Theoretically, it’s illegal for the president to accept or solicit bribes. The plain language of the statute is perfectly clear: It is a crime for a public official to seek or receive “anything of value” in return for “being influenced in the performance of any official act.” The prohibition applies whether the public official seeks or receives the bribe personally or on behalf of “any other person or entity.”
As I said: theoretically. On Tuesday, the media-and-entertainment conglomerate Paramount announced a $16 million payment to President Donald Trump’s future presidential library. The payment settled a lawsuit that Trump had filed against the Paramount-owned broadcaster CBS because he was unhappy with the way the network had edited an election-season interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s lawsuit was about as meritless as a lawsuit can be, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. If CBS were a freestanding news organization, it would have fought the case and won. But like the Disney-owned network ABC, which also paid off Trump for an almost equally frivolous lawsuit, CBS belongs to a parent corporation with regulatory business before Trump-appointed agencies. Paramount is pursuing an $8 billion merger that requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission. In November 2024, then-incoming FCC Chair Brendan Carr warned that merger approval would depend on satisfying Trump’s claims against CBS. Carr told the Fox News interviewer Dana Perino, “I’m pretty confident that that news-distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”
“News-distortion complaint?” What’s that? Nearly a century ago, in 1927, Congress empowered a new Federal Radio Commission to police the accuracy of news broadcasts. In the preceding decades, the airwaves had become a chaos of transmissions interfering with one another. The right to use any particular frequency was a valuable concession from the federal government, the owner on the public’s behalf of the nation’s airwaves. Congress felt that it could impose conditions in return for such concessions. One condition was a duty to meet public-interest standards in broadcast content, which included giving equal time to opposing political candidates in an election. In 1934, the Federal Radio Commission evolved into the Federal Communications Commission. As television technology spread, so did the FCC’s ambition to police the new medium, resulting in 1949 with its power to compel the fairness doctrine on “all discussion of issues of importance to the public.”
The fact that opinions can differ about what counts as “accuracy” and what counts as “distortion” rapidly became obvious. Government efforts to police the boundary between fair reporting and unfair scurrility create conflicts with First Amendment rights. For print media, the courts have been very clear: Editing, even arguably unfair editing, is protected free speech, subject only to the laws of defamation. In the 1960s and ’70s, the FCC groped its way toward a similar rule for broadcast media. Interestingly, some of the crucial milestones involved CBS News.
In the early days of color television, CBS News pioneered the use of aggressive editing to tell powerful stories in dramatic ways. In 1971, for example, CBS broadcast a documentary, The Selling of the Pentagon, that accused the Department of Defense of manipulating public opinion. To amplify the argument, the producers cut and reassembled questions and answers. Some of the affected individuals filed complaints against CBS, and the matter was taken up by members of Congress. Yet the FCC declined to get involved in the case on free-speech grounds.
Before the end of the first Nixon administration, the FCC had generated a series of precedents that more or less nullified the agency’s Calvin Coolidge–era status as a monitor of broadcast accuracy and a potential censor. The whole issue soon became moot, because the FCC had no jurisdiction over cable television or the internet. As Americans drew more of their information from sources outside the FCC’s domain, the very idea of content regulation by the agency came to seem absurd to all parties, including the FCC itself. Who would think of invoking a doctrine that originated in 1927 to police speech in the 21st century?
Then came Trump and the loyalty-above-law appointees of his second term. Evident from the Trump legal filing against CBS is that not even the president’s own lawyers took his complaint seriously. Three whopping clues give away the game about the filing’s farcicality.
The first is where the lawsuit was brought: the Amarillo division of the U.S. district court for the northern district of Texas. CBS is not domiciled in Amarillo. Neither is Trump or Harris or any person significantly connected with the 60 Minutes segment. What is located in Amarillo is America’s premier pick for right-wing forum-shopping, a practice criticized not only by liberal counterparties but also, at least implicitly, by The Wall Street Journal and National Review. Amarillo is the court where a partisan-conservative plaintiff goes with a case that would be summarily thrown out elsewhere.
The next clue is the language of the filing, which reads like direct dictation from the president:
As President Trump stated, and as made crystal clear in the video he referenced and attached, “A giant Fake News Scam by 60 Minutes & CBS. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better. A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. AN UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the election? WOW!” See President Donald J. Trump, TRUTH SOCIAL (Oct. 10, 2024).
And so on, through 65 paragraphs of irrelevant name-calling and Trump-quoting obsequiousness.
The final clue lies in the carelessness of the complaint’s quoted sources, two of which actually argue against the Trump claim. A cited law-review article concluded that “the reinvented news distortion doctrine would undermine the very democratic norms marshaled in its defense.” Similarly, an FCC decision referenced found against taking action (in another case involving CBS)—explicitly on free-speech grounds: “In this democracy, no government agency can authenticate the news, or should try to do so.”
One has to wonder whether Trump’s lawyers even read the texts they cited. The complaint’s flimsy legal basis—including Trump’s claim of standing under a Texas consumer-protection law—indicates its pure-nuisance quality. And yet, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a case that it could almost certainly have won for a fraction of the price.
U.S. law forbids both accepting a bribe and soliciting a bribe, yet they’re not exactly the same offense. There is an important difference between a police officer who takes money to let a criminal escape and a police officer who uses the threat of arrest to extort money from an innocent citizen. Paramount did not come up with the idea to pay Trump $16 million; Trump decided to squeeze Paramount for the money. What’s going on here is extortion—and it does not get any less extortionate for being laundered through Trump’s hypothetical future library. A systematic pattern has emerged: shakedowns of law firms, business corporations, and media companies for the enrichment of Trump, his family, and his political allies. Every time targets yield, they create an incentive for Trump to repeat the shakedown on another victim.
This time, it was Paramount’s turn. Who will be the next target of an administration that governs by mafia methods?
The post Welcome to the Mafia Presidency appeared first on The Atlantic.
