STOP RIGHT THERE
US sues to halt $85B AT&T-Time Warner sale
President Trump, who has sharply criticized CNN’s coverage as biased against his administration, on Monday saw his Justice Department sue to stop the $85 billion sale of the all-news cable network’s parent, Time Warner, to AT&T.
The deal would bring together AT&T’s 152.6 million wireless subscribers and 46.6 million pay-TV customers with Time Warner’s networks — including CNN and HBO — to form a media behemoth that regulators believe will have the power to force rivals to pay more for the right to distribute the popular content.
“This merger would … mean higher monthly television bills,” Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said in a statement.
Washington antitrust cops are looking for AT&T to shed either DirecTV or CNN to lessen any possible stranglehold it may have on content distribution, according to reports earlier this month.
Selling CNN, AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said Monday, is a nonstarter.
The proposed media megamerger has been parsed since it was announced in October 2016. Barring a sudden settlement, the two sides will battle it out in a trial that could begin in February, a Washing- ton lawyer told The Post.
The US has won nine of the last 10 suits it has filed to block a merger — with four of those cases going to trial.
But the Justice Department has not sued to stop a “vertical merger” like the AT&T- Time Warner deal. A vertical merger is a combination of two companies that operate in different spaces — unlike a merger, say, of two wireless providers.
Conventional wisdom until recently was that the Trump administration, in its first big antitrust test, would approve the AT&T deal as long as the telecom giant promised it would not strong arm rivals on content from Time Warner’s CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. studio or other assets.
President Obama’s Justice Department approved the 2011 vertical merger of cable giant Comcast and NBCUniversal after executives promised not to withhold NBCU content from rivals.
Critics say Comcast has not lived up to that promise — and government officials, to be sure, have grown wary of such so-called behavioral remedies.
At the same time, the prospects for this deal to gain approval may have taken a hit when Trump in March nominated former lobbyist Delrahim to be the Justice Department’s new antitrust chief.
Delrahim is a pal of AG Jeff Sessions. There are worries Delrahim would follow a Trump agenda.
“I think it’s less likely the division will deliver an independent judgment” with Delrahim at the helm, a source working on the AT&T deal told The Post at the time.
Delrahim last October seemed to favor the giant merger.
“I don’t see this [merger] as a major antitrust problem,” he told Canadian television.
Trump threatened during the 2016 campaign to block the deal if he was elected.
Last week, Trump said the decision of whether to block the merger was being “made by a man [Delrahim] who’s a very respected person, a very, very respected person.”