Did AT&T Pay Michael Cohen $200K To Help Kill Net Neutrality?
Michael Cohen. Image by twitter
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would have stopped around the time that the Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Trump appointee Ajit Pai, repealed net neutrality regulations that AT&T opposed.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
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
