Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
AT&T paid Cohen for advice on merger, more
Three days after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, AT&T turned to his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for help on a wide portfolio of issues pending before the federal government — including the telecom giant’s proposed merger with Time Warner, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The internal documents reveal that Cohen’s $600,000 deal with AT&T specified that he would provide advice on the $85 billion merger, which required the approval of federal antitrust regulators.
Trump had voiced opposition to the merger during the campaign, and his administration ultimately sided against AT&T. The Department of Justice filed suit in November to block the deal, a case that is still pending.
Cohen’s deals with AT&T and other corporate clients were first revealed this week by an attorney for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, but the new documents obtained by The Post offered greater detail about his arrangement with the telecom company and the type of work he had been hired to perform.
It is unclear what insight Cohen — a longtime real estate attorney — could have provided AT&T on complex telecom matters.
At the same time he was collecting $50,000 a month from AT&T, Cohen was being paid large sums to advise other companies on a variety of issues. In the wake of Trump’s election, corporate clients paid Cohen at least $2.95 million through a company called Essential Consultants, according to figures confirmed by the companies.
Essential Consultants was the same company Cohen used in October 2016 to route money to Daniels in exchange for her agreement not to disclose an alleged sexual encounter with Trump.
AT&T and the pharmaceutical company Novartis, another Cohen client, said this week that they provided information about their dealings with Trump’s lawyer to special counsel Robert Mueller last year. Cohen is also under investigation by prosecutors in New York for possible bank fraud and campaign finance violations.
A “scope of work” describing Cohen’s contract in an internal AT&T document shows that he was hired to “focus on specific long-term planning initiatives as well as the immediate issue of corporate tax reform and the acquisition of Time Warner.”
He was also directed to “creatively address political and communications issues” facing the company and advise the company on matters before the Federal Communications Commission.
AT&T declined to comment on the documents, which were provided to The Post anonymously, but did not challenge their authenticity.
Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, declined to comment. Cohen did not respond to requests for comment.
The internal AT&T documents show that Cohen was supposed to spend half of his time on “legislative policy development” and the other half on “regulatory policy development.” Payments to Cohen were approved by two executives in AT&T’s public affairs office in Washington.
The documents specified that Cohen, who was not a registered lobbyist, was to spend none of his time engaged in lobbying.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that the president was unaware of Cohen’s consulting agreements.
AT&T has declined to comment on the specific amount it paid to Essential Consultants. Under the one-year contract, the company has said, Cohen was hired to provide “insights into understanding the new administration.”
In an internal email to employees obtained by The Post, AT&T said Cohen was among “several consultants” the company hired in early 2017 “to help us understand how the President and his administration might approach a wide range of policy issues important to the company.
At the time the contract was signed, AT&T was trying to build ties to the new administration. Months earlier, Trump had come out strongly against the proposed merger with Time Warner, which owns CNN — a network he often berates as “fake news.”
In the wake of the revelation of Cohen’s link to AT&T, ranking Democrats on antitrust subcommittees in both the House and Senate sent a joint letter to the Justice Department’s top competition enforcer, Makan Delrahim, asking whether he knew of the company’s payments to Cohen during his agency’s independent review of the Time Warner merger.
Meanwhile, Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan sent an email to employees Thursday calling the company’s $1.2 million contract with Cohen a “mistake” and acknowledging that the revelation “was not a good day for Novartis.”