Video platform settles lawsuit filed in response to Trump’s suspension over the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by United States President Donald Trump after the platform suspended his account in response to the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
Under the settlement, YouTube, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, will contribute $22m on Trump’s behalf to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that is overseeing a $200m project to construct a ballroom at the White House, a court filing showed on Monday.
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The remaining $2.5m will go to other plaintiffs in the case, including the American Conservative Union and American author Naomi Wolf, according to the filing at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The settlement does not include any admission of wrongdoing by YouTube, and was reached for the “sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation”, according to the filing.
The payout is a relatively small sum for YouTube, whose advertising revenues came to nearly $9.8bn in the second quarter of 2025 alone.
The settlement comes after Meta Platforms and X earlier this year agreed to multimillion-dollar payouts to resolve Trump’s claims that he was unduly censored following the January 6 attack, which was carried out by Trump supporters motivated by his false claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen”.
John P Coale, a Trump ally and lawyer who brought the three cases, said he was pleased with the outcome.
“Very much so,” Coale told Al Jazeera. “As is the president and the other plaintiffs.”
Coale said the three cases had netted $60m in total.
“We believe we changed the behaviour,” he said.
After de-platforming Trump over fears his false claims about the 2020 presidential election were driving violence, Big Tech has moved to curry favour with his administration since his return to the White House.
Earlier this month, tech CEOs, including Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook, lavished praise on Trump at a White House dinner event and expressed support for his administration’s initiatives on artificial intelligence.
Media companies have also paid out large sums to resolve Trump’s legal claims.
Paramount Global said in July that it had agreed to pay $16m to resolve Trump’s claims that CBS News’s 60 Minutes programme had deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
In December, ABC News agreed to contribute $15m to Trump’s library to settle claims that he had been defamed by its anchor, George Stephanopoulos.
Timothy Koskie, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, said that YouTube’s settlement dealt a blow to hopes for a consistent approach to content moderation by social media platforms.
“Unfortunately, with the erosion of a rules-based order, we simply can’t expect to get consistent treatment from anyone who seeks to benefit from this administration,” Koskie told Al Jazeera.
“That is going to include an incredibly large swath of companies that we engage with in our daily lives, particularly, but very much not exclusively, the platforms. Rather than removing censorship, this vigorously empowers it in an especially selective vein.”
“Further, the US historically set precedents for many governments around the world,” he added.
The European Commission has accepted commitments from Microsoft regarding its Teams platform to address competition concerns.
These commitments involve offering versions of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites without Teams, at a reduced price, and implementing other changes. The decision follows an investigation initiated by a complaint from Slack Technologies (now owned by Salesforce) and a similar complaint from alfaview.
EU regulators had preliminarily determined that Microsoft conferred an undue competitive advantage upon Teams and restricted competition in the market for cloud-based communication and collaboration products by bundling it with productivity applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
While Microsoft unbundled Teams after the EU probe commenced, regulators found the subsequent changes insufficient. Reports had indicated Microsoft was likely to avoid an antitrust fine as the EU regulators were expected to accept its offer.
Reporting from Kissimmee, Fla. — Campaigning for Hillary Clinton at a Florida baseball stadium, President Obama lamented Sunday that the nature of this year’s presidential race has become so negative that even “Saturday Night Live” this week couldn’t keep parodying it.
What bothered him most, the president said, was the way “stuff that’s not normal, people have been treating like it’s normal.”
He referred to how just days ago he encouraged people at one of his rallies to show respect for a Donald Trump supporter who came to protest the event.
But Trump claimed just hours later that Obama had yelled at the man.
“Didn’t just make it up, but said the exact opposite of what had happened, with impunity,” he said. “There was tape. There was a video…. He thought it was OK just to lie in front of all his supporters.
“That says something about how unacceptable behavior has become normal,” Obama added. “And that’s why he is uniquely unqualified to hold this job. The good news is, all of you are uniquely qualified to make sure that he doesn’t get the job!”
Obama also mocked Trump after a report that his own campaign apparently had taken away his access to Twitter, where Trump has been known to send insulting missives.
“If somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama said.
It was a typically chesty speech from the outgoing commander in chief as he not only stumps aggressively for Hillary Clinton to succeed him, but settles some scores with the Republicans who have tried to stifle his every move for eight years.
In his reelection campaign four years ago, Obama would talk somewhat optimistically — in retrospect, perhaps naively — about his view that Republicans who had opposed him in his first term would be more cooperative should he win a second.
Knowing he would not be on the ballot again, there was less political incentive to deny him policy victories, and perhaps political incentive to try to find common ground, he thought.
“The fever will break,” he would say back then.
“C’mon, man,” has become his head-shaking credo now.
Obama on Sunday again attacked Republicans who support Trump even though they hold private — and some even public — reservations about him. He also warned that electing a Republican Congress would lead to a continuation of the obstruction he’s faced.
“They’re suggesting they might impeach Hillary. They don’t know what for yet. But they’re thinking about it,” Obama said.
Gridlock, he continued, is not “some mysterious fog that descends on Washington,” or something equally the fault of Democrats and Republicans.
“You want some more endless gridlock, vote for Republicans. You want an America that can do better … then you need to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot,” he said.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has emerged as one of Obama’s favorite targets, an example of a Republican whose devotion to defeating Democrats sometimes supersedes his personal and policy convictions.
Rubio supports Trump now, Obama said, even though he called Trump a con artist while running against him for the GOP nomination.
“He tweeted, ‘Friends don’t let friends vote for con artists,’” Obama said. “Guess who just voted for Trump a few days ago? Marco Rubio.”
Rubio’s opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, appeared before Obama on Sunday.
“If you want a senator who will say anything, do anything, be anybody just to get elected, then that’s your guy,” Obama said of Rubio. “If you want a senator who will show up and work for you and tell you the truth, then vote for Patrick Murphy and give Hillary some help.”
Obama made just one stop Sunday here in Central Florida, a key swing area in the always-important battleground state. “We win this election if we win Florida,” Obama said. “If we win Florida, it’s a wrap.”
Monday he has three appearances scheduled, in Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. He will join Clinton at the latter.
WASHINGTON — President Trump, once a casino owner and always a man in search of his next deal, is fond of a poker analogy when sizing up partners and adversaries.
“We have much bigger and better cards than they do,” he said of China last month. Compared with Canada, he said in June, “we have all the cards. We have every single one.” And most famously, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their Oval Office confrontation earlier this year: “You don’t have the cards.”
The phrase offers a window into the worldview of Trump, who has spent his second stint in the White House amassing cards to deploy in pursuit of his interests.
Seven months into his second term, he’s accumulated presidential power that he’s used against universities, media companies, law firms and individuals he dislikes. A man who ran for president as an angry victim of a weaponized “deep state” is, in many ways, supercharging government power and training it on his opponents.
And the supporters who responded to his complaints about overzealous Democrats aren’t recoiling. They’re egging him on.
“Weaponizing the state to win the culture war has been essential to their agenda,” said David N. Smith, a University of Kansas sociologist who has extensively researched the motivations of Trump voters. “They didn’t like it when the state was mobilized to restrain Trump, but they’re happy to see the state acting to fight the culture war on their behalf.”
How Trump has weaponized the government
Trump began putting the federal government to work for him within hours of taking office in January, and he’s been collecting and using power in novel ways ever since. It’s a high-velocity push to carry out his political agendas and grudges.
This past month, hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops fanned out across Washington after Trump drew on a never-used law that allows him to take control of law enforcement in the nation’s capital. He’s threatened similar deployments in other cities run by Democrats, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York and New Orleans. He has also moved to fire a Federal Reserve governor, pointing to unproven claims of mortgage fraud that she denies.
Trump, his aides and allies throughout the executive branch have trained the government, or threatened to, on a dizzying array of targets:
—He threatened to block a stadium plan for the Washington Commanders football team unless it readopted the racial slur it used as its team name until 2020.
—He revoked security clearances and tried to block access to government facilities for attorneys at law firms he disfavors.
—He revoked billions of dollars in federal research funds and sought to block international students from elite universities. Under pressure, Columbia University agreed to a $220-million settlement, the University of Pennsylvania revoked records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, and presidents resigned from the University of Virginia and Northwestern University.
—He has fired or reassigned federal employees targeted for their work, including prosecutors who worked on cases involving him.
—He dropped corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams to gain cooperation in his crackdown on immigrants living in the country illegally.
—He secured multimillion-dollar settlements against media organizations in lawsuits that were widely regarded as weak cases.
—Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi is pursuing a grand jury review of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and appointed a special prosecutor to scrutinize New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
That’s not weaponizing government, says White House spokesperson Harrison Fields; it’s wielding power.
“What the nation is witnessing today is the execution of the most consequential administration in American history,” Fields said, “one that is embracing common sense, putting America first, and fulfilling the mandate of the American people.”
Use of power
There’s a push and a pull to power. It is both given and taken. And through executive orders, personnel moves, the bully pulpit and sheer brazenness, Trump has claimed powers that none of his modern predecessors came close to claiming.
He has also been handed power by many around him. By a fiercely loyal base that rides with him through thick and thin. By a Congress and Supreme Court that so far have ceded power to the executive branch. By universities, law firms, media organizations and other institutions that have negotiated or settled with him.
The U.S. government is powerful, but it’s not inherently omnipotent. As Trump learned to his frustration in his first term, presidential powers are limited by the Constitution, laws, court rulings, bureaucracy, traditions and norms. Yet in his second term, Trump has managed to eliminate, steamroll, ignore or otherwise neutralize many of those guardrails.
Leaders can exert their will through fear and intimidation, by determining the topics that are getting discussed and by shaping people’s preferences, Steven Lukes argued in a seminal 1974 book, “Power: A Radical View.” Lukes, a professor emeritus at New York University, said Trump exemplifies all three dimensions of power. Trump’s innovation, Lukes said, is “epistemic liberation” — a willingness to make up facts without evidence.
“This idea that you can just say things that aren’t true, and then it doesn’t matter to your followers and to a lot of other people … that seems to me a new thing,” at least in liberal democracies, Lukes said. Trump uses memes and jokes more than argument and advocacy to signal his preferences, he said.
Trump ran against ‘weaponization’
Central to Trump’s 2024 campaign was his contention that he was the victim of a “vicious persecution ” perpetrated by “the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice.”
Facing four felony criminal cases in New York, Washington and Florida, Trump said in 2023 that he yearned not to end the government weaponization, but to harness it. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Aug. 4, 2023.
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’” he said in a Univision interview on Nov. 9, 2023. And given a chance by a friendly Fox News interviewer to assure Americans that he would use power responsibly, he responded in December that year that he would not be a dictator “except on Day One.”
He largely backed off those threats as the election got closer, even as he continued to campaign against government weaponization. When he won, he declared an end to it.
His victory essentially ended the felony criminal indictments against him, including his role in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which led to his second impeachment. Long-standing Justice Department policy says that sitting presidents may not be charged with crimes.
He still entered the White House in January as the only felon to ever occupy the office, after his conviction last year on fraud charges related to a hush-money payment to a porn star just before his first election, in 2016.
One of Trump’s first acts of his new term in January was to issue pardons or commutations for more than 1,500 people convicted of crimes related to Jan. 6, including sedition and attacks on police officers.
“Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents — something I know something about,” Trump said in his second inaugural address.
A month later: “I ended Joe Biden’s weaponization soon as I got in,” Trump said in a Feb. 22 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. And 10 days after that: “We’ve ended weaponized government, where, as an example, a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent, like me.”
Two days later, on March 6, Trump signed a sweeping order targeting a prominent law firm that represents Democrats. And on April 9, he issued presidential memoranda directing the Justice Department to investigate two officials from his first administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor.
With that, the weaponization has come full circle. Trump is no longer surrounded by tradition-bound lawyers and government officials, and his instinct to play his hand aggressively faces few restraints.
Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election that aired on the right wing news channel.
The network announced the settlement with the voting equipment maker Monday, but did not apologize for its reporting.
“Newsmax believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020,” the company said in a statement. “We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within professional standards of journalism.”
Earlier this year, Delaware Court Judge Eric Davis ruled that Newsmax made defamatory statements about Dominion in its reporting on President Trump’s allegations that the company was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election to favor Joe Biden.
He was ready to send the case to a jury that would have determined if Newsmax acted with malice and whether any damages should be awarded to Dominion.
Newsmax was among the channels presenting false claims by President Trump’s allies and supporters that Dominion, a provider of vote-counting machines and software, was created in Venezuela to rig elections for leader Hugo Chavez and that it has the ability to switch votes.
“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion representative said in a statement.
Fox News settled a similar case with Dominiion in April 2023 for $787.5 million after it aired incorrect election claims.
Newsmax previously settled a defamation suit filed by Smartmatic, another voting equipment company that has sued right wing outlets over their reporting on Trump’s false claims. The terms of the settlement were confidential.
In that case, Davis also ruled that false statements were made, but ruled that Smartmatic had to prove the actual financial damage of Newsmax’s actions.
Fox News has argued that there is no evidence Smartmatic has lost any business due to its reporting. The network argued that reporting on Trump’s false claims was newsworthy and protected under the 1st amendment.
The Walt Disney Co. and Lucasfilm have settled a lawsuit brought by “The Mandalorian” actor Gina Carano, who alleged she had been wrongfully terminated from the show and discriminated against because of her social media posts.
Carano and Disney each separately confirmed the settlement Thursday, with Carano calling it the “best outcome for all parties involved.”
“I hope this brings some healing to the force,” she wrote in a post on X. “I am excited to flip the page and move onto the next chapter. My desires remain in the arts, which is where I hope you will join me.”
She also thanked X owner and billionaire Elon Musk, who funded her lawsuit against Disney, calling it a “Good Samaritan deed” from someone she had never met.
A Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that the company looked forward to “identifying opportunities to work together” with Carano in the “near future,” now that the lawsuit was concluded. The company did not disclose the conditions of the settlement.
“Ms. Carano was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff,” the spokesperson said. “She worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect.”
The settlement comes a little more than a year after Carano sued Burbank-based Disney, Lucasfilm and Huckleberry Industries after she was dismissed from the Disney+ series. Carano, who portrayed former Rebellion soldier Cara Dune for two seasons, had been criticized for several controversial social media posts.
In one now-deleted post, she implied that being conservative today was comparable with being Jewish during the Holocaust. Critics had also called out posts in which she falsely claimed voter fraud affected the results of the 2020 presidential election, derided pandemic-era mask mandates and made fun of stating people’s pronouns.
Her social media postings ignited a firestorm of controversy, with critics calling for her to be fired from the series, while her supporters urged others to cancel Disney+ instead.
In 2021, a Lucasfilm representative said in a statement that Carano was not currently employed by the “Star Wars” production company, and that there were “no plans for her to be in the future.” The statement also called her posts “abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Carano claimed at the time that she had been promised a role in the now-shelved “Star Wars” spinoff “Rangers of the New Republic.” In her lawsuit, she said she was “targeted, harassed, publicly humiliated, [and] defamed” for making “political statements that did not align with what [Disney] believed was an acceptable viewpoint.”
She had been seeking more than $75,000 in damages and to be reinstated in her role in “The Mandalorian.”
University of California leaders face a difficult choice after the U.S. Department of Justice said this week that UCLA had violated the civil rights of Jewish students during pro-Palestinian protests and federal agencies on Wednesday suspended more than $300 million in research grants to the school.
Do they agree to a costly settlement, potentially incurring the anger of taxpayers, politicians and campus communities in a deep-blue state that’s largely opposed to President Trump and his battle to remake higher education?
Or do they go to court, entering a protracted legal fight and possibly inviting further debilitating federal actions against the nation’s premier public university system, which has until now carefully avoided head-on conflicts with the White House?
Leaders of the University of California, including its systemwide president, James B. Milliken; UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk and UC’s 24-member Board of Regents — California Gov. Gavin Newsom is an ex-officio member — have just days to decide.
What led to the conflict
In findings issued Tuesday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and the Justice Department said UCLA would pay a “heavy price” for acting with “deliberate indifference” to the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students who complained of antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, 2023. That’s when Hamas attacked Israel, which led to Israel’s war in Gaza and the pro-Palestinian student encampment on Royce Quad.
The Justice Department gave UC — which oversees federal legal matters for UCLA and nine other campuses — a week to respond to the allegations of antisemitism. It wrote that “unless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement” to “ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence,” the department would sue by Sept. 2.
A day after the Justice Department disclosed its findings, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and other federal agencies said they were suspending hundreds of grants to UCLA researchers. A letter from the NSF cited the university’s alleged “discrimination” in admissions and failure to “promote a research environment free of antisemitism.” A Department of Energy letter cutting off grants on clean energy and nuclear power plants made similar accusations, adding that “UCLA discriminates against and endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.”
Initial data shared with The Times on Thursday night showed the cuts to be at least $200 million. On Friday, additional information shared by UC and federal officials pointed to the number being greater than $300 million — more than a quarter of UCLA’s $1.1 billion in annual federal funding and contracts. UCLA has not released a total number.
In a campuswide message Thursday, Frenk, the UCLA chancellor, called the government’s moves “deeply disappointing.”
“This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk said.
In a statement to The Times Friday, an official from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, said it would “not fund institutions that promote antisemitism. We will use every tool we have to ensure institutions follow the law.”
An NSF spokesperson also confirmed the UCLA cuts, saying Friday that the university is no longer in “alignment with current NSF priorities.” A Department of Energy spokesperson also verified the cuts but did not elaborate outside of pointing to the department’s letter to UCLA.
What comes next
The Times spoke to more than a dozen current and former senior UC leaders in addition to higher education experts about the rapid deliberations taking place this week, which for the first time have drawn a major public university system into the orbit of a White House that has largely focused its ire on Ivy League schools.
Trump has accused universities of being too liberal, illegally recruiting for diversity in ways that hurt white and Asian American students and faculty, and being overly tolerant of pro-Palestinian students who he labels as antisemites aligned with Hamas.
Universities, including UCLA, have largely denied the accusations, although school officials have admitted that they under-delivered in responding to Jewish student concerns. In the last two years, encampments took over small portions of campuses, and, as a result, were blamed for denying campus access to pro-Israel Jews.
In a major payout announced Tuesday — before the Justice Department’s findings — UCLA said it would dole out $6.45 million to settle a federal lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a medical school professor who alleged the university violated their civil rights and enabled antisemitism during the pro-Palestinian encampment in 2024. About $2.3 million will be donated to eight groups that work with Jewish communities, including the Anti-Defamation League, Chabad and Hillel. Another $320,000 will be directed to a UCLA initiative to combat antisemitism, and the rest of the funds will go toward legal fees.
Through spokespersons, Frenk and Milliken declined interviews on what next steps UCLA might take. Friday was Milliken’s first day on the job after the long-planned departure of former UC President Michael V. Drake, who will return to teaching and research.
But in public remarks this week, Newsom said he was “reviewing” the Justice Department’s findings and that UC would be “responsive.”
The governor, who spoke during an event at the former McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento County on Thursday, said he had a meeting with Drake scheduled that day to discuss the Trump administration’s charges.
Newsom did not respond specifically to a question from The Times about whether UC would settle with Trump.
“We’re reviewing the details of the DOJ’s latest and then that deadline on Tuesday,” the governor said. “So we’ll be responsive.”
In a statement Friday, Newsom said, “Freezing critical research funding for UCLA — dollars that were going to study invasive diseases, cure cancer, and build new defense technologies — makes our country less safe. It is a cruel manipulation to use Jewish students’ real concerns about antisemitism on campus as an excuse to cut millions of dollars in grants that were being used to make all Americans safer and healthier.”
What insiders say
Senior UCLA and UC leaders, who spoke on background because they were not authorized to discuss legal decisions, said the university has been bracing for this moment for months. The university and individual campuses are under multiple federal investigations into alleged use of race in admissions, employment discrimination against Jews, and civil rights complaints from Jewish students. At the same time, leaders said, they were hoping the multimillion-dollar settlement with Jewish students would buy them time.
“It backfired,” said one senior administrator at UCLA, reflecting the sense of whiplash felt among many who were interviewed. “Within hours of announcing our settlement, the DOJ was on our back.”
Other senior UC officials said the system was considering suing Trump. It has already sued various federal agencies or filed briefs in support of lawsuits over widespread grant cuts affecting all major U.S. universities. UC itself, however, has not directly challenged the president’s platform of aggressively punishing elite schools for alleged discrimination.
It’s unclear if a suit or settlement could wipe out all remaining investigations.
Mark Yudof, a former UC president who led the system from 2008 to 2013, said he felt the Trump administration was targeting a public university as a way to “make a statement” about the president’s higher education aims going beyond Ivy League institutions.
“But this is not Columbia,” Yudof said, referring to the $221-million settlement the New York campus recently reached with the White House to resolve investigations over alleged antisemitism amid its response to pro-Palestinian protests.
On Wednesday, Brown University also came to a $50-million agreement with the White House. The Brown payment will go toward Rhode Island workforce development programs. Harvard is also negotiating a deal with the government over similar accusations regarding antisemitism.
“The University of California is much more complex,” said Yudof, who lives in Florida and also led the University of Texas and University of Minnesota. “For one, an issue that may affect UCLA is not going to affect UC Merced or UC Riverside. But do you come to an agreement on all campuses? If there is a settlement payment, does it affect all campuses, depending on the cost?”
George Blumenthal, a former chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, said he “just can’t see UC making the kind of deal that Columbia did or that Harvard contemplates. Committing public funds to Washington to the tune of tens or hundreds of million dollars strikes me as politically untenable in California.”
Pro-Palestinian UCLA groups said they don’t agree with the premise of negotiations. They point out that many protesters in last year’s encampment were Jewish and argue that the protest — the focus of federal complaints — was not antisemitic.
“We reject this cynical weaponization of antisemitism, and the misinformation campaign spinning calls for Palestinian freedom as antisemitic. We must name this for what it is: a thinly-veiled attempt to punish supporters of Palestinian freedom, and to advance the long-standing conservative goal of dismantling higher education,” said a statement from Graeme Blair, a UCLA associate professor of political science, on behalf of UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
The bigger picture
Higher education experts say UC’s decision would set a national precedent. The university’s finances include more than $50 billion in operating revenues, $180 billion in investments — including endowment, retirement, and working capital portfolios — and smaller campus-level endowments. The funds support facilities across the state, including multiple academic health centers, investment properties and campuses, as well as tens of thousands of former employees enrolled in retirement plans.
Dozens of public campuses across the U.S. are under investigation or pressure from the White House to atone for alleged wrongdoing to Jewish students or to change admissions, scholarship programs and protest rules and more. But UC has long been a standard-bearer, including in academic and protest freedoms.
“If you are Trump, your target of Harvard or Brown is much easier — a snooty elite — than a public, even a UCLA or Berkeley,” said Rick Hess, an education expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Kenneth Marcus, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department during Trump’s first term, said there would be benefits for UCLA and the UC system to enter into a “systemwide agreement that would enable everybody to put this behind themselves.”
The Justice Department’s Tuesday letter said it was investigating all campuses but only issuing findings of violations so far at UCLA.
Marcus, chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said a systemwide agreement would “provide the federal government with assurances that the regents are making changes across the board.”
Staff writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento contributed to this report.
Columbia University will pay $221m to settle accusations by the Trump administration that it failed to police anti-Semitism on campus. Critics say the deal threatens academic freedom and sets a dangerous precedent.
Settlement marks victory in US President Donald Trump’s efforts to exert greater control over third-level education.
Columbia University, one of the top educational institutions in the United States, has agreed to pay $221m to settle claims by US President Donald Trump’s administration that it failed to police anti-Semitism on campus.
Under the agreement announced on Wednesday, Columbia will see the “vast majority” of $400m in federal grants frozen by the Trump administration reinstated, the New York-based university said.
Columbia will also regain access to billions of dollars in current and future grants under the deal, the university said.
Columbia said the agreement formalised reforms announced in March to address harassment against Jews, including the hiring of more public safety personnel, changes to disciplinary processes, and efforts to foster “an inclusive and respectful learning environment”.
The agreement also commits Columbia to maintaining merit-based admissions and ending programs that promote “unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas [and] diversity targets”.
Under the agreement, Columbia will pay the federal government $200m over three years, in addition to a $21m payment to settle claims by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, said that while the settlement was “substantial”, the university could not continue with a situation that would “jeopardize our status as a world-leading research institution”.
“Furthermore, as I have discussed on many occasions with our community, we carefully explored all options open to us,” Shipman said in a statement.
“We might have achieved short-term litigation victories, but not without incurring deeper long-term damage – the likely loss of future federal funding, the possibility of losing accreditation, and the potential revocation of visa status of thousands of international students.”
Shipman said Columbia did not accept the Trump administration’s findings that it had violated civil rights law by turning a blind eye to the harassment of Jews, but acknowledged the “very serious and painful challenges our institution has faced with antisemitism”.
“We know there is still more to do,” she said.
The settlement marks a victory in Trump’s efforts to exert greater control over third-level education, including campus activism in support of Palestine and other causes.
Trump hailed the settlement as “historic” in a post on his Truth Social platform.
“Numerous other Higher Education Institutions that have hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money, much of it from our government, are upcoming,” Trump wrote.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a student activist group, slammed the settlement as an effective bribe.
“Imagine selling your students out just so you can pay Trump $221 million dollars and keep funding genocide,” the group said on X.
Columbia was among dozens of US universities that were roiled by protests against Israel’s war in Gaza throughout the spring and summer of 2024.
Many Jewish students and faculty complained that the campus demonstrations veered into anti-Semitism, while pro-Palestinian advocates have accused critics of often wrongly conflating opposition to Israel with the hatred of Jews.
On Tuesday, Columbia University’s Judicial Board announced that it had finalised disciplinary proceedings against students who took part in protests at the university’s main library in May and the “Revolt for Rafah” encampment last year.
CUAD said nearly 80 students had been expelled or suspended for between one and three years for joining the protests, sanctions it argued “hugely” exceeded the precedent for non-Palestine-related demonstrations.
The state of New York has agreed to pay $450,000 to settle a lawsuit from an ex-aide to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo who alleged he sexually harassed and groped her while he was in office.
The former aide, Brittany Commisso, had sued Cuomo and the state, alleging sexual harassment from the then-governor and retaliation against her after reporting the incidents. The allegations were part of a barrage of similar misconduct claims that forced Cuomo to resign as governor in 2021.
Commisso’s lawyers said that the settlement announced Friday “is a complete vindication of her claims” and that she is “glad to be able to move forward with her life.”
The settlement came as Cuomo is in the midst of a so-far bruising political comeback with a run for mayor of New York City. Cuomo lost the Democratic primary to Zohran Mamdani by more than 12 percentage points, and this week he relaunched his campaign to run in the general election as an independent candidate, beginning a potentially uphill battle in a heavily Democratic city where support is coalescing behind Mamdani.
Cuomo, who has denied wrongdoing, has been dogged by the scandal during his campaign for mayor.
“The settlement is not a vindication, it is capitulation to avoid the truth,” Cuomo’s lawyers said Friday in a statement in which they called Commisso’s allegations false.
The attorneys, Rita Glavin and Theresa Trzaskoma, added that they “oppose the dismissal of Ms. Commisso’s lawsuit.”
“Until the truth is revealed, the lawsuit should not be dismissed,” they said in the statement.
Cuomo resigned as governor after a report from the state attorney general determined that he had sexually harassed at least 11 women, with some alleging unwanted kissing and touching, as well as remarks about their appearances and sex lives.
Commisso filed her lawsuit in late 2023, just before the expiration of the Adult Survivors Act, a special law that created a yearlong suspension of the usual time limit to sue over an alleged sexual assault.
She later filed a criminal complaint accusing Cuomo of groping her but a local district attorney declined to prosecute, citing lack of sufficient evidence.
The Associated Press doesn’t identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they decide to tell their stories publicly, as Commisso has done.
Anthony Hogrebe, a spokesperson for current Gov. Kathy Hochul, said Friday that the state “is pleased to have settled this matter in a way that allows us to minimize further costs to taxpayers.”
Paramount Global has agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to end his lawsuit over edits to a “60 Minutes” interview — a legal tussle that roiled CBS News, spurred high-level departures and threatened to derail the company’s hoped-for sale.
The money will be allocated to Trump’s future presidential library. As part of the deal, Paramount did not offer an apology or express regret for CBS News’ reporting or edits.
“No amount will be paid directly or indirectly to President Trump,” Paramount said in a statement. “The settlement will include a release of all claims regarding any CBS reporting through the date of the settlement, including the Texas action and the threatened defamation action.”
Paramount decided to buy peace with the president rather than wage a costly fight to defend “60 Minutes” and its journalists in court. The move prompted an outcry by 1st Amendment experts who denounced the lawsuit as frivolous and the talks to reach Tuesday’s settlement as a shake-down.
Instead of fast-tracking the review of the proposed Paramount-Skydance merger, the Trump-appointed FCC chairman opened an inquiry into whether edits of the October “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the level of news distortion.
“The Company has agreed that in the future, ’60 Minutes’ will release transcripts of interviews with eligible U.S. presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns,” Paramount said.
The two sides have participated in mediation sessions for the past two months. Paramount said the terms of the settlement were proposed by the mediator. Paramount’s $16 million payment will include Trump’s attorneys fees.
Trump has long maintained last fall’s “60 Minutes” interview was edited to make Harris look smarter to boost her November election chances. CBS denied the allegations, saying the edits were routine.
But Trump’s team said the edits caused Trump “mental anguish.” After returning to the White House this year, Trump doubled his lawsuit damages demand to $20 billion.
“Her answer was horrendous,” Trump told reporters last month on the White House lawn. “I would say election-threatening. … Her answer was election-threatening it was so incompetent.”
Trump’s lawsuit called the edits “malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.” The trims, the suit alleged, were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference.”
CBS has acknowledged editing the interview, which is routine in the news business. Longstanding 1st Amendment interpretations give news producers wide latitude to decide what material to broadcast as long as they don’t distort the information presented to viewers.
Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone pushed for a settlement. The Redstone family’s investment firm, which holds the controlling Paramount shares, is juggling more than $400 million in debt and she wanted to facilitate the sale of Paramount, as well as her family’s holding firm, to Skydance.
Family members are counting on their portion of the Paramount sale proceeds. A representative has said Redstone recused herself from decisions dealing with Trump’s lawsuit but the mogul had made clear her desire for a settlement.
Skydance executives and their private equity partners also agitated for Paramount to end the bickering with Trump to resolve a key headache before the new owners take over.
Paramount, in a statement, said it has treated Trump’s lawsuit “completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process.”
It’s been nearly a year since Redstone and fellow Paramount directors approved Skydance’s two-phased $8-billion deal that would hand the company to tech billionaire Larry Ellison and his family.
His son David Ellison is eager to run the company that boasts the legendary Melrose Avenue film studio, Paramount+ streaming service, CBS and cable channels including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and BET.
Skydance operations and personnel are expected to be folded into Paramount in the second phase of the transaction.
Paramount Pictures studio lot on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
The deal faces one last regulatory hurdle. Paramount must win FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s consent to transfer more than two dozen CBS station licenses to the Ellisons. FCC approval has been held up for months.
Skydance and Paramount face an October deadline to finalize the deal or risk its collapse.
Redstone would then have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to satisfy her creditors, including Larry Ellison, giving her another reason to favor a settlement.
Her willingness to set aside free speech values prompted push-back from journalists. The nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation decried Paramount’s decision to cede 1st Amendment freedoms in an effort to advance the Skydance deal. It vowed to sue Paramount if it settled.
The saga began last fall when CBS News invited both Harris and Trump to sit down with “60 Minutes,” a campaign season tradition. After initially agreeing, Trump backed out.
CBS went forward with the Harris piece but got into hot water after the network broadcast two portions of her response to a question by CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker. When he challenged Harris about the Biden Administration’s struggles dealing with Israel’s prime minister, Harris gave a three-sentence answer.
CBS’ Sunday morning show, “Face the Nation” aired her first sentence, which was convoluted. The following night, “60 Minutes” ran the second part of her answer, which was forceful and succinct.
Trump and his supporters cried foul, pointing to the discrepancies.
The showdown accelerated a week before the election when Trump filed his lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas. He accused CBS of trying to cover up Harris’ “word salad” to manipulate the results of what was expected to be a tight election.
Trump won decisively, and CBS sought to have the case dismissed.
The network’s lawyers said its journalists were protected by the 1st Amendment. It also argued that the case should be moved from west Texas, where it was heard by a Trump-appointed federal judge. The lawyers sought to get the case moved to a New York court, where CBS and “60 Minutes” is based.
The interview in question didn’t even mention Texas. In February, Trump added U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson, his former doctor, to the lawsuit as an additional plaintiff. Jackson is a Texas resident.
Tuesday night’s settlement stipulated that Jackson would not receive any money.
Earlier this year, the Texas judge ordered the two sides to present their cases to a mediator. A retired judge who handles complex litigation began hearing the matter April 30.
The controversy stabbed at the heart of CBS News and its legacy of fearless broadcast journalism.
CBS News producers have long maintained they did nothing wrong. Journalists refused to sign any apology, which was long seen as a key demand from Trump and his team.
Inside the company, a pitched battle raged for months.
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker.
(CBS News)
In late April, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, quit. That prompted longtime CBS newsman Scott Pelley to inform “60 Minutes” viewers the show had faced increased corporate oversight because of Paramount’s desire to win the Trump administration’s approval of the Skydance deal.
“None of our stories has been blocked,” Pelley told viewers. “But Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
Some corporate executives were furious over Pelley’s public statements, insiders have said.
The Trump dispute also contributed to the departure of Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations. She stepped down under pressure in May.
There were other sore points. Redstone, who also serves as the chair of the Paramount board, had also expressed dissatisfaction with CBS News’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Three Democrat U.S. senators warned Redstone that Paramount could face allegations of bribery if it wrote a big check to mollify Trump in an effort to facilitate the FCC’s review of the Skydance deal.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount offered Trump $15 million to make the lawsuit go away, but he declined.
The issue became an unexpected pain point in Skydance’s pursuit of FCC approval to take over the CBS licenses.
Early this year, the FCC’s Carr opened an inquiry into whether the “60 Minutes” edits constituted “news bias” despite a longstanding acknowledgment by the FCC that it had little authority to act on complaints about accuracy or bias of reporters and news networks.
“The agency is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press,” FCC said in guidelines posted on its website. “Those protected rights include, but are not limited to, a broadcaster’s selection and presentation of news or commentary.”
Video of the unedited interview confirmed the network’s account. But the footage also revealed that Harris’ jumbled answer was clipped to its most cogent sentence.
“It is troubling anytime a news organization settles a suit that was plainly winnable,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a 1st Amendment expert and law professor at the University of Utah, said in an interview earlier this year. “It represents lost 1st Amendment ground that didn’t have to be ceded.”
Paramount becomes the latest media company to settle, rather than risk incurring the president’s wrath or face an ugly courtroom confrontation.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News in December settled a Trump suit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos by agreeing to pay $1 million for legal fees and donating another $15 million for Trump’s future presidential library.
The resolution came after Stephanopoulos asserted during an on-air interview that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” in a civil case. Jurors had actually determined Trump was liable for “sexual abuse.”
Gannett’s Des Moines Register and independent pollster J. Ann Selzer also have battled Trump’s legal challenges to an Iowa poll that overstated Harris’s support. The poll was published just days before the election, suggesting Harris was leading in the Hawkeye state but she lost convincingly.
This week, Trump and his fellow plaintiffs moved to have their federal case dismissed.
The president revised his claims — that the poll’s publication amounted to election interference and violated Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act — with a new lawsuit in state court.
Alec Baldwin and additional “Rust” movie producers have agreed to settle a negligence lawsuit brought by three New Mexico crew members who witnessed the 2021 fatal shooting of the film’s cinematographer.
Crew members Ross Addiego, Doran Curtin and Reese Price filed the lawsuit in 2023, seeking compensation for the trauma they said they suffered after Baldwin accidentally shot Halyna Hutchins. The crew members were setting up their gear in a small wooden church on the movie set when the shooting occurred.
In the lawsuit, the crew members blamed the tragedy on “dangerous cost-cutting” and a “failure to follow industry safety rules.” The movie’s star, Baldwin, also served as a producer on the low-budget western.
The plaintiffs sued Baldwin, his El Dorado Pictures company and Rust Movie Productions LLC, alleging negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In the suit, the crew members argued that Baldwin and other producers “cut corners, ignored reports of multiple, unscripted firearms discharges, and persisted, rushed and understaffed, to finish the film.”
Baldwin and fellow producers have long denied such allegations.
Last week, the two sides asked a New Mexico civil court judge to dismiss the case.
“All claims have been settled and compromised,” attorneys for both sides wrote in a joint June 25 motion.
Terms of the proposed settlement were not disclosed. Representatives for the two sides declined to comment.
“Each party has agreed to bear its own costs and fees,” the lawyers wrote.
The film was running behind schedule the day of the shooting after camera crew members had walked off the set. The camera technicians have said they were frustrated by inaction over their complaints of a lack of nearby housing, rushed conditions and safety violations, including accidental gun discharges.
The shooting claimed the life of Hutchins, 42. She died that day, leaving behind her husband, their son and her family in Ukraine. The producers previously settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought on behalf of her husband, Matthew Hutchins.
Addiego was the film’s dolly operator, responsible for operating the mechanisms for camera movement. Curtin was the set costumer, overseeing costumes and accessories. Price was the key grip, who handled the nonelectric support gear.
New Mexico authorities brought three criminal prosecutions, including against Baldwin, who pointed the gun at Hutchins during a setup shot for a close-up of Baldwin’s prop revolver.
Baldwin pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter and his high-profile trial ended abruptly last July after former New Mexico 1st Judicial District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the charge.
The judge found the special prosecutor and Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies had concealed evidence from Baldwin’s legal team, which the judge said prejudiced the case against Baldwin.
At the time, the actor-producer’s team was exploring whether prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies botched the investigation into how the bullets made their way onto the desert set.
The weapons handler Hannah Gutierrez was convicted of involuntary manslaughter following a two-week trial last year. The Arizona woman was released from prison last month after serving 14 months.
June 13 (UPI) —Shaquille O’Neal, the retired basketball star and NBA analyst, has agreed to pay $1.8 million to settle claims that he misled investors by promoting the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.
O’Neal, who urged fans to trust the platform in a commercial, won’t admit wrongdoing. He reportedly earned much less to make the commercial that aired in June 2022: around $750,000, Front Office Sports reported.
The settlement Monday marks one of the first high-profile settlements over FTX’s collapse, CNBC reported.
The civil case in Miami federal court. O’Neal must pay the amount within 30 days. An initial settlement was reached in November.
In the class-action suit, O’Neal is accused of presenting FTX as a trustworthy and legitimate investment tool while allegedly helping drive the adoption of unregistered securities.
Eligible are users who deposited money into FTX or held its proprietary token, FTT, between May 2019 and late 2022.
O’Neal’s $1.8 million payout will cover all legal fees, notice and administration costs, and payouts to those eligible. Also, he is released from future liability and is barred from seeking reimbursement from the FTX bankruptcy estate.
“We are pleased to have this matter behind us,” O’Neal’s attorney said in a statement.
In 2022, O’Neal told CNBC he “was just a paid spokesperson for a commercial.”
At the time he said he didn’t know much about crypto currency.
“I don’t understand it, so I will probably stay away from it until I get a full understanding of what it is,” he told CNBS. “From my experience, it is too good to be true.”
Other FTX endorsers, including Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen and Steph Curry, had claims against them largely dismissed.
FTX, a company in the Bahamas, was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange three years ago but it racked up billions of dollars or losses and filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022.
Founder Sam Bankman-Fried isserving a 25-year prison sentence for seven counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the FTX collapse.
O’Neal, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson are moving from TNT next season when “Inside the NBA” appears on ESPN.
Paramount Global’s efforts to appease President Trump could carry a steep price, and not just financially. As Paramount executives struggle to win government approval for its planned sale, the legal risks and political headaches are spreading — from Washington to Sacramento.
Three U.S. senators have warned Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone and other decision-makers that paying Trump to drop his $20-billion lawsuit over an October “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris could be considered a bribe.
Scrutiny widened late last week when two California Democrats proposed a state Senate hearing to probe details of the drama that has roiled the media company for months. The senators invited two former CBS News executives — who both left, in large part, because of the controversy — to testify before a joint committee hearing in Sacramento to help lawmakers examine problems with a possible Trump settlement.
“I haven’t seen a president act in this brazen of a manner,” state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) said in an interview. “We’re concerned about a possible chilling effect any settlement might have on investigative and political journalism. It would also send a message that politically motivated lawsuits can succeed, especially when paired with regulatory threats.”
Settling the Trump lawsuit is widely seen as a prerequisite for regulators to finally clear Paramount’s $8-billion sale to Skydance Media, which Redstone has been desperately counting on to save her family’s fortunes.
Trump contends CBS edited the “60 Minutes” interview to enhance Harris’ appeal in the 2024 presidential election, which she lost. He reportedly rebuffed Paramount’s recent $15-million offer to settle his lawsuit, which 1st Amendment experts have dismissed as frivolous.
“This is a really important case,” said Scott L. Cummings, a legal ethics professor at UCLA’s School of Law. “Legislators are starting to raise alarms.”
But whether federal or state politicians could foil a Trump settlement is murky. Experts caution, for example, that it may be difficult, if a settlement is reached, to prove that Paramount’s leaders paid a bribe.
Congress has grappled with such distinctions before, Cummings said. The U.S. Senate acquitted Trump in February 2020 after the House voted to impeach him for allegedly holding up nearly $400 million in security aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate former President Biden and his son Hunter. Major universities and law firms offered significant concessions to the administration this year to try to carve out breathing room.
“We would have to have a lot more facts,” Cummings said. “Bribery requires a quid pro quo … and [Trump and his lieutenants] are always very careful not to explicitly couple the two things together. But, clearly, they are related, right? This is the challenge, legally speaking.”
Even if a Paramount payoff could be proved to be a bribe, it’s unclear who would prosecute such a case.
No one expects the Trump-controlled FBI or others within the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate allegations of bribery. Trump also has a grip on congressional Republicans and the Federal Communications Commission is run by a Trump appointee, Brendan Carr, who in one of his first acts as chairman, opened a public inquiry into whether the “60 Minutes” edits rose to the level of news distortion.
It may fall to state prosecutors to dig into the issue, Cummings said.
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker.
(CBS News)
That hasn’t stopped nationally prominent progressive lawmakers from sounding alarms.
U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have demanded Paramount provide information about the company’s deliberations or concessions to facilitate a deal with Trump, including whether newscasts were toned down.
“It is illegal to corruptly give anything of value to public officials to influence an official act,” the lawmakers wrote in their May 19 letter to Redstone. “If Paramount officials make these concessions … to influence President Trump … they may be breaking the law.”
Redstone and Paramount failed to respond to the senators’ questions by this week’s deadline, according to Warren’s office.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has suggested that Paramount executives could be liable for unlawfully paying a bribe if it settles President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS to secure approval of Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media.
(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)
Paramount and a Redstone spokesperson declined to comment.
Lawmakers often express interest in big media takeovers, and Skydance’s proposed purchase of an original Hollywood movie studio and pioneering broadcaster CBS could be an industry game changer. But this time, interest is less focused on vetting the Ellison family or the deal’s particulars and more about determining whether Trump inappropriately wields his power.
Trump has demanded Paramount pay “a lot” of money to settle his lawsuit. The president also has called for CBS to lose its station licenses, which are governed by the FCC.
For more than a month, attorneys for Paramount and Trump have participated in mediation sessions without resolution.
Paramount offered $15 million but Trump said no, according to the Wall Street Journal. Instead, the president reportedly demanded at least $25 million in cash, plus an additional $25 million in free commercials to pump his favorite causes. He also wants an apology.
The latter is a red line for CBS News executives who say they have done nothing wrong, according to insiders who were not authorized to discuss the sensitive deliberations.
The two California state senators — Becker and Tom Umberg (D-Orange) — hope such fractures provide an opening.
Late last week, the pair invited former CBS News and Stations President Wendy McMahon and former “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens to testify at a yet-unscheduled oversight hearing in Sacramento.
“You are being approached as friendly witnesses who may help our committees assess whether improper influence is being exerted in ways that threaten public trust and competition in the media sector,” Becker and Umberg wrote to the former executives. Becker is chairman of the Senate Energy, Utilities & Communications Committee; Umberg heads the Senate Judiciary Committee.
California has an interest, in part, because Paramount operates in the state, including a large presence in Los Angeles, Becker told The Times.
The controversy over the edits began in October after CBS aired different parts of Harris’ response to a question during a “60 Minutes” interview a month before the election. Producers of the public affairs show “Face the Nation” used a clip of Harris giving a convoluted response. The following day, “60 Minutes” aired the most forceful part of her answer, prompting conservatives to cry foul.
Trump filed his federal lawsuit in Texas days before the election, alleging CBS had deceptively edited the Harris interview to boost her election chances, an allegation CBS denies. After returning to the White House, Trump doubled the damages he was seeking to $20 billion. His team claims he suffered “mental anguish” as a result of the interview.
CBS has asked the Texas judge, a Trump appointee, to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the edits were routine.
Since then, the FCC’s review of Paramount’s Skydance deal has become bogged down. Paramount needs Carr’s approval to transfer CBS television station licenses to the Ellison family.
Paramount has said it is treating the proposed settlement and FCC review on the Skydance merger as separate matters.
Experts doubt Trump sees such a distinction.
Trump and his team “essentially are using government processes to set up negotiations that end up benefiting Trump personally in ways that raise corruption concerns,” Cummings said.
Paramount’s decision could open the company to shareholder complaints.
The reason Trump’s CBS “60 Minutes” lawsuit has become such a lightning rod is “because the lawsuit is so ridiculously frivolous,” said Seth Stern, advocacy director for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which owns Paramount shares and has vowed a lawsuit if the company capitulates.
“This is so transparently an abuse of power — a shakedown,” Stern said.
Media analyst Richard Greenfield of LightShed Partners suggested that Trump’s goal may be about more than his reported demand of nearly $50 million.
“The far bigger question is whether there is any number that Trump would want to settle the CBS/60 Minutes lawsuit,” Greenfield wrote in a blog post this week. “If Trump’s goal is to weaken the press and cause persistent fear of lawsuits that could negatively impact business combinations, keeping the CBS/60 Minutes lawsuit ongoing could be in the President’s best interests.”
UCLA’s Cummings sees another deleterious outcome.
A settlement could “legitimize the narrative that Trump puts out that there’s some sort of corruption within these media entities,” Cummings said. “He could point to a settlement and say: ‘I told you they did something wrong, and they now agreed because they paid me this amount of money.’ ”
“Even though they would be paying to get this deal through,” Cummings said.
May 22 (UPI) — American defense contractor L3 Technologies Inc. will pay tens of millions of dollars in fines to settle allegations that one of its divisions, Communications System West, submitted false business info to U.S. military and other federal agencies, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday.
L3, doing business in Utah, agreed to pay $62 million to the U.S. government to settle scores of allegations that Communications System West had violated multiple provisions in federal law by “knowingly” making false claims, according to a settlement agreement.
“Taking advantage of the resources that support the armed forces of the United States and other government agencies will not be tolerated,” said Utah’s Acting U.S. Attorney Felice John Viti.
At the end of 2018, L3 Technologies and Harris Corp. announced its merger that created the country’s sixth largest defense contractor.
U.S. officials say L3 company leaders knowingly made false statements and submitted other claims for “dozens” of government contract proposals by not accurately disclosing L3’s current and complete set of cost and pricing data for communication devices sold to a number of departments and agencies, including the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force.
Viti said his office will continue to work and partner with law enforcement agencies to investigate and “hold accountable individuals and contractors who defraud the government.”
L3 produces communications equipment designed to operate unmanned vehicles, retrieve data and other visuals for U.S. military ops and intelligence, DOJ added.
The Justice Department contends that the practice went on from October 2006 to at least February 2014.
It said L3 Tech allegedly violated provisions in the 1863 False Claims Act, amended in 1986 under the Reagan administration, and the 1962 Truth In Negotiations Act which requires a federal contractor to provide the most current and accurate facts to government regulators by the time there’s an agreement, which could “reasonably be expected to affect price negotiations significantly.”
“Investigating companies that defraud the Army is crucial to maintaining the trust of the American public and upholding the integrity of government contracting,” said Special Agent in Charge Olga Morales of the U.S. Army’s CID southwest field office.
In 2020, L3Harris Technologies was selected to design and manufacture a next-gen aerial device in a nearly $500 million contract, and the company started the year with a $28 million DOD contract to update Greek F-16 jets. The year prior, L3 was on the receiving end for more than $37 million to produce U.S. Navy precision aiming lasers and $73 million to repair U.S. Navy submarine issues in 2019.
OSI Special Agent Jeffery Herrin said the $62 million settlement underscored the “commitment” the Air Force Office of Special Investigations has to protect national security and “ensuring the integrity of Department of Defense acquisitions.”
“L3’s defective pricing in contract proposals for critical systems like ROVER, VORTEX and SIR erodes public trust,” he continued, saying with “robust” law enforcement alliances that “law and order” will be upheld in the U.S. defense industry.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Ashli Babbitt’s family filed over her shooting by an officer during the U.S. Capitol riot, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement. The person insisted on anonymity to discuss with the Associated Press terms of a settlement that have not been made public.
The settlement would resolve the $30-million federal lawsuit that Babbitt’s estate filed last year in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 6, 2021, a Capitol police officer shot Babbitt as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby.
The officer who shot her was cleared of wrongdoing by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which concluded that he acted in self-defense and in the defense of members of Congress. The Capitol Police also cleared the officer.
Settlement terms haven’t been disclosed in public court filings. On May 2, lawyers for Babbitt’s estate and the Justice Department told a federal judge that they had reached a settlement in principle but were still working out the details before a final agreement could be signed.
Justice Department spokespeople and two attorneys for the Babbitt family didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was unarmed when she was shot by the officer. The lawsuit alleges that the plainclothes officer failed to de-escalate the situation and did not give her any warnings or commands before opening fire.
The suit also accused the Capitol Police of negligence, claiming the department should have known that the officer was “prone to behave in a dangerous or otherwise incompetent manner.”
“Ashli posed no threat to the safety of anyone,” the lawsuit said.
The officer said in a televised interview that he fired as a “last resort.” He said he didn’t know if the person jumping through the window was armed when he pulled the trigger.
Thousands of people stormed the Capitol after President Trump spoke to a crowd of supporters at his Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House. More than 100 police officers were injured in the attack.
In January, on his first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of charges for all of the more than 1,500 people charged with crimes in the riot.
Tucker and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press. AP writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.
