Here’s the thing about Donald Trump’s AT&T bribe that everyone missed
Donald Trump’s defense in his AT&T bribery scandal is that his administration is still standing in opposition to the AT&T – Time Warner merger. Under different circumstances, that would be something of a solid defense. The trouble for Trump is that we all know he’s fully corrupt and fully for sale. People are asking the right question: why didn’t the bribe work? But everyone is overlooking what this is really tells us.
Let’s throw out the notion that Michael Cohen was soliciting these bribes and Donald Trump somehow wasn’t on board with it. Of course he was. That’ll all come out after Cohen cuts his inevitable, though not necessarily imminent, plea deal. So Trump signed off on Cohen taking money from AT&T, knowing that AT&T wanted the merger approved in return. There’s only one reason why Trump then turned around and screwed AT&T on the merger: more money.
There are a few possibilities here, but they all center around more money. The first is that Trump decided the $600,000 from AT&T was not enough money to convince him to sign off on a multibillion dollar merger deal, and he went back and tried to extort more money out of AT&T, and the company refused. The second is that, because he was for sale to the highest bidder, someone else paid him more money to remain opposed to the merger. There are a number of telecom companies who would love to see the merger fall through. Did one of them outbid AT&T in the bribe department?
Donald Trump doesn’t have any personal financial stake in the telecom industry, and he certainly couldn’t care less about whether the AT&T – Time Warner merger is good or bad for America. So there’s no logical reason that his administration is still standing in opposition to the company that he had his fixer solicit bribe money from – unless it came down to even more money. Trump’s attempt at a defense gives away that this is even uglier than it initially appeared.
