Top Justice Department officials moved to drop the antitrust investigation into Paramount’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery before the team of lawyers investigating the matter could issue a recommendation, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The career lawyers in the DOJ’s Antitrust Division had been “leaning” toward advising that the department should file a lawsuit seeking to block the merger — and were surprised when DOJ leadership gave the deal the green light, per the Journal article.
“The American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor. This reeks of corruption,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been a strong critic of the Paramount-WBD deal, wrote in a post on Bluesky, citing the WSJ story.
In March, the acting head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Omeed Assefi, said the Paramount-WBD deal would “absolutely not” be on a fast-track for approval due to political reasons, in the context of the Ellison family’s friendly ties to Trump.
The Journal story, citing anonymous sources, said DOJ attorneys who had spent months investigation Paramount-WBD were inclined to recommend a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be “anticompetitive and violate antitrust law.” The paper reported that the antitrust staffers who investigated the proposed merger “didn’t participate in writing” the Justice Department statement. On Friday, the DOJ issued a statement saying in part, “The [Antitrust] Division has completed its analysis of the proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. and determined based on the evidence received in its investigation that the transaction is not likely to result in harm to competition or American consumers,”
