Executives involved in the pending Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery deal expect that a judge will press pause on the takeover plan in the coming days.

Officially, it’s anyone’s guess what the court will do. A hearing to consider the state AGs’ request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) is slated for Friday morning.

Unofficially, people close to the matter anticipate that the TRO will be granted, putting the deal in a two- or three-week timeout.

Those people, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of play, remain bullish that Paramount will prevail eventually. “The deal will get done one way or another,” one exec said.

But the earlier prospect that Paramount might take control of WBD in July — as soon as next week — has been all but extinguished by the state AG action.

Amid one of the most dramatic antitrust showdowns in years, investors and prediction-market traders continue to bet that the deal will go through.

“But the litigation poses a major headache for David Ellison, who wants to wrap up the deal by September to avoid making higher payouts to WBD shareholders,” Meg James writes on the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times. She points out that Paramount also wants to “manage escalating legal fees from a half-dozen law firms hired to help defend the merger.”

Litigation is expensive. “Both sides appear to be signaling the costs of a prolonged fight, taking bargaining positions for the nearer term,” Puck’s Eriq Gardner wrote last night.

Of course, the judge could surprise my sources by turning down the states’ request for a TRO, and then Paramount could theoretically complete the merger in a matter of days, as I explained yesterday in this “what happens next” Q&A.

But the people with the most at stake seem to think there are delays ahead.

Paramount has agreed to a request from the state AGs “to link their federal antitrust case to a pre-existing suit brought by Paramount+ subscribers,” Variety’s Gene Maddaus reported overnight. The move means that the states’ challenge “will likely end up before Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin,” whom we mentioned here yesterday, and who is already handling the subscriber lawsuit.

But for the moment, the states’ case is assigned to Judge P. Casey Pitts, who, like Martinez-Olguin, is a Biden appointee.

And there’s now another lawsuit targeting the merger: Yesterday, the Writers Guild of America filed suit in the Northern District of California, piggybacking on the state AG lawsuit and saying the deal “would reduce the number of buyers in Hollywood for ⁠films and TV shows, harming its members,” Jody Godoy and Lisa Richwine wrote for Reuters.

Paramount responded: “A ​combined Paramount–WBD will have the scale and resources to reverse the current trends in our industry and expand opportunities for writers, not ‌shrink ⁠them.”

California AG Rob Bonta is talking more openly about the CNN of it all. While the states’ lawsuit focuses on the film and TV industries, Bonta told Oliver Darcy, “I’m very concerned about the reports about what’s happening at CBS. And I’m also concerned about the possibility that what’s happening at CBS could be part of an attempt to curry favor with the president who might want something similar to happen at CNN.”

As James put it in her LA Times story, President Trump has been “rooting for a shake-up at CNN and maintains friendly ties with billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, who already own CBS.”

On a forthcoming episode of the Status “Power Lines” podcast, Bonta told Darcy that a divestiture of CNN “would definitely have value” as part of the states’ negotiations with Paramount.

Every time I ask around about this, I hear the same thing: It would be exceedingly difficult (some say impossible) to spin off CNN from the rest of the cable channels owned by WBD. All the channels are tied up together in various distribution deals, and without CNN’s valuable live news coverage, the other channels wouldn’t command the same fees.

There’s also the key point Alex Weprin made in a THR piece titled “Why Paramount Can’t Afford to Let Go of CNN.” The combined company “will need CNN’s revenue and profits to help pay down that debt load, especially with the other channels on a downward trajectory financially.”

>> Analyst Rich Greenfield expressed some skepticism in a new note: “If Paramount’s antitrust argument is so strong, why is it threatening to abandon California, hiring the country’s top Supreme Court litigator, and invoking Netflix in virtually every public statement and filing? These are not the actions of a company confident in its positioning.”

>> There is now a “Block the Merger UK” effort, “which urges people to contact the Department for Culture, Media and Sport or regulator Ofcom, demanding they examine the merger in more depth,” Deadline’s Max Goldbart and Jake Kanter reported. Lisa Nandy is “poised to decide whether the UK government will formally intervene.”

>> Back in the US, ProPublica’s Corey G. Johnson released a new investigation titled “FCC officials took pricey gifts from Paramount as the company needed approval for billion-dollar deals.”

>> Journalists at both CNN and CBS News continue to (try to) tune out all this noise. This morning, CBS announced a new women’s health podcast hosted by Norah O’Donnell, and CNN released a new episode of “CNN Explains” about AI IPOs, featuring Hadas Gold and Kyla Scanlon.

Acting AG Todd Blanche’s two-day confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee began just a few moments ago. You can stream it here.

One of the big questions: Which senators will press Blanche about the DOJ’s subpoenas targeting The New York Times — and what will he say? There were also those withdrawn subpoenas to WSJ and WaPo reporters, as well as the raid on WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson’s home.

The NYT editorial board described those actions this morning as an “onslaught against the news media” happening under Blanche’s watch. “These acts represent an appalling politicization of law enforcement,” the editors wrote.

>> CNN’s Jake Tapperpreviewed the hearings earlier this week: “Soon, senators are going to be voting on the attorney general nomination of Todd Blanche,” who is “clearly part of this assault on the press. This administration believes in pardoning January 6 extremists who beat up police officers while they subpoena journalists for doing our jobs. Is the Senate about to sanction this crackdown? We’re watching. So is history.”

“I’ve written a book about my time as president,” Joe Biden announced in a new video this morning. The book, titled “Promise Me, America,” is touted as the “complete story” behind his presidency. Little, Brown & Co. lists it at 560 pages.

The big news about the book is the release date — it won’t come out until November 17, two weeks after the midterms, which means nothing from the book is even intended to leak during campaign season.

MS NOW turns 30 years old today. If you’re like me and you remember watching the very first day of MSNBC, it’s a hoot to go back and stream the debut broadcast on YouTube, which, as one commenter points out, “couldn’t be more ’90s.”

Nielsen rated MSNBC for the first time in October 1997, and it estimated that 97,000 primetime viewers were watching. Last month, MS NOW averaged 1.3 million viewers in prime…

State Affairs has been around for years, but it’s getting attention this week for raising $70 million for what it calls an “intelligence platform for the policy and regulatory markets.”

The startup backed by, among others, Peter Thiel, is “hiring local journalists and sticking them in statehouses” — knowing that state capitols are often severely undercovered — and then feeding the human-produced stories “into a large language model, with the goal of organizing the information for high-paying subscribers from companies, nonprofits, and governments,” Scott Nover and Elizabeth Dwoskin report in this intriguing WaPo story.

Co-founder Jamie Roberts Seltzer says “we intend to hire many more full-time reporters over the next few years” because “exclusive reporting and original data gathering” power the “platform…”