Two House Democrats are accusing executives at Paramount Skydance of stonewalling their probe of the corporation’s controversial megamerger, which was approved by the Trump administration in July.
Accusations of bribery, which the company has denied, have swirled within and around Paramount — owned by Trump-aligned billionaire David Ellison — for months. Such concerns, expressed by Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and others, stem from a host of pro-Trump moves made by the corporation around the time its merger was approved.
Those actions include its $16 million settlement with the president over legal claims widely viewed as frivolous, the costly acquisition of Trump-friendly opinion platform The Free Press and the hiring of a Trump-aligned monitor to review content at CBS News for potential bias.
In a letter to Ellison on Wednesday, Raskin and Pallone said his company had failed to provide many of the documents they demanded as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the merger.
Per a news release from Democrats on the committee:
Two months have passed since the deadline to fully respond to the Committee’s request, yet Paramount still has not produced the settlement agreement, documents, and communications Committee staff requested in August. Instead, Paramount’s counsel provided partial responses on August 29, that not only failed to address any of the requests, it raised additional questions and concerns.
The letter specifies that the communications the Democrats are still seeking include any internal communications about the settlement, the merger and any potential side deals, with a reference to Trump’s claim — denied by executives — that Paramount agreed to provide the president with millions of dollars’ worth of free advertising in addition to the multimillion-dollar settlement.
The lawmakers say the only response they received was to a question seeking “a description of communications with the President or other representatives of the Administration from April 12, 2025; July 7, 2025; or any other day during the pendency of the merger between Skydance and Paramount.” The letter says the company responded that it had engaged only in “routine and customary interactions” with government officials.
Trump, for the record, was spotted with Ellison at a UFC event on April 12.
Raskin and Pallone also raised concerns about executives reportedly saying that Skydance had “fully complied with all applicable laws, including our nation’s anti-bribery laws” but not making the same assurance about Paramount.
Paramount Skydance did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment.
Trump has openly touted Ellison and his billionaire father — both of whom the president looped into a potential deal to acquire TikTok — as his “supporters” and “friends” and has said CBS will be better off under their control. Trump is obviously no friend of the free press, so that has only fueled speculation that the younger Ellison is converting his newly minted company into a pro-Trump media empire.
In 2022, Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, gave Republicans a playbook on how to crack down on press freedoms and wield control over the media. Over the past year, we’ve seen Trump — who idolizes Orbán — and his allies following that guidance to a T.
And that explains why Democrats are sounding the alarm here, before Trump is allowed to impose even more authoritarian power over the media ecosystem.
