WELCOME TO THE MAFIA PRESIDENCY

 

Welcome to the Mafia Presidency

That’s a nice business you’ve got there.

By David Frum

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

July 4, 2025, 6:30 AM ET

Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on July 4, 2025

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.

Read: Trump targets Google after Meta and X payouts

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.

Also striking is the carelessness of the complaint’s use of legal authority. Two of Trump’s few quoted sources 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. In a complaint about “distortion,” Trump’s lawyers themselves grossly distorted the legal authorities they invoked to support their otherwise absurd claim. Even flimsier is Trump’s basis for claiming standing, and thus the right to sue. Past FCC decisions about “distortion” were filed by the person or persons who spoke the word allegedly wrongly edited. Trump bizarrely complained about the way someone else was quoted—on the basis, of all crazy things, of a Texas consumer-protection law so that he could sue in friendly Amarillo. 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?

SAYS IT ALL

 

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST INC. COLUMN

 Listen to the show here

Listen to the show here

HOW COULD WE HAVE SUNK SO LOW - CONVICTED FELON - BUSINESS FRAUD - MORON - DEMENTED DICTATOR ?

 

SHAME AND COWARDICE

 

I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.

FEEL FREE TO SHARE AND RECIRCULATE - IT'S TIME WE ALL SPEAK UP

 

CRAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY

 

Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WM

 

The only thing lower than lying about what you accomplished in a war is hiding behind the people who actually accomplished it.

Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WMD

He savaged Bush for distorting intelligence and overselling the military’s initial success in Iraq. Now Trump and his team are doing the same in Iran.

 

Will Saletan

Jul 02, 2025

 

IN 2016, DONALD TRUMP REBUKED George W. Bush for peddling erroneous intelligence and false assurances about the war in Iraq. He accused Bush of deliberately misrepresenting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, and he mocked Bush’s premature “Mission Accomplished” speech.

Bush and his administration “lied,” Trump charged at a Republican presidential debate in February 2016. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Two days after that debate, Trump derided the May 2003 speech in which Bush infamously proclaimed that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and “the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Trump recalled that Bush had stood on an “aircraft carrier saying all sorts of wonderful things, how the war was essentially over. Guess what? Not over.”

Nine years later, Trump is doing what he accused Bush of doing. He has launched a preemptive military strike, this time in Iran. He has defended the strike by misrepresenting intelligence. He has prematurely declared the mission a total victory. And he is impugning the patriotism of anyone who challenges his lies.

ON JUNE 21, AFTER A WEEK of war between Israel and Iran, the United States bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. Three hours later, Trump went on TV and announced that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” The claim was absurd—the damage couldn’t have been assessed that quickly, and the operation hadn’t even targeted most of Iran’s enriched uranium—but Trump repeated it on June 22, June 25, June 26, June 27, and June 29.

Trump’s senior officials joined him in the lie. “Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on June 25. “This was complete and total obliteration,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “There’s no doubt that it was obliterated,” said Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, referring to Iran’s underground nuclear site at Fordo.

“Obliterate” wasn’t just rhetoric. Trump was literally insisting that the three sites and Iran’s whole program had been annihilated. “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability,” he wrote in a Truth Social post on June 24. At the White House, he said of Fordo: “That place is gone. . . . That place is gone.”

The myth of total destruction was important because it underpinned Trump’s second lie: that no further negotiations or military operations were necessary to curtail the nuclear program. “I don't care if I have an agreement or not” with Iran, the president told reporters at a NATO meeting on June 25. “We destroyed the nuclear,” he explained. “We blew it up. It’s blown up to kingdom come.”

Nor would America have to bomb Iran again. At a June 25 press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, a reporter asked Trump: “If the Iranians do rebuild, would the United States strike again?” Trump dismissed the question. “Sure,” he scoffed, “but I’m not going to have to worry about that. It’s gone for years.”

The basis of these assurances, Trump explained, wasn’t just the totality of the destruction. It was that Iran, according to Trump, was so devastated, exhausted, and demoralized that it no longer wanted to develop nuclear weapons. “They don’t even want to think about nuclear,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on June 24. At the press conference with Rutte, the president added: “I don’t think they’ll ever do it again. . . . I think they’ve had it. The last thing they want to do is enrich.”

IN ONE VENUE AFTER ANOTHER, reporters pressed Trump about evidence that his assurances were false or baseless. He refused to listen. For example, after the bombing, Iran’s foreign ministry reaffirmed that its nuclear enrichment program would continue. But on June 25, when a reporter asked Trump about those statements, he dismissed them. “The last thing they want to do is enrich anything right now,” he repeated. “No, they won’t do that.”

On June 27, in a Fox News interview, Maria Bartiromo questioned Trump about reports, apparently sourced to Israeli intelligence, that Iran had moved nearly 900 pounds of enriched uranium out of Fordo before the bombing. Trump waved off that possibility. “They didn’t move anything,” he insisted. Two days later, when a reporter asked about Pickaxe Mountain, another of the sites where satellite imagery suggested enriched uranium might be stored, Trump returned to his mantra that Iran had no interest in continuing such work: “The last thing they’re thinking about right now is enriched uranium. They’re not thinking about it.”

Meanwhile, the president made up stories about various damage assessments. On June 25, at a press conference with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Trump declared that “the high commission of Iran just said it [Fordo] was totally demolished.” No such commission exists, and statements from Iran’s government have said no such thing.

On Truth Social, Trump announced, “Israel just stated that the Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED!” But Israel’s actual assessments, quoted in a White House fact sheet, made no such boast. Officially, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission said Israeli and American strikes had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” Unofficially, Israeli officials told reporters that the extent of damage at the three targeted sites was unknown.

As Trump spewed his fictions and embellishments, he blithely contradicted himself. In the press conference with Rutte, he said of Fordo: “Iran went down to the site afterwards. They said it’s so devastated. . . . Two Iranians went down to see it, and they called back, and they said, ‘This place is gone.’” But two minutes later, Trump mentioned that “nobody can get in to see” the facility’s underground chambers, because “the tunnels are totally collapsed.”

In his interview with Bartiromo, Trump said Iran wouldn’t have moved enriched uranium out of Fordo before the bombing, because it hadn’t expected the site to be attacked. “Nobody thought we’d go after that site, because everybody said that site is impenetrable,” he explained. But seconds later—apparently forgetting or not caring that he had just brushed off the idea of Iranian preparations—he claimed that vehicles spotted at Fordo in the days before the strike were there “to seal up the entrance” with concrete.

Trump also alluded to unspecified intelligence that supposedly vindicated his boasts. At the NATO meeting, he said of Fordo: “We’ve collected additional intelligence. We’ve also spoken to people [who] have seen the site. And the site is obliterated.” He posted the same statement, again without evidence, on Truth Social. The next day, at a White House event, he asserted that “the target has now been proven to be obliterated, just as we said.”

TRUMP IS LYING. A week and a half after the bombing, he has offered no such proof. Instead, his flunkies have issued empty statements claiming, with zero discernible evidence, that “new intelligence” or “credible intelligence” backs him up. The charlatan who accused Bush of politicizing intelligence and lying about weapons of mass destruction is politicizing intelligence and lying about weapons of mass destruction.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that Trump, like Bush, is suggesting that anyone who disputes the president’s statements about a war is sabotaging America’s armed forces.

In 2005, as the Iraq war soured and the purported Iraqi nukes failed to turn up, Democrats accused Bush of having manipulated intelligence to justify the war. Bush responded by challenging his opponents’ patriotism. Their accusations of manipulation “send the wrong signal to our troops,” the president warned. “As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.”

Vice President Dick Cheney joined Bush in this flag-waving counterattack. “American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions,” he fumed, while “back home, a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie.” One could argue, said Cheney—pretending not to endorse this argument himself—that the “untruthful charges against the commander-in-chief have an insidious effect on the war effort.”

Trump, having rebuked Bush and Cheney, is now copying their tactic of hiding behind the troops. At the NATO meeting, he called journalists “scum” for reporting, accurately, that according to a preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment, the damage from the Iran strike was limited. He accused the press of “hurting” the mission’s pilots by “trying to minimize the attack.” And he said CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, one of the first reporters to reveal the assessment, “should be FIRED” for denying the truth—“TOTAL OBLITERATION!”­­—and for “attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad.”

Hegseth went further. At a Pentagon briefing, he lambasted journalists for challenging Trump’s tale of obliteration. “You, the press corps . . . It’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump,” the defense secretary raged. He accused reporters of trying “to cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind, over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. . . . You’re undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots.”

Spare us the sanctimony. These lectures about undermining America’s warriors aren’t patriotic. They’re cynical and dishonest. The only thing lower than lying about what you accomplished in a war is hiding behind the people who actually accomplished it.

ERIK WEMPLE

 

Opinion

Erik Wemple

Paramount betrays ‘60 Minutes’ and the rest of us

Parent company caves to baseless suit by Donald Trump.

July 2, 2025 at 5:06 p.m. EDTToday at 5:06 p.m. EDT

 

On Nov. 3, a top lawyer for CBS News wrote to a lawyer representing Donald Trump in a baseless suit against CBS News. “We urge your client to voluntarily dismiss the complaint for the reasons set out below and, should he refuse to do so,” wrote the CBS News lawyer, “we reserve the right to seek sanctions and damages against him.”

 

Bravo!

 

On Tuesday night came the news that Paramount had agreed to pay $16 million to settle the suit, which stemmed from a “60 Minutes” interview with then-vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The money, which covers the president’s legal fees and costs, will go to his future presidential library.

 

What happened between disputation and capitulation? Way too much, that’s what.

 

Paramount, the parent company of CBS News and “60 Minutes,” is working on a merger with Hollywood studio Skydance, a transaction that requires the approval of the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission. A view had taken root at Paramount that the case could thwart merger approval, though there were concerns that paying too much would expose officers to bribery allegations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has already called for an investigation into “whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.”

 

After “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens in April announced his resignation, correspondent Scott Pelley said on air, “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

 

Honest journalism requires noting that Paramount’s leaders will never, ever hear the end of this abject decision. Nor should they. Much has been made in the recent past about attacks on the First Amendment, whether it’s the administration’s expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it won’t swallow “Gulf of America” (a dispute that’s tied up in the courts); the targeting of student protesters for their speech; attacks on lawyers for their past work; or any number of actions seeking to snuff diversity language from the handbooks of corporate America.

 

Yet the First Amendment withers, too, when it’s not called into action under trying circumstances. That’s the sin of Paramount. Though lawyers for CBS News cited First Amendment protections in court filings, Paramount caved prematurely and completely, leaving the impression that our legal protections may not have been equal to the task. Is it possible to malign the First Amendment itself?

 

“Look, companies often settle litigation to avoid the high and somewhat unpredictable cost of legal defense, the risk of an adverse judgment that could result in significant financial as well as reputational damage, and the disruption to business operations that prolonged legal battles can cause,” said Paramount co-CEO George Cheeks, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “A settlement offers a negotiated resolution that allows companies to focus on their core objectives, rather than being mired in uncertainty and distraction.”

 

Aside from the details above, there are other important considerations in Trump et al v. CBS Broadcasting Inc. et al. Trump’s complaint sought relief over a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris by correspondent Bill Whitaker, in which he asked Harris about the crisis in the Middle East. Harris gave an extended answer, a longer part of which CBS News broadcast on “Face the Nation” and a shorter part of which it broadcast on “60 Minutes.” The version on “Face the Nation” was a Harris “word salad,” argues the complaint, which insists that viewers were “deceived and misled by the astonishing contrast between the two versions” of Harris’ reply. Instead of suing CBS News for defamation — a common approach for parties aggrieved by media reports — Trump sued under a Texas consumer-protection statute and a federal statute governing false advertising — and he chose a venue perceived to be favorable to his chances in Amarillo, Texas.

 

In published reports, legal eagle after legal eagle has called the suit frivolous, though they’ve often been too polite. The Washington Post’s decency standards bar me from properly characterizing its worthlessness.

 

Context is required to understand just what Paramount executives have done here.

 

Three cases:

·         CNN in January settled a defamation case with Zachary Young, a security contractor who assisted companies in evacuating their personnel from Afghanistan. The settlement followed an adverse jury verdict that reflected some sloppy work and hostile behind-the-scenes communications at CNN.

·         ABC News settled a Trump defamation claim stemming from a segment in which anchor George Stephanopoulos articulated a technically inaccurate description of a civil jury finding against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll case.

·         Fox News famously paid out $787.5 million to resolve a suit by Dominion Voting Systems. The network’s airwaves carried commentary implicating the company in a scheme to steal the 2020 election from Trump.

See? You settle when you screw up.

 

CBS News did not screw up, however. The settlement doesn’t include an apology, and that’s because there is nothing to apologize for. Its actions under attack in the Trump suit are the subject of great reverence from the First Amendment. In the 1974 case Miami Herald Pub. Co. v. Tornillo, for instance, the Supreme Court considered a spat in which the Herald had declined to publish pushback by a politician to critical editorials — in violation of a Florida law requiring newspapers to offer space for such rebuttals. The high court knocked down the law because of its intrusion into the “function of editors in choosing what material goes into a newspaper and in deciding on the size and content of the paper and the treatment of public issues and officials.”

 

That very function — the one that happens many times a day at newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, networks, social media accounts, newsletters, whatever — is what Paramount failed to stick up for. It doesn’t deserve the likes of “60 Minutes.”