US fights AT&T efforts to link Trump to merger controversy

Bloomberg

The US Justice Department is fighting AT&T Inc.’s search for evidence that President Donald Trump is behind the agency’s antitrust challenge to the takeover of Time Warner Inc.
Trump’s criticism of Time Warner’s CNN doesn’t justify AT&T’s “fishing expedition” for communications between the White House and the Justice Department, government lawyer Craig Conrath told US District Court Judge Richard Leon in Washington. While the president dislikes the news channel, Conrath said, “AT&T wants to turn that into a get-out-of-jail-free card for their illegal merger.”
AT&T is trying to learn if there was any political tampering in the department’s November lawsuit to stop the $85.4 billion merger, which the agency has said would harm consumers. The government has rejected the company’s request for a list of communications between the White House and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s office and between Sessions and the antitrust division, AT&T lawyer Daniel Petrocelli said.
Petrocelli complained to the judge that the Justice Department won’t expressly rule out the existence of the communications. If the government produces the list, the judge can look “and that will be the end of it, unless there’s something there,” he said.
“We don’t know whether there are three documents. We don’t know whether there are 30 documents,” Petrocelli said. “Ostensibly there shouldn’t be any.”
Leon said he would rule on Tuesday whether the Justice Department must identify any communications. During the hearing, AT&T’s lawyer complained that Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson and his Time Warner counterpart, Jeff Bewkes, had been questioned under oath about their belief that the president was behind the lawsuit, while the companies’ efforts to obtain information about the same subject had been stymied.
Conrath produced a written statement from Makan Delrahim, the head of Justice’s antitrust division, attesting that he hadn’t been directed by Trump. Conrath also argued the lawsuit couldn’t have been motivated by a desire to harm CNN because the network would have continued operating under the settlements the government was willing to accept, such as a sale of Turner Broadcasting.
“CNN doesn’t matter,” the government’s lawyer said. “We know we’re here to be judged on the facts and the law.” If approved, the merger would hand AT&T, the largest US pay-TV provider, ownership of some of the most popular providers of film and TV programming, including CNN, Warner Bros., TNT, TBS and HBO.