Trump claims CNN 'is bad for the USA' as he praises new AT&T investor

[backtoblue]

8. I think it was Michael Cohen who got money from AT &T

600,000....

MAY 11, 2018
AT&T Gave Trump’s Lawyer $600,000 to Help Get Its Merger Approved (and Its Taxes Cut)

But it is, of course, an ethical monstrosity. The Trump team’s handling of the AT&T-Time Warner merger looked fundamentally corrupt, even before these revelations. Last July, a senior White House official told the New York Times that administration advisers had discussed using Time Warner’s desired merger as a “point of leverage” over CNN (its subsidiary), in an attempt to coerce the news network into giving Trump more positive coverage. Before that, presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner had (reportedly) complained to Time Warner executive Gary Ginsberg about CNN’s “unfair coverage” of the president.

These actions cast a cloud of impropriety over the Justice Department’s subsequent decision to block the merger, which would have otherwise been quite defensible. Now, it appears that Trump’s inner circle not only tried to use the pending merger as a tool for extracting more favorable coverage from CNN — but also, at least in Cohen’s case, as one for extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars from AT&T. If any of that money did get back to the president —or else, to someone that Trump had an interest in shutting up — it might well represent the slimiest pay-to-play scandal in the history of the American presidency.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2018/05/at-and-t-paid-trumps-lawyer-to-get-its-merger-approved.html