Rob Bonta Is Fighting Paramount – Where Was He When California Fire Victims Took on Insurers?

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has apparently found a legal fight he thinks is worth waging. But it’s not fighting for California families who lost their homes in the devastating Los Angeles fires and found themselves up against insurance companies.

Instead, Bonta is leading a coalition of 12 state attorneys general in an aggressive lawsuit to block Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery – a deal projected to bring significant new investment and thousands of jobs to California.

Bonta has made stopping the merger one of his office’s most visible priorities, celebrating court victories and declaring that the transaction should “never see the light of day.”

That raises a simple question about the priorities of California’s top law enforcement officer: Where was that zeal when California wildfire victims needed it?

Earlier this year, 60 California homeowners brought a suit against insurers, alleging that they coordinated to cancel or decline to renew fire coverage before the Palisades and Eaton fires. When the companies sought dismissal based in part on federal legal protections, it was not Bonta who stepped in to defend homeowners. The federal Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice intervened to allow the case to proceed. Bonta stayed silent.

Yet when Paramount proposed combining with Warner Bros., he became one of the most aggressive antitrust enforcers in the country. He filed suit, sought an emergency order stopping the transaction and celebrated when the court temporarily halted it.

Those are strange priorities for the attorney general of a state struggling to keep employers, jobs and investment.

And apparently Gov. Gavin Newsom has concerns too.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Newsom has privately expressed concern that Bonta’s lawsuit could hurt California employment if the Paramount-Warner transaction is blocked.

That is significant.

Newsom is not a political opponent looking for an opportunity to criticize Bonta. He put Bonta in the job. Yet even Newsom appears to be distancing himself from Bonta’s antitrust crusade because of the potential consequences for California workers.

The economic stakes are hard to dismiss. California is already struggling to keep film and television production in the state. Paramount is a historic California company that employs thousands of people and supports an enormous network of writers, production workers, tradespeople, vendors and small businesses. Expert analyses from the California Policy Center project that the merger would strengthen California’s economy, adding $1 billion in investment to movie production and supporting roughly 6,600 direct full-time jobs and 40,000 additional indirect jobs.

Bonta wants Californians to believe his Paramount lawsuit is a straightforward exercise in principled antitrust enforcement. But regulators around the world have already scrutinized the deal and allowed it to move forward, including authorities in the European Union and United Kingdom, both known for aggressive merger review.

Meanwhile, some of the strongest political support for Bonta comes from wealthy donors with ties to Netflix, a direct competitor that stands to benefit if Paramount is weakened. That is an awkward backdrop for an attorney general who has persuaded eleven other state AGs to join a legal fight that increasingly looks isolated from the broader regulatory consensus.

Merits or no, Bonta appears determined to stand firm as the last obstacle to this deal moving forward. That may be good politics for an attorney general with eyes on governorship who wants to portray himself as a crusader against big corporations. It is harder to see how it is good for California.