Paramount Surrenders to Trump and Agrees to Pay Him Millions

Truckling to President Donald Trump, Paramount has agreed to settle the president’s frivolous lawsuit over the editing of CBS News’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.

Some executives at the media conglomerate reportedly desired this outcome, for it would clear the way for a megamerger requiring the Trump administration’s approval, despite surely emboldening his war against the press.

As part of the settlement, Paramount will reportedly not apologize or admit wrongdoing—cold comfort, considering it will, per The New York Times, fork up $16 million, including to Trump’s legal fees and planned presidential library, and release written transcripts of future 60 Minutes interviews with presidential candidates.

Trump alleged that the show deceptively edited an answer from Kamala Harris on Israel during an October 2024 interview. Of course, 60 Minutes and other news programs customarily edit politicians’ remarks for concision, including those of the notorious prolix president.

The settlement paves the way for a multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance, which requires the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. In May, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Wyden wrote to Paramount that “Paramount may be engaging in potentially illegal conduct involving the Trump Administration in exchange for approval of its megamerger with Skydance.”

Paramount’s supine settlement starkly contrasts a court filing from just last Monday, in which the company called the “meritless lawsuit” an attempt “to evade bedrock First Amendment principles establishing that public officials like themselves cannot hold news organizations like CBS liable for the exercise of editorial judgment.”

Previously, the company had called the lawsuit “an affront to the First Amendment … without basis in law or fact.”

Former FBI agent and January 6 rioter Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—is now part of Trump’s Department of Justice. 

Wise will act as counselor to Ed Martin while the latter heads the Weaponization Working Group, a committee tasked with enacting revenge on the president’s political enemies, particularly those involved in investigating January 6. This means that a man who broke into the Capitol in a face mask and called for the deaths of police officers is now playing a key role in an agency that is attacking those who criticize and question the events of that infamous day.   

Wise worked for the FBI from 2004 to 2017 before joining the far-right propaganda think tank Project Veritas, where he infiltrated teachers’ unions across the Midwest. Wise was officially charged with two felonies and four misdemeanor counts in 2023, including trespassing and disrupting the orderly conduct of government. All of his charges were dropped by Trump, along with those of the hundreds of other insurrectionists he pardoned. 

This should all but confirm that there is not an ounce of MAGA remorse or discomfort about the January 6 insurrection. They have time to play Nixon and attack protesters across the country for acting against ICE raids and speaking out on Palestine, while venerating people who are proud and obvious threats to the U.S. government.   

It looks like Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski is getting exactly what she voted for, even though it’s not what she wanted.

Murkowski was the crucial vote Tuesday in passing Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate. But right after the vote, she said she’d backed the measure in the hopes that the legislation could be amended after it was returned to the House. But Republican leadership in the other chamber seems content passing the bill as is.

“My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” Murkowski told reporters after the vote. But more haggling over changes doesn’t seem to be on the agenda for House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The Louisiana Republican admitted that the Senate had strayed a “little further than many of us would have preferred” from the original bill that had passed in the House but that he would continue to work to pass the bill as it had returned, according to Punchbowl News.

“My objective and my responsibility is to get that bill over the line. So we will do everything possible to do that,” Johnson said.

The behemoth budget bill passed through the Senate only after Murkowski had acquired a stack of carve-outs for her state. “Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests,” Murkowski defiantly told NBC News.

In settling for a bill she doesn’t like at all, Murkowski has just signed onto adding trillions to the national deficit and gutting social programs such as SNAP and Medicaid while extending tax breaks for the rich.

Trump officials got a lesson in the Streisand effect—whereby attempts to suppress information only circulate it further—as their outrage over ICEBlock, a free iPhone app that monitors the activity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, propelled the app to the top of Apple’s App Store on Tuesday.

On Monday, CNN published an article about ICEBlock, which anonymously crowdsources information about ICE agent sightings in order to create an “early warning system,” according to the app’s developer, Joshua Aaron. Users have turned to ICEBlock as fear grips communities where federal immigration enforcement has ramped up operations in recent months, often led by agents conducting arrests and raids in masks and plain clothes.

In a Monday night Fox News appearance, Attorney General Pam Bondi chastised CNN for its reporting and lashed out against Aaron, saying, “He’s giving a message to criminals where our federal officers are, and he cannot do that, and we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that is not protected speech, that is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country.”

The app also drew condemnations from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, ICE acting Director Todd Lyons, and Trump border czar Tom Homan.

By Tuesday morning, ICEBlock had rocketed to the top of the App Store charts, becoming the #1 free app in the marketplace’s social networking category. It remains in that top social networking slot as of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, and it also appears to have more than tripled its user base: While the CNN story published Monday stated that the app had more than 20,000 users, Aaron on Tuesday afternoon posted that it now boasts over 70,000.

Thanking the app’s users, Aaron wrote, “I am so incredibly grateful that this little idea has become so popular. All I wanted to do was help protect people and #resist this downward spiral to authoritarianism.”

In a week dominated by Trump’s budget bill, Democrats can take some solace in a legal victory over Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and DOGE.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose of Rhode Island issued an injunction that blocks RFK Jr. from moving on with his plan to eliminate crucial agencies and fire 10,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services. The injunction was on behalf of 19 Democratic states that challenged the HHS secretary’s initial layoffs and his planned restructuring of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Tobacco Products, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the Office of Head Start. The injunction also blocks the Trump administration from issuing further layoffs at the department.

“The Executive Branch does not have the authority to order, organize, or implement wholesale changes to the structure and function of the agencies created by Congress,” DuBose wrote. Her injunction comes just one day before those 10,000 employees were set to be fired. Some have already been rehired.