FCC Chairs Took Paramount Gifts During Merger Reviews

Two Federal Communications Commission officials who voted to approve Paramount's $8 billion merger with Skydance Media accepted thousands of dollars in event tickets from Paramount while the deal was pending, according to ethics disclosure records. FCC Chair Brendan Carr sat in a private skybox alongside Paramount CEO David Ellison at the December 2025 Kennedy Center honors gala, where seats cost $125,000 each. Commissioner Olivia Trusty, who cast the decisive vote approving the merger, attended with a guest on tickets Paramount gifted her worth more than $12,000.

The gala took place as Paramount was actively seeking FCC approval on multiple fronts. The Paramount-Skydance merger was already under review when Carr, Trusty, and two other commissioners accepted combined Kennedy Center tickets worth $48,156 in December 2024. By the night of the December 2025 gala, Paramount had just launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that also requires FCC approval. The timing makes the gifts especially sensitive: regulators were sitting in seats paid for by a company whose future depended on their decisions.

What the Ethics Rules Say

Federal ethics rules bar government employees from accepting gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by, or seeks official action from their agency. A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo explicitly stated that officials cannot accept free Kennedy Center attendance offered by anyone other than the Kennedy Center itself. A 2016 update tightened those rules further, warning officials to avoid any appearance of lost impartiality.

The FCC has argued internally that the gala qualifies under a "widely attended gathering" exemption, which allows free entry to events that further agency programs and where the agency's interest in attendance outweighs concern about improper influence. But four ethics experts quoted in the disclosures pushed back hard on that logic. Former White House ethics lawyer Virginia Canter said the Kennedy Center show, where celebrities perform and honor recipients are lauded, is not what the rules consider a widely attended gathering. Former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub called the FCC's justification outrageous, noting that the performance arts exemption was specifically addressed and rejected in a 2007 ethics memo.

Paramount's chief communications officer described the invitations as a decades-long CBS practice of inviting government officials from both parties. The FCC said in a statement that commissioners have attended the same event consistently across multiple administrations and that ethics officers have cleared the appearances each time. Shaub dismissed that defense: past bad habits do not retroactively make a practice legal.

Why It Could Derail the Warner Bros. Deal

The stakes here are not just reputational. The FCC currently has only three commissioners, meaning any recusal would break the three-member quorum required for a full commission vote. If Carr or Trusty steps aside from the Warner Bros. Discovery review, the commission may be unable to act at all, unless Carr delegates the decision to staff as he did with the recent Nexstar-Tegna acquisition.

Carr has already publicly endorsed the Paramount-Warner deal on CNBC, promising swift approval. That endorsement, combined with the gift disclosures, gives opponents of the $110 billion consolidation concrete material for legal challenges. Former White House ethics attorney Richard Painter warned that a court could view the entire FCC decision-making process as compromised, potentially invalidating any approval the agency grants.

The merger itself is already under pressure from multiple directions. Twelve states, led by California and New York, filed a lawsuit in July 2026 seeking to block the deal under anti-monopoly laws. The British government signaled it plans to investigate competition concerns. The FCC is also scrutinizing the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the transaction, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. A combined Paramount-Warner entity would control Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, and a large share of Hollywood's film and television output.

Experts said Carr and Commissioner Anna Gomez both faced conflicts over the earlier Paramount-Skydance vote because each had accepted Paramount tickets, even though Gomez voted against that merger. Ethics rules require only prompt reimbursement to avoid a recusal obligation, but Shaub and other experts said common sense and the public interest called for abstention regardless. Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to requests for comment. Gomez said she followed agency advice when she attended in prior years and declined Paramount's 2025 invitation over concerns about press independence conditions tied to the earlier merger.

The disclosures show the pattern runs wider than two officials. Seven of the ten FCC commissioners who served since 2016 accepted Kennedy Center tickets from CBS or its parent company, totaling more than $260,000. Carr alone has accepted tickets at least seven times since 2017, worth more than $63,000. The one commissioner who never accepted, Nathan Simington, said he simply turned the invitations down because it was not his preference. His example suggests refusal was always an available option.

The Justice Department, according to ethics experts, should investigate whether the gift-taking violated federal rules or criminal statutes. Any approval the FCC grants on the Warner deal is likely to be challenged in court, and the gift record will be central to those challenges. Whether Carr routes the decision through a full commission vote or delegates it to staff, the process now carries a documented ethics cloud that opposing parties will almost certainly use.