This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.

“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”

On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed FCC chair by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January 2025, attended regularly.

Rosenworcel and several other former commissioners who accepted the tickets did not respond to requests for comment. The one commissioner who didn’t accept a single gift, Nathan Simington, said he received the Kennedy Center invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it “wasn’t my cup of tea.”

A review of 10 years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and speak at conferences. Some of those gifts came from other media companies regulated by the FCC. NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents’ Association dinners, records show. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000. But the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company.

Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. She didn’t address why the practice continued after new ownership took over last year, the purpose of the gifts or whether the tickets posed a conflict of interest.

Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to become the agency’s general counsel, was appointed to serve as a commissioner by Trump during his first term. Since then, Carr has accepted tickets annually, except when the 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his public disclosures.

Carr did not respond to an email request from ProPublica for his latest ethics report, which would indicate whether Paramount also paid for him to attend last December’s gala. The FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.

A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly said officials cannot accept free attendance “offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees.” In 2016, the ethics office tightened its gift requirements, warning officials to avoid any appearance “of loss of impartiality.”

There is an exemption to the gift rules that allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met.

The event must “further agency programs or operations,” and the agency’s interest in an official attending must outweigh “concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties,” according to the federal rules.

As an example, the Office of Government Ethics said an industry-wide seminar attended by more than 100 people could be allowed if the employee’s participation would be in the agency’s interest. But those attending should “represent a range of persons interested in a given matter” and the event must provide a “structured opportunity” to exchange ideas and views among invitees.

The office clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not count even if they, like the honors gala, have a reception before or afterward at which officials can mingle with other attendees.

Canter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said it would be a “stretch” for the FCC to argue the exemptions apply to the Kennedy Center’s annual show, where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud those who are being honored. “It’s not what we would consider a widely attended gathering,” she said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted that federal rules also require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment.

“The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation,” he said, adding that it is an “obvious conflict of interest” for an official to “accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests.”

An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance given to the commissioners said they were told the event met the criteria for the “widely attended gathering” exception. (The source was not authorized to talk publicly about agency legal discussions.)

Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics head, disagreed, saying it would be “hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners” attend the gala.

“What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?” he asked.

Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering. The FCC did not respond to our requests to provide the authorizations for the Paramount tickets or say who authorized them. Two senior ethics officials at the agency, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.

While December’s event came at a particularly sensitive time for Paramount and the FCC, it wasn’t the first.

More than a year earlier, in September 2024, Paramount had filed paperwork seeking the commission’s approval for its merger with Skydance Media. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump later filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited the interview — an accusation CBS denied.

Then in November, less than two weeks after his election victory, Trump declared he would appoint Carr as FCC chair. Almost immediately, Carr accused CBS of biased election coverage and said it would be an obstacle to approving the Paramount-Skydance merger.

That December, Carr and three other commissioners — Rosenworcel, Gomez and Geoffrey Starks — accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.

On Jan. 16, 2025, just days before Rosenworcel stepped down from the commission, she announced the agency was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. She and Gomez called the outcome a victory for the First Amendment.

But days later, Carr, the incoming FCC chair, reopened the investigation.

To resolve Trump’s lawsuit, CBS agreed to pay the president $16 million, a decision criticized by legal experts who decried Trump’s claims as baseless.

Two days after Trump posted on social media that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Paramount-Skydance merger. To meet Carr’s demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson who would evaluate claims of bias. The company also pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

By then, Starks and Simington had unexpectedly stepped down from the commission. Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed by the Senate the previous month.

Trusty and Carr voted in favor of the merger. Gomez voted against, blasting the approval for requiring “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment.”

Experts said that while Trusty had no conflict yet, Carr and Gomez did. The fact that Gomez voted against Paramount did not mean she didn’t face a conflict under the rules, Shaub said.

Federal rules only require those who accept improper gifts to make a prompt reimbursement, but Shaub and the other experts said Carr and Gomez should have abstained from the vote.

“If you repay the face value of the ticket, the gift rules don’t require you to recuse — though common sense and any kind of conscience might lead you to recuse voluntarily for the good of the country,” Shaub said. “But if you refuse to repay the donor, I don’t see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem.”

With the Paramount-Skydance merger greenlit by the FCC, Ellison, the new company’s CEO, then set his sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner at first rebuffed Paramount’s overtures and on Dec. 5 — two days before the Kennedy Center gala — accepted a bid from Netflix to buy its studio and streaming assets. Ellison responded by making numerous calls to administration officials and had a long talk with Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal “could be a problem” and that he planned to get directly involved with the regulatory approval. Inside the Kennedy Center, Carr and his wife sat with Ellison in an exclusive skybox, Bloomberg reported. (Gomez said in her statement to ProPublica that she declined Paramount’s “invitation because of serious concerns about press independence connected to conditions Paramount agreed to as part of its merger transaction before the FCC.”)

Hours after the gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.

About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed Paramount over Netflix on CNBC, promising swift approval.

If one or more commissioners choose to abstain from a merger vote because of ethical concerns, what would happen next is unclear. Under federal conflict of interest rules, an agency designee could theoretically permit commissioners to vote after considering several factors, including “the difficulty of reassigning the matter,” the nature of the relationship between the commissioners and Paramount, and the “effect that resolution of the matter would have upon the financial interests” of the firm.

Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely, as he did with the recent acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group. In that case, Carr delegated authority to FCC staff to approve the takeover.

But any decision on the Paramount deal — whether by the full commission or by staff at the direction of the chair — is likely to be challenged.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.

“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.

The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.

Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.

Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.

Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.

“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”

The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.

The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.

The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.

Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.

The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.

“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.

A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.

The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.

In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”

A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.

Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.

“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”

“I Lost Everything”

In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.

Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.

He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.

Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.

“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.

Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.

Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”

“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.

Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.

“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.

Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.

William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.

“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”

Trapped in Group Homes

South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.

After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.

The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.

South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.

Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.

Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.

“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.

South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.

After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.

South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.

His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.

Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.

“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”