The process is the punishment
“The process is the punishment” has become a mantra during President Trump’s second administration.
Don Lemon said it after pleading not guilty to federal charges in Minnesota. Democratic FCC commissioner Anna Gomez said it in a letter about Brendan Carr’s moves against Disney. Libertarian legal scholar Eugene Volokh said it just the other day on his “Free Speech Unmuted” podcast.
Now it’s being applied to yet another case: The Justice Department’s probe of the five major TV networks, including CNN, over supposed antitrust violations.
A DOJ spokesperson confirmed over the weekend that “the Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.”
But “when the DOJ launches a major investigation against the press, there’s nothing ‘simple’ about it,” former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance wrote. “As with so much of Trump’s revenge docket, the investigations into Jim Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, and others, the process is the punishment. Targets have to hire lawyers. It gets expensive, and it’s stressful.”
Last night on “AC360,” another former federal prosecutor, Jessica Roth, said “this investigation appears to be meritless. And I think the only reasonable interpretation is that it’s pretextual.” The Washington Post’s Miriam Waldvogel and Scott Nover interviewed other legal experts who said the same thing here.
Personally, I found this comment to my colleague Evan Perez most memorable: “This is not even in the same zip code of an antitrust violation,” Jonathan Kanter, Biden’s assistant attorney general for antitrust, told Perez. Here’s our full story, noting that all of this started when Trump banned CNN from the White House grounds last month.
The TV pool chair said there would be “no replacement pool put in place.” So pooled coverage of Trump’s events stopped for a few days; Trump was frustrated by the lack of coverage; allies like Laura Loomer urged the DOJ to punish the networks; and now there’s a punishing legal process underway.
Incidentally, CNN chair Mark Thompson was asked about this DOJ probe during an unrelated interview with the FT. Thompson said: “To us, the administration’s ongoing efforts to exclude our access to the White House and the president is a First Amendment matter. The public’s right to have journalists asking questions and holding US political leadership to account is the true topic.”
Yesterday I broke the news that Brendan Carr has directed the FCC to open an investigation after receiving a letter from GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno condemning ABC’s shoddy story about Trump’s sons.
Semafor’s Max Tani has details about what went wrong with the story here. ABC’s handling of the matter was indefensible. But the senator’s demand for a probe into ABC’s “hit job” also risks chilling press freedom.
The ABC story was not broadcast over the airwaves; it was only published online. That’s important because “the FCC has no authority to investigate written online news stories. Zero,” FIRE’s Nico Perrino wrote on X. He added: “You can be concerned about the handling of this particular story, or even distrust the press more broadly, while still recognizing that this sort of misinformation policing of online news content is a dangerous precedent.”
>> Meanwhile, here’s the latest in Disney’s ongoing First Amendment case against the government: “ABC alleges FCC’s attempts to curb its free speech were designed to evade judicial review,” Variety’s Todd Spangler reports.
Almost $20 million later, Trump’s taxpayer-funded ad campaign has come to an end, apparently.
In the end, a federal judge ordered a stop to it. The administration had said that the ads were about to stop airing, anyway. But Judge Jennifer Rochon said that didn’t render Common Cause’s lawsuit moot. She told the government to cancel any further airings after 6:45 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.
When I reported Rochon’s order on CNN an hour later, I asked viewers to let me know if they spotted any of the ads on TV later in the evening. And I heard from numerous viewers who did. AdImpact confirmed that the ads kept airing — leading a Justice Department lawyer to apologize “to the court and the plaintiffs” for the delay in implementing the order. Their excuse? The relevant lawyer didn’t see the email until Monday morning. C’mon.
I think we’re going to remember this as another norm-shattering episode in Trump 2.0 — money allocated by Congress for the Border Patrol repurposed into pro-Trump ads just weeks before the midterms — leading to bipartisan backlash and many comparisons to authoritarian-style propaganda…
That’s the headline of Andrew Kaczynski’s CNN piece. He combed through Zacharia’s old social media posts and found that she “repeatedly made baseless accusations of pedophilia against prominent Democrats and shared conspiracy-related content, including claims that echoed the debunked ‘Pizzagate’ theory and that Hollywood elites were pedophilic cannibals.” Many of those were posted in 2022.
Kaczynski also found that the incoming press secretary “has a record of since-deleted social media activity that shows her advocating for hardline policies and criticizing the administration she is now poised to represent.” That includes “warning Republicans of a potential midterm ‘bloodbath’ in a now-deleted tweet,” according to Kaczynski.
>> Playbook reports this morning that in order to get the gig, Zacharia “looked at Trump’s public schedule every day, and monitored his Truth Social, and made sure she was on-air when she assumed he might be watching.”
>> Zacharia “has claimed to be a lawyer repeatedly on national TV, on podcasts, and on social media. But there is no evidence that Zacharia has ever been licensed to practice law,” Judd Legum writes. When asked for comment, the WH did not provide proof that she’s licensed; instead, it referred Legum to a Trump post calling her an attorney.
The Wall Street Journal published another damning story about Kimberly Guilfoyle over the long weekend, citing an audio recording and sources. When Trump was asked yesterday if he has spoken with Guilfoyle and if he’s considering firing her, he said, “Well, we’re looking at. Yeah. We’re not happy.”
Politico’s Jonathan Martin said on X that this underscores how there are “two leverage points on Trump — press coverage and the markets.”
“If the WSJ hadn’t written these stories,” he said, “there would’ve been no check on her.”
“CNN is expanding its paid streaming service overseas for the first time, accelerating its effort to build a digital business as new owner David Ellison takes control of the news network’s future,” the FT’s Anna Nicolaou reports.
The network “will launch an all-access subscription in the UK and Canada” this time next week. There are “plans to expand to other countries next year,” Nicolaou writes.
Lesley Stahl’s “60 Minutes” report on Israeli settler violence aired Sunday, but screenings for the piece “grew extraordinarily contentious” in the days ahead of air, leading Stahl to privately discuss “the possibility of quitting the show,” Oliver Darcy scooped for Status last night.
Darcy reported that Bari Weiss raised objections to the piece, though the “precise nature” of the objections remains unclear. CBS called Darcy’s account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative,” saying Stahl’s piece “received far fewer edits than most.” Darcy also reported a separate dispute over Gaza coverage involving correspondent Holly Williams — the network did not comment on that incident. Read the full story here…
Breaking this morning: “Character.AI, one of the first breakout startups of the generative AI boom, has filed for bankruptcy and is selling some of its assets to Disney,” The Verge’s Robert Hart reports.
The company “has faced mounting scrutiny and lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots.” Now it’s listing $50 million to $100 million in liabilities and saying that Disney will “pay $20 million for certain undisclosed assets,” setting up Disney as the stalking horse bidder…
>> Andrew Ross Sorkin announced the lineup for this year’s DealBook Summit, which includes David Ellison, who had intended to participate last year. Also on the list: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and JD Vance. The summit is on Nov. 18. (X)
>> “SNL” is getting its first digital creator host: TikTok/IG sketch comic Druski will helm the show on Nov. 7, Matt Belloni scooped overnight. (Puck)
>> Hillary Clinton and Kara Swisher announced a short-run podcast series, “High Stakes,” that will “break down the race to control the House and the Senate in weekly episodes that run through mid-November.” (NYT)
>> Getty Images is filing for bankruptcy and going private, “a major reset after the collapse of its planned merger with rival Shutterstock amid heavy debt and growing competition from AI-generated imagery.” (Reuters)
>> Aaron Blake has a comprehensive explainer on how MAGA media fully embraced the “sketchy” theory that James Talarico was “missing” from the campaign trail because of a mental health episode — and how that theory quickly fell apart. (CNN)
>> Trump has “privately shared misgivings about livestreaming the firing-squad execution of a former Army major who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas,” leading to speculation that the Pentagon will scrap the plan, Marc Caputo reported. (Axios)
>> Elon Musk has funneled “more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections,” Teddy Schleifer scooped. (NYT)
>> Speaking of Musk, John Gruber wrote that X “once again marks the spot,” in part because “the rank muskiness that permeated the platform after he took over is — for now, at least — gone.” (Daring Fireball)
>> On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver commented on the WBD–Paramount merger: “I’m thrilled to be part of the Skydance family! Hope you’re happy with what you bought, guys. We’re never gonna change!” (THR)
“The Social Reckoning” had a “tough time making noise at the box office in its opening weekend, spurring debate about the prospects for a spate of 2026 titles examining the tech sphere,” THR’s Ryan Gajewski writes. The Aaron Sorkin-directed film “grossed a disappointing $5.5 million domestically, below even the soft initial projections that distributor Sony Pictures had set.”
The results contrasted sharply with Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary, “Musk,” which also debuted theatrically and collected $69,321 from four screens, an incredible per-screen total. That result bodes well for “Musk” in the coming weeks…
>> This LA Times headline also caught my eye: “Warner Bros. could face loss of at least $150 million on ‘Digger’ after tepid box office.”
Today’s new nonfiction releases! Maria Ressa, a longtime friend of Reliable Sources, is out today with “The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators.” The Atlantic has an excerpt here.
My next read: “Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People” by Chrystia Freeland.
Also new today: “The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America’s Undoing in the Middle East” by Kim Ghattas, “Out of The Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life” by Jay Stratton, “This Is What Happens When Women Read” by Julianna Glasse, and “Looking for Terry: A Memoir” by Terry Bradshaw.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.