AT&T drops VP over Cohen pay
AT&T’s top Washington exec was forced out of his high-paying job after he approved a payment of $600,000 to President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, a report said Friday.
Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, was said to be retiring in a memo put out by the telecom giant’s CEO on Friday, but an insider said Quinn was booted after the revelation about the payment, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“There is no other way to say it — AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake,” CEO Randall Stephenson said in the memo to employees.
AT&T said earlier this week that it hired Essential Consultants, a company created by Cohen, for “insights” into the Trump administration shortly after the president’s inauguration. Essential Consultants is the same company that was used to pay $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.
At the time, AT&T needed government approval for an $85 billion takeover of Time Warner, a deal the Justice Department wants to block.
AT&T said that investigators from special coun- sel Robert Mueller’s team contacted the company in late 2017 and that the company had cooperated.
The payments to Cohen, along with others by pharmaceutical giant Novartis, a US company tied to a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch and a Ko- rean aerospace company were revealed this week by Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti.
Novartis paid Cohen $1.2 million from February 2017 until February of this year, despite company officials concluding after a single meeting with the lawyer that he had nothing of value to offer them.
Its CEO, Vasant Narasimhan, called the payments a mistake. The company has confirmed it was contacted by Mueller’s team and said it fully cooperated.