Surprising no one — except for the timing — Donald Trump‘s Department of Justice has weighed in on the $1.88 billion bond battle between David Ellison‘s Paramount and a dozen blue states over the company’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery.
Disputing the very right of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, New York AG Letitia James and others to raise an antitrust stink, the Todd Blanche-run DOJ made its bottom-line POV a top line in paperwork filed Tuesday in federal court.
“The bond requirement forces parties to have skin in the game, and also provides a measure of protection to defendants who were ultimately found to be wrongly enjoined,” the DOJ asserts, quoting from past Clayton Act cases.
Citing “extraordinary losses” leading up to the March 2027-scheduled trial plus the $7-million-a-day ticking fee in the WBD contract that kicks in October 1 (the same day Paramount has threatened to move its corporate HQ out of California), the Melrose-based company wants the plaintiffs to pony up.
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The AGs have said if there is any cash to be paid it should be in the realm of $10,000 at most.
Aside from the bond tactic being a tried-and-true distraction in a thorny legal fight, even the son of one of the richest men in the world wants to hold onto that nearly $2 billion. With a ticking fee equaling more than $635 million a quarter for Paramount, and at least two quarters before the trial, serious money is on the table — even for an Ellison.
“Congress provided for complementary antitrust enforcement by the federal government and private parties — but made clear that it was not a system of equals,” says the 17-page Statement of Interest of the USA to Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín. Drilling down to Section 16 of the antitrust Clayton Act and waving off the lack of an injunction in the case, the feds argue “the plain meaning of the statute and the contemporaneous use of ‘proper bond’ in dictionaries and federal court decisions makes it clear the amount of the bond must be fit, suitable, adapted, and correct to compensate the defendant for ‘damages for an injunction improvidently granted.’”
In other words, give our “good friend” David the money. We may discover whether Martínez-Olguín agrees when the parties meet in Oakland next week. Today, Bonta’s office did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the feds’ escalation of the matter.
They might be busy, and we ain’t talking about the CA AG’s easy path to reelection in November.
With court-orchestrated settlement talks now on again for the end of October, it’s going to be a busy few months heading towards the trail set to begin March 2, 2027. There’s a September 24 hearing on the bond debate, which the AGs and the WGA have dismissed as more posturing by Paramount. Then there’s that pricey ticking fee kickoff and a possible SCOTUS intervention in the wings.
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Of course, with the close relationship between the Ellisons and Trump administration, which in the minds of some saw the merger approved this spring with too few questions and no conditions, the fact that the language in today’s DOJ statement so closely mirrors Paramount’s recent filings on the bond issue is just another non-surprise. Also stating that the AGs’ antitrust case is way out of their jurisdiction, a September 11 filing by Paramount calls the whole July 13 lawsuit little more than “a series of attempted shortcuts and assumptions that collapse under scrutiny.”
“Day by day, the weak case against this Merger gets even weaker.”
Again, in the transactional ethos of Trumpland, it’s all about who has real skin in the game
