From a New York Times news article:
Mr. Obama made a point of approaching HBO's chief executive, Richard Plepler, at the state dinner for France on Tuesday night.
"Where is my True Detective and Game of Thrones?" Mr. Obama asked Mr. Plepler as he told him that the coming weekend would be a good time to have the DVDs....
After his conversation, Mr. Obama waved over one of his aides to make sure that Mr. Plepler knew where to send the DVDs to ensure they would make it through White House security and end up in the president's hands.
Unexplored by the Times article are the following questions:
Does Mr. Obama plan to pay for these DVDs?
If he doesn't plan to pay for them, are they then gifts, subject to federal ethics laws, including the one that says, "an employee can never solicit or coerce the offering of a gift"?
If such a gift is legal in the American context, would it be illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act if, instead of giving the DVDs to Mr. Obama, the HBO executive gave the DVDs to the chief executive of a foreign government?
The Times article doesn't say how it got the information about the conversation between Mr. Obama and Mr. Plepler. It might have been from a pool report, or it might have been overheard by Times editor Jill Abramson, who was a guest at the dinner, in which case, good for her for getting it into the paper somehow, I suppose, but too bad the Times didn't press the issue of the presidential shakedown by a president who is being widely criticized at the moment by Republicans for the perception, with ObamaCare, immigration, and other matters, that he sees himself as unbound by law.