Paramount Plan To Pay Off Trump Sparks California Senate Probe, Requests For Ex-CBS News Brass To Testify
Lesley Stahl is certain Paramount will pay off Donald Trump to end POTUS' $20 billion 60 Minutes lawsuit, and Scott Pelley exclaims journalism is under attack. However, if Shari Redstone thinks a big check and an apology for a piece last year from the CBS newsmagazine series he didn't like is enough to grease the regulatory wheels for Skydance's $8 billion absorption of the company, the California state Senate has a news alert for her.
In a letter Friday sent to former 60 Minutes EP Bill Owens and ex-CBS News and Stations boss Wendy McMahon, plus the Paramount Global board and the state Attorney General, the heads of the Senate Energy, Utilities & Communications Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee in Sacramento began an investigation to see if Golden State bribery and unfair competition laws are about to be violated.
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Whether such a probe from the Democrat-dominated state Senate and voluntary (well, voluntary for now) testimony from Owens and McMahon could derail the big-bucks merger Redstone is banking on is unlikely. Yet, it's sure to make it uncomfortable for the current owners and the potential future ones.
'Your recent resignations from CBS's leadership, amid public reports of internal concern about the editorial and ethical implications of the proposed settlement, suggest that you may possess important, first-hand knowledge relevant to our legislative oversight responsibilities,' state Senators Josh Becker and Thomas J. Umberg wrote to Owens and McMahon today. 'This hearing will mark the beginning of our inquiry,' the committee chairs added. 'Should additional testimony or documentation become necessary, both committees retain full subpoena authority under California law. We respectfully encourage you to participate in this important hearing. Your cooperation will help safeguard the values you have each worked to uphold in your distinguished careers.'
Owens and McMahon both jumped ship from CBS in the past several weeks before they were given a fatal shove by George Cheeks for resisting the motivations of the C-suite and Redstone to tone down critiques of the former Apprentice host and reach a settlement to the lawsuit Trump filed just before last year's election.
To that, Becker and Umberg want Owens and McMahon to consider the big picture, and Redstone and Skydance's David Ellison to realize they are dancing with the devil in a red tie.
'Perhaps even more concerning is the potential chilling effect of Paramount's settlement on investigative and political journalism,' the state politicians declared. 'Such a settlement would signal that politically motivated lawsuits can succeed when paired with regulatory threats. It would damage public trust in CBS News and other California-based outlets, diminishing the state's stature as a national leader in ethical journalism. Paramount's capitulation would also undermine two essential pillars of a liberal democracy: a free press and an impartial, rule-of-law regulatory system.'
In a recent filing trying to stop Paramount from getting the suit tossed, Trump's lawyers claimed that the so-called tough guy POTUS suffered 'mental anguish' over editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his then-ballot box rival Kamala Harris. Filed in Texas, Trump's suit alleges violations of the state's Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which typically is used by consumers to pursue false advertising claims.
In the weeks before he was promoted to FCC chair, Brendan Carr said the 60 Minutes complaint was 'likely to arise' as part of the Paramount/Skydance merger review. Trying sometimes to out-Trump Trump, Carr has since said earlier this month that his boss' lawsuit has nothing to do with the merger consideration and regulatory approval – a statement no one with an ounce of real-world knowledge believes for one minute.
Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) warned Redstone that any deal with Trump could constitute a violation of federal bribery laws. She clearly didn't care what the trio had to say because earlier this week, Deadline confirmed the gist of a May 28 Wall Street Journal report that Paramount had offered Trump an 'eight-figure' settlement in the $15 million range.
Smelling more lucrative blood in the water, it was a settlement that Trump rejected. Sources say that he wants more money and that talks are ongoing, which means he'll likely get more money so the Skydance deal can be greenlighted.
Semafor first reported the news of the California state Senate letter.
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43 minutes ago
Can Trump fix the national debt? Republican senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts
WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won't bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package. The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised. 'All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,' said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. 'There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.' The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted 'to debunk some false claims" about his tax cuts. Leavitt said that the "blatantly wrong claim that the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.' But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. 'We have to get a lot of votes,' Trump said last week. 'We can't be cutting.' That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump's orbit think is viable. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump's inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump's 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year's dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury Note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office's expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when that growth is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods — all of which, by Miran's logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. 'I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,' Miran told reporters recently. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is 'in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.' Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. 'This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face,' said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be 'dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time.' Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump's economic team are 'a work of fiction.' He said the bill would lead some workers to choose to work fewer hours in order to qualify for Medicaid. 'I don't know of any serious forecaster that has meaningfully raised their growth forecast because of this legislation,' said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was the Council of Economic Advisers chair under the Obama administration. 'These are mostly not growth- and competitiveness-oriented tax cuts. And, in fact, the higher long-term interest rates will go the other way and hurt growth.' The White House's inability so far to calm deficit concerns is stirring up political blowback for Trump as the tax and spending cuts approved by the House now move to the Senate. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky have both expressed concerns about the likely deficit increases, with Johnson saying there are enough senators to stall the bill until deficits are addressed. 'I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,' Johnson said on CNN. The White House is also banking that tariff revenues will help cover the additional deficits, even though recent court rulings cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping taxes on imports. When Trump announced his near-universal tariffs in April, he specifically said his policies would generate enough new revenues to start paying down the national debt. His comments dovetailed with remarks by aides, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that yearly budget deficits could be more than halved. 'It's our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it'll all happen very quickly,' Trump said two months ago as he talked up his import taxes and encouraged lawmakers to pass the separate tax and spending cuts. The Trump administration is correct that growth can help reduce deficit pressures, but it's not enough on its own to accomplish the task, according to new research by economists Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard and Zachary Liscow. Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said additional 'growth doesn't even get us close to where we need to be.' The government would need $10 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years just to stabilize the debt, Tedeschi said. And even though the White House says the tax cuts would add to growth, most of the cost goes to preserve existing tax breaks, so that's unlikely to boost the economy meaningfully. 'It's treading water,' Tedeschi said.
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Can Trump fix the national debt? Republican senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won't bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package. The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised. 'All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,' said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. 'There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.' The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted 'to debunk some false claims" about his tax cuts. Leavitt said that the "blatantly wrong claim that the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.' But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. 'We have to get a lot of votes,' Trump said last week. 'We can't be cutting.' That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump's orbit think is viable. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump's inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." Federal debt keeps rising The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump's 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year's dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury Note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office's expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when that growth is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods — all of which, by Miran's logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. 'I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,' Miran told reporters recently. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is 'in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.' Economists doubt Trump's plan can spark enough growth to reduce deficits Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. 'This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face,' said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be 'dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time.' Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump's economic team are 'a work of fiction.' He said the bill would lead some workers to choose to work fewer hours in order to qualify for Medicaid. 'I don't know of any serious forecaster that has meaningfully raised their growth forecast because of this legislation,' said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was the Council of Economic Advisers chair under the Obama administration. 'These are mostly not growth- and competitiveness-oriented tax cuts. And, in fact, the higher long-term interest rates will go the other way and hurt growth.' The White House's inability so far to calm deficit concerns is stirring up political blowback for Trump as the tax and spending cuts approved by the House now move to the Senate. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky have both expressed concerns about the likely deficit increases, with Johnson saying there are enough senators to stall the bill until deficits are addressed. 'I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,' Johnson said on CNN. Trump banking on tariff revenues to help The White House is also banking that tariff revenues will help cover the additional deficits, even though recent court rulings cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping taxes on imports. When Trump announced his near-universal tariffs in April, he specifically said his policies would generate enough new revenues to start paying down the national debt. His comments dovetailed with remarks by aides, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that yearly budget deficits could be more than halved. 'It's our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it'll all happen very quickly,' Trump said two months ago as he talked up his import taxes and encouraged lawmakers to pass the separate tax and spending cuts. The Trump administration is correct that growth can help reduce deficit pressures, but it's not enough on its own to accomplish the task, according to new research by economists Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard and Zachary Liscow. Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said additional 'growth doesn't even get us close to where we need to be.' The government would need $10 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years just to stabilize the debt, Tedeschi said. And even though the White House says the tax cuts would add to growth, most of the cost goes to preserve existing tax breaks, so that's unlikely to boost the economy meaningfully.
Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Clarence Page: Hey, men, Democrats want your votes. They really do.
Where are the Democrats? What are they doing about the damage President Donald Trump is doing to … everything? I hear that a lot from my liberal friends these days, ever since Trump swept the battleground states six months ago and proceeded to dismantle government as we Americans used to know it. With the fury of a man who is trying to make up for the time he lost on the sidelines after losing to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has been rolling out radical changes almost daily that seem to be aimed at retribution — one of his favorite words — more than decent governance. In the face of the onslaught, Democrats sound about as depressed as the party's approval ratings — 27% in a recent NBC News poll. That's the party's lowest positive rating in the network's polling data since 1990. Only 7% say their support is 'very positive.' Throwing more salt into their wounds is the simmering discontent among the party's core constituencies, upon whom the party has come to count for decades: young people, Black voters and Latinos, in particular. Trump made notable gains with these voters, a trend that — unlike 2016 — included Trump's winning the popular vote for the first time. Self-identified Democratic voters say by a 2-to-1 margin in the NBC poll that they would rather see their party 'hold the line on their positions, even if it leads to gridlock,' instead of looking for areas of compromise to, as the old Capitol Hill saying goes, get things done. As a self-described moderate liberal, I'm dismayed but not surprised by that angst-driven reaction. Trump's slash-and-burn approach to reform — on issues as varied as immigration enforcement to Medicaid to Veterans Affairs and COVID-19 shots, just for starters, will take a strong pushback just to land somewhere near the ever-elusive sensible center. Where are the Dems now? Of particular interest this time around, the party is trying to woo young men — diligently. The harsh Democratic reality includes downward long-term trends for Democrats while Republicans have been gaining ground in recent decades, particularly among noncollege graduates. Working-class voters have been turning away from the Democrats, long viewed as the party for working families but increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated 'elites.' Which leads us to the most significant new moves by the Dems' donor class and strategists: a $20 million 'strategic plan' called 'Speaking with American Men,' or SAM for short. That's right, guys. Like an old Uncle Sam poster, today's Democrats want you! Perhaps more than ever. The decline of men and concomitant rise of women in Democratic voting ranks has been observed for decades and is not expected to change drastically soon. Democratic pollsters are advising the party leaders to avoid taking the wrong lessons from the 2026 midterms, when many of them hope President Trump's excesses will backfire in favor of the Dems. That's wise. Trump's successes, including his victory last year, have tended to be larger than expected after the Democrats underestimated his popularity. As Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic consultant told The New York Times, 'Voters are hungry for people to actually stand up for them — or get caught trying.' In other words, she said, 'The party is doing a lot of naval-gazing and not enough full-belly aching.' I, too, have heard that lament, particularly from Democrats in cities like Chicago who remember an era when the party seemed less concerned with trying to sound polite and more concerned with delivering the goods to its constituents. That's especially important at times like these when funding cuts for research, veterans and health care, among other issues, can mean life and death for them. Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU and a prominent commentator, has gained a measure of fame for his speeches and research on the feeling of abandonment by the Dems that has been a major turnoff for the audience of the so-called 'Manosphere' of male podcasting. He argues that the party's focus on other demographics, like women voters, is important, but has fed a feeling of neglect and abandonment among young men. This development caught little attention in the era before podcasting. But today's electorate, like the news, is not what it used to be. Democrats will have to keep up with changing times before the party's candidates are overwhelmed by them.
