Lobbying

Internet Association announced that [former Benton Foundation Headlines writer!] Jon Berroya joined the organization as Senior Vice President and General Counsel to lead IA’s legal and regulatory efforts. Berroya joins IA from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), where he was Vice President, Legal Affairs. At ESA, Berroya was responsible for managing all aspects of the organization’s efforts to enforce its members’ intellectual property rights and counseled the association on cybersecurity and privacy issues.

T-Mobile is getting advice from Corey Lewandowski, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, as part of a lobbying effort to help the telecommunications company secure federal approval for its proposed takeover of Sprint. T-Mobile said it hired Turnberry Solutions in August. “Corey Lewandowski is now affiliated with that firm and they have offered perspective to T-Mobile on a variety of topics, including the pending transaction,” the company said. According to documents,  Lewandowski receives a cut of the fees paid to the lobbying firm on the T-Mobile contract.

In June 2013, halfway through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) negotiations, a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked documents on America’s global surveillance. The documents showed that the National Security Agency had backdoor deals with major Silicon Valley companies, allowing them to use consumer data as the basis of their counterintelligence operations.

AT&T apologized for for its “serious misjudgment” in hiring President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen to provide “insights” into how the new administration would handle issues like net neutrality and AT&T’s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable. Although Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai denied hearing from Cohen, new scheduling documents obtained through FOIA by corruption watchdog American Oversight show Chairman Pai met with with top AT&T executives at a private dinner in Barcelona a month after the company began paying Cohen.

If you know anything about AT&T’s history, its relationship with Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen shouldn’t be too surprising. The company has an army of lawyers at its disposal, is hair-trigger litigious, and is no stranger to backroom dealing in the Capitol. During 2017, the company paid $16,780,000 to 31 lobby firms, according to government filings. 

One of the largest contributions to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee in 2016 appears to have been orchestrated by a set of powerful conservative legal activists who have since been put in the driver’s seat of the administration’s push to select and nominate federal judges. 

The ouster of AT&T's top lobbyist caught DC telecom insiders by surprise and underscored that even the most well-oiled Washington machine isn't immune to inadvertent entanglement with Trumpworld scandal. 

In another seeming flareup of his chronic foot-in-mouth disease, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on May 11 told the Huffington Post that the president “denied the merger” sought by AT&T and Time-Warner.

The White House pushed back on concerns regarding newly-discovered payments to President Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen from corporations looking to lobby the White House, arguing that the episode proves the President will not cater to “special interests.” 

[Commentary] AT&T's hiring of Michael Cohen in January 2017 to advise the company on an $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner looked like a smart strategy. In retrospect, AT&T's contract with Cohen appears to have been a complete failure. In November 2017, 10 months after AT&T retained Cohen, the Justice Department sued to block the company's purchase of Time Warner, citing antitrust concerns. Whatever efforts Cohen made to grease the skids did not work. The only visible evidence of President Trump taking a friendlier posture toward AT&T during the period when the company p