The CEOs of a couple of corporations were forced to apologize on Friday after it was revealed that they paid President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, millions for apparent access to the administration.
The head of AT&T has sent out a memo to his employees that expressed regret that the company's payments to Cohen, who is under federal investigation, were revealed by Stormy Daniel's lawyer, Michael Avanettti.
"Our company has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons these last few days and our reputation has been damaged. There is no other way to say it — AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake," AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall L. Stephenson wrote to his employees in the memorandum, according to The New York Times. Stephenson admitted that hiring Cohen "was a serious misjudgment" and admitted that "in this instance, our Washington D.C. team’s vetting process clearly failed, and I take responsibility for that.
Although Stephenson apologized, he made it clear that he wasn't confessing to any illegal behavior. Instead, he insisted that "everything we did was done according to the law and entirely legitimate" and that Cohen did not lobby on AT&T's behalf as a result of the money that was given to him by the company. Stephenson's note comes after it was revealed that AT&T had paid Cohen an amount of $600,000 in order to get his advice on an $85.4 billion merger with Time Warner. It was a revelation that rais serious questions about why AT&T would seek Cohen's advice when he had no firsthand knowledge about the issues facing telecommunications companies like AT&T. As Jennifer Rubin wrote in The Washington Post:
Equally as interesting and troubling is why major public corporations saw fit to pay exorbitant sums of cash to someone with zero expertise in any substantive policy matter, who had no position in the administration, who was not a registered lobbyist and who had few, if any, congressional connections. One might understand a single company mistaking Cohen for a policy Svengali but why did multiple corporations line up to stuff money in the pockets of Trump’s lawyer?
While AT&T failed to adequately answer Rubin's question, it did announce that it had found an internal corporate scapegoat in Senior Executive Vice President Bob Quinn. Although their internal memo said that Quinn was retiring, the 57-year-old executive is actually being forced out of the company because of his involvement in setting up a financial relationship with Cohen, according to The Wall Street Journal. AT&T's Washington operations will instead be handled by the company’s general counsel, David McAtee.
"David’s number one priority is to ensure every one of the individuals and firms we use in the political arena are people who share our high standards and who we would be proud to have associated with AT&T," Stephenson wrote in the memo. The Journal also explained how, regardless of the exact nature of AT&T's relationship with Cohen, the company has been well-known for its habit of becoming heavily involved in American politics.
AT&T is no stranger to Washington politics. It has one of the largest lobbying operations in the capital and its political-action committee is one of the country’s top corporate contributors. AT&T spent more than $16 million on federal lobbying each of the last two years.
In the 2016 election, AT&T’s political-action committee gave a total of $4.7 million to hundreds of candidates and groups in both parties. It was also a major donor to both political conventions, giving $1.5 million to the host committee for the Democratic convention and $4.2 million to the host committee for the Republican convention.
AT&T is not the only corporate giant embarrassed by the revelations influence peddling.
Novartis, a drugmaker located in Switzerland, also has egg on its face after it was revealed that they gave $1.2 million to Cohen for information on how to gain influence with President Donald Trump's administration, according to Politico.
"We made a mistake in entering into this engagement and, as a consequence, are being criticized by a world that expects more from us," wrote Navartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan in a Thursday email to his employees.
He added, "Personally and for my family, yesterday was also a difficult day, as unfounded stories spread through the US news. While I was not involved with any aspect of this situation, the facts did not matter. I went to sleep frustrated and tired. But I woke up this morning full of determination."
While much of the political world has professed shock at the news about Michael Cohen's LLC receiving so much money from major companies, Politico's Playbook was busying giving the corporations cover.
Senior Washington correspondent Anna Palmer went on a Twitter rant to explain why everyone's outrage is misplaced.
"A scintilla of information gives a company an edge," Palmer wrote on Twitter. "That price tag would be completely worth it for a member of Hill leadership — and intel on Trump is worth much more than that. It seems like Cohen offered squat."
Palmer also noted that "people work for years on the Hill for $60,000 to make three times as much money on K Street to work much shorter days." As she noted to a hypothetical "24-year-old Hill aide," lobbyists "don't like you for your personality. You're boring and green. They want to know what your boss is talking about, what he's worked up about and what he's thinking about on random bill X."
Palmer is correct, of course. Washington DC has always been a town defined by greed, in which people with the right business and political connections can shape policy far more effectively than the vast majority of the population. What has happened with Trump, however, is that the disproportionate attention on the rest of his allegedly corrupt activities — from possibly colluding with Russia in order to win the 2016 election to allowing the interests of his business empire (from which he hasn't divested himself) to shape public policy — has helped draw more attention to the type of casual corruption which is often legal and almost always normal.
If any good can come out of the Trump scandals, it will perhaps be raising awareness of how Washington can indeed be a swamp — and then working to get rid of as much of that swampiness as possible.
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