Source
Paramount Global paid $16M toward Trump's presidential library to settle his '60 Minutes' suit; the FCC approved Skydance's $8B takeover of Paramount weeks later.
Flow Diagram
$16.00M Settlement Paramount Global (CBS paren… Donald J. Trump presidentia… Hops
0
Settlement · primary
Paramount Global (CBS parent) → Donald J. Trump presidential library foundation
USD $16.00M (settlement of Trump's 60 Minutes lawsuit, no apology; the FCC approved the $8B Skydance/Ellison merger ~3 weeks later)
Methodology
How amounts are sourced. Dollar figures are drawn from public disclosure filings: USASpending.gov for federal contracts, FEC filings for political contributions, SEC EDGAR for corporate disclosures, LD-2 lobbying registrations for lobbying expenditures, and Congressional records for appropriations. Each hop carries its own citations linking to the primary filing. Where an amount is unavailable (classified contracts, private transactions), the hop is marked "undisclosed" rather than estimated.
About vanish points. A vanish point marks the node at which the money trail goes dark. Each marker carries a typed reason from a fixed taxonomy (shell company, offshore jurisdiction, undisclosed beneficial owner, etc) and a curator note describing what is and isn't known. Vanish points are highlighted in red in the flow diagram above. They are evidence of opacity, not endpoints — every reason is a documented systemic feature of the disclosure regime that prevents further tracing.
Confidence tiers. Each hop and chain carries a confidence rating: primary (sourced directly from official filings), secondary (sourced from reporting or derived records), or inferential (existence is established but details are reconstructed from indirect evidence).
