The department's press release credited those staff with finding no harm to competition. The Wall Street Journal reported they were leaning toward a lawsuit to block the deal.
For eight months, career antitrust lawyers inside the U.S. Department of Justice built a case against the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. Then, before they could finish, senior leaders shut it down, according to the Wall Street Journal, as summarized by Ars Technica.
The DOJ announced Friday that it had approved Paramount Skydance's proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, closing an eight-month review without a challenge. A department press release attributed the outcome to a "rigorous eight-month investigation led by the [Antitrust] Division's career staff" that found the deal would not harm competition or American consumers.
That public account conflicts with what the Journal reported about the investigation's closing weeks. Career staff lawyers who led the review were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging the combination of the two movie studios as anticompetitive, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the paper. Staff investigators had not yet made a final recommendation. Senior leaders closed the investigation before the concerned career staff had a chance to formally object.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed Assefi, who led the Antitrust Division during the review, told Reuters in March that the deal would not be fast-tracked for approval because of political factors. "The idea that somehow enforcement has been politicized is ludicrous," he said.
The split between the department's public framing and the reporting about its internal deliberations is the story. The approval lets Paramount Skydance absorb Warner Bros. Discovery, joining two of the major Hollywood studios under one owner, and removes the legal threat that the staff, on the Journal's account, had been preparing to file.
The deal is likely to face other obstacles. California, New York, and other U.S. states are reportedly preparing a lawsuit seeking to block the merger in the coming weeks, according to Reuters. The European Union is also scrutinizing the deal's financing and competitive impacts, with a decision due July 14, 2026.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) responded to the approval with a public call for transparency. "The American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor," Warren said in a statement. "This reeks of corruption."
The DOJ Antitrust Division has not publicly named any conditions attached to the approval, and the department has not, as of the announcement, responded to the Journal's account. The next test of which version holds—the press release's or the Journal's—will come when career staff who worked on the review speak publicly about what the case file actually contained.