If you’re like us, you must be wondering what’s up with AT&T? The telecom giant was revealed to have hired Michael Cohen with a series of $50,000 payments for his “insight.” The money was deposited in the same account used to silence porn star Stormy Daniels. Cohen’s “company,” Essential Consultants, was formed three weeks before the election and was nothing more than a shell. From The Atlantic:
- “Some months later, the AT&T contract with Essential Consultants began, although Avenatti’s litany of accusations only note four $50,000 payments, three in late 2017 and one in early 2018. This timeline raises a question of whether there could have been more payments, spanning the period from early 2017 to 2018.”
- “If AT&T paid a monthly fee of $50,000, Essential Consultants would have received more money in the year than AT&T’s highest-paid lobbying firms, Mayer Brown and Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer, and Feld, which were paid $420,000 and $400,000 respectively.”
- “In 2017, AT&T paid 14 firms at least $200,000 to work Washington for the telecommunications giant.”
But what was the money for?
- “Among the more charitable interpretations of AT&T’s payments to Essential Consultants is that they were a pay-for-play scheme to get access to the newly elected president.”
- “Less charitable interpretations go well beyond the baseline level of corruption that Americans have come to expect from their government. People know that powerful interests pay for access to American politicians, but they likely do not expect the president’s personal lawyer to commingle the money of corporations, adult-film actresses, and Russian oligarchs.”
Also, how did AT&T know to hire and pay Cohen? Who told them this was the place to make a large deposit? It stretches credibility to the breaking point to think that somehow a giant corporation suddenly gives large chunks of money to an unknown LLC owned by a man who had no role in the Trump campaign or the White House. And it wasn’t just AT&T. Novartis, a huge pharmaceutical company and a Russian oligarch were also funneling cash to Cohen.
So Michael Cohen’s shell company commingled funds from AT&T, a big pharma company, a Russian oligarch, and the hush-money payoff to a porn star.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY.
— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 9, 2018
A smart person I know described the AT&T and Novartis payments to Cohen as part of massive push by Trump associates in 2017 to cash in on corporations desperately trying to figure out Trump world and its pecking order.
— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) May 9, 2018