The Department of Justice has decided against ramping up an investigation into Comcast’s seven-year-old acquisition of NBCUniversal — despite Trump recently doubling down on his criticism of the tie-up as anticompetitive, The NY Post has learned.
The DOJ said in August it was still monitoring Comcast’s activities even though a consent decree in which it agreed not to withhold NBC programming from rival cable companies or video-streaming services was expiring in September.
Nevertheless, federal prosecutors have failed to file a so-called civil investigative demand for company records that would mark a stepped-up investigation and has no plans to do so — effectively clearing the regulatory cloud that has long hung over the deal, according to sources.
The DOJ is backing off partly because it fears it wouldn’t get a favorable hearing from US Judge Richard Leon, who approved the merger in 2011, according to The NY Post citing sources. That’s because Leon appears miffed over the DOJ’s recent appeal to his June approval of AT&T’s merger with Time Warner — a deal which, also against Trump’s wishes, allowed the companies to retain ownership of CNN.
The tide appeared to turn late last month, when Leon ordered a surprise delay of the CVS-Aetna merger into next summer, castigating DOJ officials for not policing the deal more aggressively.
Just two weeks earlier, momentum had appeared to be building for the DOJ to move against Comcast, whose NBC division’s “Saturday Night Live” has drawn barbs from Trump over Alec Baldwin’s mugging impersonations of him.
On Nov. 12, the American Cable Association, which represents more than 700 smaller video and broadband providers, asked the DOJ to open an investigation into Comcast. That prompted Trump to tweet that the trade group said Comcast “routinely violates Antitrust laws.”
Trump has a history with NBC that some insiders argue is even more bitter than his feud with CNN. On top of Baldwin’s weekly insults, NBC in 2015 ended its partnership with Trump to air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants after the presidential candidate vowed to stop “rapists” and “criminals” from Mexico from coming to the US.
On the campaign trail, Trump said President Obama’s DOJ never should have cleared the Comcast-NBC merger.
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