Senate confirms Trump's FCC pick, Olivia Trusty
Trusty will join Republican Chair Brendan Carr and Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez on the panel, with two seats remaining empty. Trump has yet to select other nominees for the roles. No more than three commissioners on the independent agency are allowed to be from the same party, though Gomez had expressed doubt that Trump may nominate another Democrat to the agency. Former Republican Commissioner Nathan Simington endorsed his chief of staff, Gavin Wax, a MAGA loyalist who once said Trump's return to office would be a 'time for retribution,' after announcing he'd be stepping down from his post.
Trusty was a longtime staffer for Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who previously served as the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC and related issues. Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Monday, she opposed Trusty's confirmation largely due to concern with the Trump administration's actions. 'Although I respect the nominee's professional background, when I spoke in support of Ms. Trusty's nomination in Committee on April 30, I explained that my support was not absolute,' Cantwell wrote. 'Since then, the Trump Administration has pursued a series of concerning policies, leading me to oppose Ms. Trusty's nomination.'
Cantwell said she's concerned that Trusty's nomination was not paired with a Democratic one, which would be 'consistent with longstanding practice,' she wrote. She pointed to Trump's attempted firing of two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, another agency created to be independent from the president and whose commissioners the Supreme Court has said cannot be fired without cause. 'I remain seriously concerned that this Administration will try to illegally terminate Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez, refuse to nominate any Democratic replacements, and then operate the Commission on a strictly partisan basis,' Cantwell wrote.
'These are not normal times'
Trusty's confirmation gives Carr a 2-1 Republican majority to carry out his agenda, including slashing agency regulations and pursuing action against media outlets he views as countering the administration. 'I look forward to welcoming Olivia to the Commission as a colleague and advancing an agenda that will deliver great results for the American people,' Carr said in a statement.
Gomez similarly praised Trusty's experience and welcomed her to the panel. 'I have known Olivia for years and have been very impressed with her strong background in communications policy, which will be a great asset to this agency,' Gomez wrote in a statement.
'In normal times, there'd be little reason to oppose the confirmation of a candidate as qualified as Trusty. But these are not normal times.' Matt Wood, VP of policy and general counsel of nonpartisan group Free Press Action, said in a statement. 'Trusty's confirmation gives Carr the majority he needs to radically reshape the media sector in Trump's image, including offering policy favors to large broadcasters in exchange for their unwavering loyalty to the president.'
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Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Commentary: Paramount appeased Trump — but now it has to battle Colbert and all his friends
There may be a new entrant in the annals of corporate hole-digging: Media titan Paramount, which owns CBS and recently said it's canceling the top-rated "Late Show with Stephen Colbert." Paramount said it needs to cancel the Colbert show for 'financial reasons' and leaked reports likely sourced to the company suggest the show loses around $40 million per year. But the decision reeks of Trumpian subterfuge, putting Paramount in the fraught corporate position of picking sides in one of President Trump's many disputes over business and cultural priorities. Paramount plans to merge this year with media firm Skydance, to help stabilize its finances and ease the transition from legacy media behemoth to a nimbler streaming operation. The two companies agreed on the $8 billion deal last year, when Joe Biden was president. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the deal in February. That left the Federal Communications Commission, which must also sign off since the deal involves the transfer of broadcast licenses. FCC approval was 'widely seen as a formality,' as Deadline reported in April. But it didn't come until July 24, months later than would have been likely under any president other than Trump. In the meanwhile, Paramount paid tribute to Trump in unprecedented ways likely to dog the company for months or years, with the cancellation of Colbert's show fueling a barrage of criticism from Colbert himself and many allies, some of it on Paramount's own airwaves. Paramount clearly didn't anticipate this sort of trouble when it arranged the deal last year. But when Trump won the presidency in November, Paramount faced new barriers to a buyout that otherwise might have been routine. That's because of Trump's personal beef with CBS and the news show "60 Minutes." Trump sued the network last year as an individual, claiming the show distorted a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris, Trump's foe in the presidential election, to give her favorable treatment. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump appointed loyalist Brendan Carr to head the FCC. Then Trump converted the formerly independent agency into an arm of the White House's policy and political operations. One of Carr's first moves as Trump's FCC boss was opening an investigation into the CBS for its interview with Harris, an unprecedented effort to use government power to intimidate a news organization. 'The chairman of the FCC has cagily created a new and coercive technique for operating outside the agency's established statutes and procedures to attack corporate decisions he and Donald Trump do not like,' former FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler, now of the Brookings Institution, wrote in February. 'Prime targets are media company editorial decisions.' The Los Angeles Times and other news organizations reported that Shari Redstone, non-executive chair of umbrella company Paramount Global, pushed her executives to settle with Trump. Redstone and her family stand to net about $1.75 billion from the Skydance deal. So she has a clear interest in pushing barriers to the deal out of the way. That may explain why earlier this month, Paramount and CBS agreed to settle the Trump lawsuit for $16 million. Colbert roasts Trump regularly on his show and is far more political than David Letterman, whom he replaced in 2015. On July 14, the cheeky host called the $16 million Paramount payment to Trump 'a big, fat bribe'—on CBS's own air. Three days later, Paramount canceled Colbert's show. There's no public evidence that the company axed Colbert to appease Trump. Yet it did please Trump. 'I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,' Trump posted to social media on July 18. Then on July 24, Paramount received the FCC blessing to close the deal with Skydance. Mission accomplished ... Except for what is sure to be a very messy aftermath. Colbert's contract lasts until next May (same as the tenure for embattled Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell), and the show will air until then. 'For the next 10 months, the gloves are off,' Colbert told his audience on July cronies Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Adam Sandler, Christopher McDonald, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Weird Al Yankovic joined that show for a spoof that ended with a Trump-Paramount kiss-cam exposé. The same day, Jon Stewart devoted half of his weekly Comedy Central program to blasting Paramount for trying to 'make yourselves so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless, that you will never again be on the boy king's radar.' Stewart ended the show with a musical number, backed by a gospel quintet, featuring the refrain 'Go f— yourself,' which may or may not become an instant classic but is certainly giggly. Stewart's show, like Colbert's, runs on a network owned by Paramount. So does the animated series "South Park," which just debuted the premiere episode of its 27th season, in which a fictional Trump tries to seduce a [fictional] Satan, who mocks fictional Trump for having diminutive [fictional] genitalia. Maybe Paramount won the battle. But will it win the war? Will Trump really be satisfied that Colbert's Paramount-supported mockery of him might continue until next year? Or that Stewart and the diabolical "South Park" brain trust will keep tweaking him indefinitely? If Paramount cites contractual obligations requiring it to continue airing the Trump-bashing resistance, will Trump nod and say, right, of course? Big public companies make mistakes all the time. The memorable ones are those compounded by a corporate reaction that amplifies the original sin and makes everything worse. In 2023, Target tried to back away from its own LGBTQ outreach effort, offending the very people it was wooing and making no new friends in the process. In 2017, United Airlines appeared to defend thuggish security guards who forcibly dragged a passenger off a plane, igniting a firestorm of bad publicity that wiped nearly $1.5 billion off its market value. Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick resigned as CEO in 2017 after failing to shake months of controversy over a toxic company culture rife with sexual harassment and discrimination. Those incidents are now textbook examples of how to worsen a crisis, rather than fix it. Paramount now seems headed toward its own chapter in that cringy volume. Colbert, Stewart, et al. won't do Trump any harm, since they've been slamming him for years and have long been speaking to like-minded audiences. But now they're aiming their comedic lances at Paramount, which most of their viewers have probably never thought much about. That will change. Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices.
CNN
23 minutes ago
- CNN
Legal loopholes and Senate drama: Inside Trump's battle to install US attorneys
President Donald Trump's fraught effort to install political appointees in permanent roles as US attorneys across the country gained momentum this week, as Republicans work to jumpstart a stalled confirmation process in the Senate, while the White House resorted to a novel legal maneuver to keep a political ally in place as New Jersey's top prosecutor. Alina Habba, the Trump-appointed interim US attorney for New Jersey, resigned from her post on Thursday in an effort to keep it, after district judges for the state booted her from the job. Habba, a former personal attorney for Trump and campaign spokesperson, said she will now be appointed as the 'acting' US attorney for New Jersey. Habba's time as interim US attorney was due to expire on Friday. The move, according to one source familiar with the strategy, will prevent Habba's term from expiring and nullify an effort by the state's federal judges to name her replacement, leading to a simmering standoff between the administration and New Jerseys' judges. Meanwhile in the Senate, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have offered a broad compromise to Democrats in an effort to break a blockade on the president's slate of US attorney nominees in hopes of getting a few confirmed before the Senate leaves for its monthlong recess in August, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. A spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Democrats declined to comment on the situation. Administration officials were initially confident they would be able to install a slate of more than 30 US attorneys Trump nominated early in the year. But only a dozen have even moved past a preliminary committee vote and not a single nominee has received a confirmation vote on the Senate floor. While every recent president has gotten off to a slow start moving US attorney nominees, Trump is in danger of falling even further behind, especially amid concerns over the quality of some of the more controversial nominees tapped by Trump, some of whom have never worked as prosecutors. The clock is also running out on the interim status for many of Trump's US attorney picks, beyond Habba. Under federal law, if the administration doesn't fill the job and the Senate doesn't confirm a nominee within 120 days, federal judges can select a temporary US attorney, further undermining the administration's goal to have their own people in place. Pressure is therefore mounting on Republicans to cut a deal with Democrats to get at least a few nominees confirmed before the Senate leaves town for a month. 'I think both sides understand that the current situation is untenable,' the source familiar with the negotiations told CNN. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin has since May put a blanket hold on Trump's slate of US attorney nominees, leaving the administration without top law enforcement officials in permanent roles as it presses forward with an aggressive agenda that includes a heavy focus on immigration enforcement and violent crime. Durbin has justified his blanket hold in part by arguing that then-Sen. JD Vance placed a similar hold on Democratic US attorney nominees during the Biden administration. 'Sen. Durbin continues to discuss a path forward with his Democratic and Republican colleagues,' Durbin spokesperson Josh Sorbe said in a statement to CNN. There are now a dozen US attorney nominees ready for a floor vote, after seven were passed out of committee on Thursday. That includes former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, who is in line to be the top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC. While US attorney nominees usually receive broad bipartisan support, some of Trump's nominees have made that more difficult. In comments on Thursday, even Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that some of the president's nominees are 'controversial.' 'As chairman, I try to be fair to all members of the committee, even during controversial nominations. And we have plenty of them and have had plenty of them as well,' Grassley said. The drama has been particularly acute in New Jersey, where the Justice Department spent much of the week engaged in a bitter standoff with the state's federal judges over who will be the state's top prosecutor. With Habba facing an unlikely road to confirmation in the Senate, and her interim status set to expire Friday, federal judges on Tuesday tapped Desiree Leigh Grace, a top federal prosecutor, to take over the office. The Justice Department immediately said it was removing Grace, though she vowed to take over the job next week. To do so, Grace would've had to be sworn in by a federal judge just after midnight Friday after Habba's interim term expired. But Habba short-circuited all that by resigning on Thursday, trading in her interim status as New Jersey's US attorney to an 'acting' role, thus (in theory) restarting the clock on how long she can serve. 'Donald J. Trump is the 47th President,' Habba posted on Twitter on Thursday. 'Pam Bondi is the Attorney General. And I am now the Acting United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.' Habba continued: 'I don't cower to pressure. I don't answer to politics.' Habba and the Justice Department both declined to comment when reached by CNN. Grace did not respond to CNN's request for additional comment. The White House had hoped to avoid all this. In the early days of Trump's second term, the administration worked to compile a slate of nominees to lead some of the 93 US attorneys' offices across the country. Top Justice Department officials, with input from the White House, selected dozens of nominees they believed could carry out the president's agenda – specifically on immigration and violent crime. While senior officials were initially confident they would be able to get these nominees confirmed, the process stalled earlier this year amid the disastrous attempt to force through the confirmation of Trump's nominee to lead the DC US Attorney's Office, Ed Martin. Martin's nomination was riddled with controversies. He had to repeatedly update his mandated disclosure forms to Congress and came under fire over his previous praise of a Capitol rioter who is an alleged Nazi sympathizer. In the end, Martin's nomination was pulled and Trump in his place nominated Pirro, who is not without controversy herself following her years as a Fox News personality. US attorneys are the top law enforcement officials in each of the 93 judicial districts across the country. They play an important role in prosecuting federal crimes and defending the government in civil litigation. They are also key to implementing the president's agenda at the local level. 'So much of our public focus is on the attorney general, and rightly so. However, the real engines who drive DOJ's day to day work and case making on a district-by-district basis, are the US attorneys. Each US attorney essentially runs one of those districts, and has very broad autonomy in how that office functions,' said CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey. While nominees can serve temporarily on an interim or acting basis without getting Senate confirmation, it's less than ideal, said Honig. 'There's a big impact where you have a non-confirmed US attorney, especially if there's flux and uncertainty. If you're going from one acting to another, interim back to the other acting, it causes chaos in those offices,' Honig said. 'It causes a lack of stability, a lack of a sense of mission. It undermines morale in those offices.' Data from the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for an effective government workforce, shows that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were the only modern presidents able to get nominees confirmed by the six-month mark. Trump, in his first term, did not have any US attorneys confirmed after the first six months. Max Stier, PPS's president and CEO, notes that it is significant that in his second term Trump was quick to put up nominations, but that has not resulted in swift confirmations. 'Instead of being ahead of the curve, they are now behind the curve,' Stier said. Stier noted though that the pace of nominations is not what is slowing the administration from filling vacancies; it's the nature of the nominees. 'It's not just a numbers game that we're watching this administration, even unlike the first Trump administration, is putting forward extraordinarily partisan and unqualified candidates for these positions, and it's not just in the District of Columbia,' Stier said. Stier points to other examples including Habba, who has worked as Trump's personal attorney and campaign spokesman but never as a prosecutor. John Sarcone, Trump's pick for US attorney in Northern New York, has also been criticized for not having any prosecutorial experience. 'I do think the extra element that's added here of consequence is the deeply flawed nature of a consequential number of the candidates that are being put up by this administration,' Stier said. Acting US attorneys can still carry out the president's agenda without being confirmed by the Senate, but there are downsides. 'I think his real view is that acting officials are people that don't have the oversight by the United States Senate and by the public through that process, and so that allows to put in place people who either shouldn't or would exact a political cost to actually get confirmed,' Stier said. Senators have the option to personally request a confirmation that has been otherwise blocked or delayed in a process called 'blue slipping,' but a senior administration official told CNN: 'Unless there is a deal struck, in blue states we are not going to get any blue slips.' One notable example is how Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declined to offer a blue slip for Jay Clayton, who was tapped to be US attorney in the Southern District of New York even though he is the former head of the SEC. 'It's pretty crazy,' the official said.
The Verge
24 minutes ago
- The Verge
Paramount-Skydance merger approved after companies agree to government speech demands
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved Skydance's $8 billion purchase of CBS-owner Paramount after the companies agreed to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs but feature a 'diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.' In light of the Trump administration's critiques of CBS's alleged anti-conservative bias — including collecting a $16 million settlement over the president's lawsuit over an allegedly deceptively edited video of then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes — the companies' commitment to address bias in the lawsuit likely means featuring more conservative programming. Skydance agreed to employ an ombudsman for at least two years, 'who will receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS.' 'Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,' Republican FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement announcing the agency's approval. 'That is why I welcome Skydance's commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network.' He said the commitments 'would enable CBS to operate in the public interest and focus on fair, unbiased, and fact-based coverage,' and mark 'another step forward in the FCC's efforts to eliminate invidious forms of DEI discrimination.' Carr also boasts that Skydance 'reaffirms its commitment to localism as a core component of the public interest standard,' and that the approval will 'unleash the investment of $1.5 billion into Paramount.' Carr has made no secret of his distaste for news coverage he sees as disproportionately unfavorable to the right and DEI policies he believes contribute to unfair treatment. He's opened investigations into all three major networks as well as NPR and PBS (NBCUniversal and its owner Comcast are investors in The Verge parent company Vox Media). A week ago, CBS announced it was retiring The Late Show, hosted by Trump critic and comedian Stephen Colbert. The network said it was 'purely a financial decision.' The FCC's only remaining Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, dissented, writing that, 'In an unprecedented move, this once-independent FCC used its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement and further erode press freedom … Even more alarming, it is now imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.' Still, she gave Carr credit for calling a vote on the matter, rather than rubber-stamping the merger through one of the agency's bureaus, like it did for the Verizon-Frontier merger, which similarly required an end to DEI programs. Gomez warns that this agreement is just the canary in the coal mine. 'The Paramount payout and this reckless approval have emboldened those who believe the government can—and should—abuse its power to extract financial and ideological concessions, demand favored treatment, and secure positive media coverage,' she writes. 'It is a dark chapter in a long and growing record of abuse that threatens press freedom in this country. But such violations endure only when institutions choose capitulation over courage. It is time for companies, journalists, and citizens alike to stand up and speak out, because unchecked and unquestioned power has no rightful place in America.' Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Lauren Feiner Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Business Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Film Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Policy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Streaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All TV Shows
