changes at CNN.
The Department of Justice said last month that it would not challenge Paramount’s move, saying it was “not likely to harm competition or American consumers.” Now that decision will go to federal court, where a judge will determine if the damage to the public breaks the law.
A federal judge just nixed the settlement underlying Donald Trump’s nearly $1.8 billion slush fund.
The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for the unlawful leak of his tax returns in 2019. The honey pot payments were pitched as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger that felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in a 56-page order Monday.
Williams ruled that any entities affiliated with the slush fund settlement—including the president, the Treasury Department, and the IRS—were “prohibited” from using the details of the arrangement in any official capacity. She also referred Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for possible professional discipline.
She noted that while Trump had the right to pursue legal action over the unauthorized publication of his tax returns, he chose not to do so while he was still a private citizen. Instead, Trump did not bring the charges until he had returned to the White House and subsequently appointed his former lawyer, Todd Blanche, atop the Justice Department.
“These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel, to reach a ‘settlement,’” Williams assessed. “It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.”
The settle
