Former president Donald Trump and his aides pushed for AT&T to sell CNN to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch while threatening to block the telecommunications company’s merger with Time Warner, according to a new book.
AT&T was approached twice with an offer to sell the news channel, which Mr Trump viewed as hostile, according to a pre-release copy of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s The Divider which The Independent obtained ahead of its 20 September publication date.
The authors report how Mr Trump summoned AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson to his Trump Tower office just after his 2016 election victory and complained about the then CNN boss Jeff Zucker, calling him “a bad guy” while also bragging that he’d “got” Mr Zucker his position.
Mr Stephenson reportedly left the meeting believing Mr Trump was a threat to the merger, and in the subsequent weeks AT&T would donate to the Trump inauguration fund and hire Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s attorney at the time, as an adviser (the latter of which Mr Stephenson later called “a big mistake”).
The first call from Mr Murdoch came in May 2017, five months after Mr Trump was sworn in as president.
The Fox founder asked Mr Stephenson: “How’s the deal going?”
He then said he’d “be happy to buy CNN from you” if doing so “would help get the deal done”.
Mr Stephenson replied: “Rupert, I’m not interested in selling”. But the Australian-born mogul would telephone a second time three months later, on the heels of a White House dinner with Mr Trump, his son-in-law turned adviser Jared Kushner, and the then White House chief of staff John Kelly.
The AT&T CEO again rebuffed Mr Murdoch’s offer.
Baker and Glasser report that AT&T believed the calls to be “an implicit quid pro quo” in which Mr Trump would not push the government to block the merger if AT&T would divest its news channel to the owner of a competitor whose network was closely allied with the then president.
They add that executives “viewed it as crude, almost mob-style extortion”.
One AT&T executive told them Mr Stephenson was “totally beyond pissed” over the Murdoch overtures and implied shakedown.
“He just felt that this was the most outrageous abuse of power that he’d ever seen.”
Ultimately, the Justice Department sued to block the merger, but a federal judge threw out the lawsuit.
