President Donald Trump late Saturday called on Netflix to fire board member Susan Rice or “pay the consequences,” after she said Democrats would push for corporate accountability if they regain power in the November midterm elections.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump described Rice, who served as President Joe Biden’s domestic policy chief and held top foreign policy posts under President Barack Obama, as “purely a political hack” with “no talent or skills.”

“HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK,” Trump wrote.

Rice argued during a podcast last week that “it is not going to end well” for corporations, news organizations, and law firms that “bent the knee” to Trump, and that their deference is unpopular.

“There is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they are going to be caught with more than their pants down,” Rice told Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “They’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box.”

She added, “If these corporations think that Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules, and say, ‘Never mind, we will forgive you for all the people you fired and all the policies and principles you violated, all the laws you skirted,’ I think they got another thing coming.”

Rice served on Netflix’s board from 2018 to 2021, and rejoined in 2023 after leaving the Biden administration.

A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment on Trump’s remarks, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump included a screenshot of an earlier post from far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who said Rice’s remarks were “anti-American” and urged the president to “kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now.” Loomer also tagged Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr in her post.

The comments come after Trump told NBC News earlier this month that the Department of Justice will “handle” the deal and that he’ll stay out of their review, after previously saying he’d be involved in the process. The DOJ is currently reviewing Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Netflix has proposed acquiring WBD in a $72 billion deal that would not include the company’s cable networks, including CNN.

Paramount Skydance, in response, launched a hostile takeover bid for all of WBD, promising its shareholders $30 per share in an all-cash deal.

The DOJ is investigating whether Netflix’s proposed deal could hurt competition, and it’s also asked how the company’s previous acquisitions have affected competition for creative talent, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

As part of its review, the agency is also examining whether the streaming giant uses anticompetitive tactics in negotiations with independent content creators for acquiring programming, Bloomberg reported, citing documents.

Steve Sunshine, Netflix’s outside counsel and the head of the global antitrust group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, told CNBC in a statement that the law firm hasn’t been given any notice that the DOJ is conducting a monopolization investigation.

Netflix’s Chief Legal Officer, David Hyman, said in a statement that the company operates in an “extremely competitive market.”

“Any claim that it is a monopolist, or seeking to monopolize, is unfounded,” Hyman said. “We neither hold monopoly power nor engage in exclusionary conduct and we’ll gladly cooperate, as we always do, with regulators on any concerns they may have.”

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said last month that he’s confident the company will be able to secure regulatory approval “because this deal is pro-consumer … pro-innovation, pro-worker.”

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Users were met with an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” and told to “please try again in a few minutes” as sites relying on the company’s infrastructure failed to load.

The problems began around 6:30 a.m. ET, when several websites intermittently failed before going fully dark.

NJ transit was affected by the Cloudflare outage. Christopher Sadowski

Cloudflare said it was dealing with a major outage on Tuesday, November 18, 2025. vladim_ka – stock.adobe.com

About 15 minutes later, Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption, saying, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”

It added, “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

An image of what Cloudflare is telling users after the major outage.

Down Detector, which tracks outages, briefly went down itself before showing spikes at X, OpenAI, bet365, League of Legends and payment firm Sage.

Cloudflare later updated its status, saying it was “continuing to investigate this issue,” and reported early signs of improvement: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

Cloudflare has not said what is the cause of the outage. MichaelVi – stock.adobe.com

Cloudflare has not identified the cause of the outage.

An NJ Transit spokesperson confirmed the outage, telling The Post: “Due to a vendor firewall-related issue, parts of NJ Transit’s digital services, including NJTransit.com, the NJ Transit mobile app and DepartureVision, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.”

“Our teams are monitoring the situation closely and will restore full functionality as soon as the vendor implements a fix,” the spokesperson added.

“We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.”

A spokesperson for New York City Emergency Management said the agency is tracking the situation and has not seen major effects so far.

“NYCEM is aware of reports of impacts to services provided by Cloudflare, and we are continuing to monitor and check for any major impacts or disruptions to city services and partner agencies,” a spokesperson for NYCEM told The Post.

“No significant resource requests have been made to NYCEM at this time. We will share updates if the situation significantly changes.”

Cloudflare handles cybersecurity and network services. Sundry Photography – stock.adobe.com

The outage is the latest significant glitch to hit the internet in recent years as users have witnessed just how vulnerable global digital infrastructure has become.

The most damaging was CrowdStrike’s failure from July of last year, when a faulty Falcon Sensor update crashed 8.5 million Windows systems and caused more than $10 billion in losses across aviation, healthcare and financial services.

In February 2024, an AT&T network configuration mistake crippled mobile service nationwide for more than 12 hours, blocking tens of millions of calls — including thousands to 911 — and triggering a federal settlement.

Cloud platforms suffered significant disruptions as well. Microsoft Azure endured multi-continent outages in 2023 and 2024 from a faulty router update, a DDoS attack and a regional power incident.

Most recently, Amazon Web Services, a provider that supports roughly one-third of the internet, experienced a DNS (domain name system) failure that took down major apps.

Other critical systems faltered too. The FAA’s NOTAM failure in 2023 grounded flights nationwide after a contractor deleted essential files, while ransomware attacks across healthcare in 2023 and 2024 forced hospitals into prolonged manual operations with average downtime of 24 days.

The Post has sought comment from Cloudflare.

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Censorship has been a point of tension for Spotify, which has faced heated backlash for flagging COVID-19 information from podcaster Joe Rogan and banning Steve Bannon from the platform.

“More relevantly, it’s the pressure we are seeing the EU put on companies to censor more,” a source familiar with the probe told The Post.

In a letter sent to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) slammed recent laws from the EU and UK that require social media platforms – even those based in the US – to censor “disinformation” and “harmful content” or face massive fines.

Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during a television interview at the US Capitol earlier this month. Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock

“These foreign laws, regulations, and judicial orders may limit or restrict Americans’ access to constitutionally protected speech in the United States. Indeed, that appears to be their very purpose,” Jordan wrote in a copy of the letter obtained by The Post.

The committee ordered Spotify to preserve documents and all contact with foreign governments, as well as individuals linked to the White House, and provide this information to the House by Aug. 12, according to a letter obtained by The Post.

The committee ordered Spotify to preserve documents and all contact with foreign governments and individuals tied to the White House. REUTERS

Spotify found itself caught in the midst of a controversy in 2022 over Rogan’s comments on COVID-19 – including claims that Ivermectin can cure the disease. 

Clinical trial data do not demonstrate that Ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19 in humans, according to the FDA.

Outraged critics accused Spotify of permitting the spread of misinformation, and musician Neil Young famously pulled his music from the platform in protest.

The company vowed to include advisories on COVID-19 content after a group of scientists and medical professionals signed an open letter calling for Spotify to “take action against mass-misinformation events.”

Podcaster Joe Rogan’s comments on COVID-19 threw Spotify into a free speech controversy in 2022. PowerfulJRE /YouTube

At the time, Biden-era press secretary Jen Psaki called it “a positive step,” but added that the White House wants platforms to do “more.”

Rogan recalled the chaos during an episode of his show last month – and dished that two unnamed former presidents had been involved in the protests against his discussion of the pandemic.

Spotify also banned Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in 2020 after he threatened Anthony Fauci and former FBI Director Christopher Wray, calling for Trump to put their “heads on pikes.”

The podcast returned to Spotify last month after a five-year suspension.

While Spotify is based in Stockholm, Sweden, it has a large presence among American users, as well as New York offices in the World Trade Center.

Along with pressure at home, aggressive foreign laws that punish online platforms for “disinformation” could be forcing companies like Spotify to censor content for all users, including those in the US, which is a violation of free speech, Jordan claimed.

In the letter, the chairman nodded to an incident in August 2024, when Thierry Breton, who at the time was responsible for enforcing EU content laws, warned X and its owner Elon Musk that it may need to censor content to prevent “potential spillovers in the EU.”

Elon Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zimmerman, Andronika

Though the social media platform is based in Texas, its content – in this case, a live interview with then-president elect Donald Trump – is also available to EU users, making it subject to EU regulations.

Breton called on Musk to ensure that “all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content.”

Many EU laws come hand-in-hand with hefty fines, like its Digital Services Act, which authorizes fines up to 6% of a platform’s global revenue – which could translate to billions of dollars for social media giants like Meta.

X has pushed back against some of these orders, even notching a win earlier this month over the Australian government.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a panel last September for Acquired, a technology podcast. REUTERS

Australia’s online safety commission had ordered X to block a post blasting government officials in favor of transgender care, or cough up a $520,000 fine.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has similarly pushed back on content restrictions, announcing in January – just before Trump took office – that Facebook has done “too much censorship.”

The Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner scrapped its fact-checking and content moderation policies, opting for a crowd-sourced “Community Notes” model similar to Musk’s on X.

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Martin Elling, 60, pleaded guilty in January to obstruction of justice related to criminal investigations into McKinsey’s consulting work with opioid manufacturers. McKinsey last year agreed to pay $650 million to settle those probes.

“Today’s sentencing sends a resounding message: those who attempt to obstruct justice and conceal the truth – no matter how senior, sophisticated, or well-connected – will be held accountable,” Leah Foley, US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said in a statement.

Martin Elling, a former senior partner at McKinsey & Company. McKinsey & Company

In a statement, Elling’s legal team confirmed the sentencing and said he is “extremely sorry.”

“He intends to spend the remainder of his life seeking to regain the trust of those whom he disappointed with his conduct, by supporting his family and friends and giving back to the less fortunate, as he has done for the past decades,” his lawyers told The Post.

Elling’s sentencing took place at a federal courthouse in Abingdon, Va., a town in Appalachia – one of the regions hit hardest by the opioid crisis, which killed more than 42,000 people across the country in 2016 alone, according to the National Library of Medicine.

Purdue Pharma engaged McKinsey in 2013 to drive OxyContin revenue and “turbocharge” sales, according to court documents.

Elling, who was also ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service and pay a $40,000 fine, served as the director of the team for about 30 of McKinsey’s engagements with the pharma giant, according to the Department of Justice.

In 2018, Elling emailed another senior partner with concerns that a Purdue board member was being sued by state attorneys general.

“It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything other [than] eliminating all our documents and emails. Suspect not but as things get tougher there someone might turn to us,” Elling wrote.

Purdue Pharma reportedly engaged McKinsey & Company to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales. REUTERS

A forensic analysis found that Elling had deleted materials from his company-issued laptop related to their work with Purdue – after seemingly emailing himself a reminder.

The subject line of a 2018 email to himself read “When home,” and the items listed included: “deleted old pur documents from laptop,” according to court documents.

He later emailed himself another reminder: “Remove Pur folder from garbage,” according to the analysis.

Elling was fired from McKinsey in 2020. 

The consulting firm in December apologized for its work with Purdue and “the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to his work for that client.”

McKinsey & Company agreed to pay $650 million to settle investigations into its work with opioid manufacturers. REUTERS

Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Elling to a year in prison.

“This is a rare case: a well-educated senior partner at one of the world’s foremost consulting companies was caught destroying documents relating to the investigation of OxyContin, a powerful opioid narcotic drug, against the tragic backdrop of the opioid crisis,” prosecutors said in a memo signed by Randy Ramseyer.

Ramseyer led a probe into Purdue in 2007 that secured guilty pleas from its executives for misleading doctors and patients about OxyContin risks.

McKinsey, one of the most prestigious consulting firms in the world, employs more than 700 senior partners who are typically paid millions of dollars a year.

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