Did AT&T Pay Michael Cohen $200K To Help Kill Net Neutrality?
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Aiden Pink May 9, 2018
The telecommunications company AT&T admitted on Tuesday that it paid Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen $200,000 for “insights” into the Trump administration.
The lawyer representing porn star Stormy Daniels, who is suing Cohen, said that AT&T made four payments of $50,000 to Cohen’s company. AT&T admitted that their payments with Cohen, which was to “provide insights into understanding the new administration,” ended in December 2017. If that is true, the payments would have stopped around the time that the Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Trump appointee Ajit Pai, repealed net neutrality regulations that AT&T opposed.
Soon after the regulations were ended, AT&T introduced new features that would not have been allowed under the old regulations, Daily Kos reported.
But AT&T has not gotten everything it wanted from the administration: The Justice Department is suing to block the merger of the company with Time Warner.
Daniels is suing Cohen over his actions related to a nondisclosure agreement designed to prevent her from talking about an alleged affair with President Trump.
Other firms so far known to have made large payments to Cohen’s company include the pharmaceutical giant Novartis and a firm controlled by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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