Trump's DOJ Silenced Its Own Lawyers
If it were up to the lawyers, the merger wouldn't have gone through.
The DOJ just told its own attorneys to sit down and shut up.
Variety is reporting that top Justice Department officials moved to drop the antitrust probe into Paramount’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery before the career lawyers actually investigating the deal could even issue their recommendation. Those attorneys had spent months on the case.
They were leaning towards blocking it.
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Not every antitrust review ends in a lawsuit. But this investigation wasn’t closed because the evidence came up short — it was closed because the people at the top said no. The career staffers who investigated the deal didn’t even participate in writing the DOJ’s statement announcing its approval. They found out like the rest of us.
What happened at the Justice Department isn’t a story about a complicated merger. It’s a story about what happens when the rule of law becomes optional. If you can silence your own career attorneys on a $111 billion deal, override months of investigation, and cut them out of the final statement, then you can silence anyone.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called it what it is: “This reeks of corruption.”
The connections aren’t subtle. David Ellison and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, are friendly with Trump. Paramount hosted a party in Washington “honoring” the president. Ellison hired the man who ran the DOJ’s Antitrust Division during Trump’s first term as Paramount’s chief legal officer. Then the DOJ’s antitrust leadership cleared the deal over the objections of its own staff.
That’s not governance. That’s a transaction.
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