California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) wants you to believe his lawsuit to kill the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger is a principled stand for consumers. Look closer, and a different story emerges: political favors that benefit leftists and one company that will profit the most — Netflix — not the taxpayers footing the bill.
On Monday, a Biden-appointed federal judge in the Northern District of California handed Bonta and 10 other Democratic state attorneys general a preliminary win in their bid to block the deal. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board laid out, that ruling flies in the face of the global antitrust consensus. So why is a state attorney general burning taxpayer dollars to fight a merger that regulators everywhere else have been willing to live with?
Netflix tried to buy Warner Bros. itself. It lost. Now it dominates the streaming industry, and a combined Paramount-WBD is the single biggest competitive threat it faces. Block the merger, and Netflix’s monopoly position stays comfortably intact. What hasn’t been reported anywhere is exactly how tight the financial relationship is between the attorney general driving this lawsuit and the family of leftists who built Netflix.
Patty Quillin, wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, cut Bonta’s 2021-22 attorney general campaign a maximum $16,200 check. She’s kept maxing out, cycle after cycle, to Bonta’s wife, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta. And that’s the small money. Quillin is also a key funder of Smart Justice California, the activist group that campaigned to install Bonta as attorney general — $127,000 in 2021, then a staggering $1 million wire in March 2022. That’s over a million dollars from one Silicon Valley household flowing straight into the political infrastructure of the man now deciding the fate of her husband’s biggest rival.
Call it what it is: Bonta didn’t stumble into this lawsuit as a neutral referee. He was bankrolled into office — and into his wife’s Assembly seat — by the family with the most to gain from crushing this merger. Politico reported in July 2021 that a small clique of Northern California donors with Silicon Valley fortunes had already poured millions into installing progressive prosecutors and dismantling California’s criminal-justice status quo — and flagged Bonta, one of the most liberal attorneys general in America, as their guy. Quillin was one of those donors.
It’s not a coincidence that Bonta didn’t cook this lawsuit up alone. Former Obama ethics adviser Norm Eisen and a chorus of progressive Hollywood elites have spent months cheering the case on, dressing up what looks like a donor payoff as high-minded reform. That’s the oldest trick in the book: recruit “public interest” voices to launder a special-interest favor. No one has bothered to ask whether that outside pressure campaign traces back to the same Silicon Valley money that has financed Bonta’s entire career.
When a company founder’s spouse funnels well over a million dollars toward an attorney general and his political family, and that attorney general then moves to kill a deal that directly protects her husband’s business, it’s a burning conflict of interest.
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Bonta’s office will insist the donations are meaningless. But taxpayers shouldn’t have to take his word for it. Bonta owes Californians full disclosure of every contact between his office and Netflix, Reed Hastings — or Patty Quillin, in this case — and he should step aside from any further role in it until he provides it.
Taxpayers didn’t sign up to fund a leftist proxy war for Netflix’s streaming monopoly. If they are, they deserve to know the truth.
Tom Jones is the president of the American Accountability Foundation.