A federal judge on Tuesday gave his blessing to telecom giant AT&T's drive to take over the Time Warner media conglomerate. Judge Richard Leon rejected arguments by Justice Department lawyers that the combined company would be too large and too powerful, and that the $85 billion deal would harm competition and hurt consumers.  

Time Warner owns CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and a passel of cable channels including TNT, TBS and the Cartoon Network.  

The two companies seeking to unify had argued that a new crop of competitors cast an ominous shadow over their businesses: Netflix, Amazon and Apple in content and distribution; Google and Facebook in advertising.

In his decision, Leon weighed in on a case that carried political overtones, scrambled typical ideological alignments, and triggered close attention from corporate executives beyond media.  

On the campaign trail in October 2016, then candidate Donald Trump spoke in Gettysburg, Pa. He noted Time Warner owned CNN, and then declared his opposition to the $85 billion proposed sale. It is, he said then, "a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in hands of too few."  

Trump's call holds a populist appeal and won some support across the ideological divide. As Gigi Sohn, a former top aide to the Federal Communications Commission chairman under President Obama put it during the trial, "If we return to a place where ... there's a presumption that big is bad — bad for democracy, bad for consumers — I think that's a good place for antitrust law and antitrust enforcement to be." Trump's appointment as the antitrust chief at the Justice Department, Makan Delrahim, is widely well-regarded.