Trump tried to block the $85bn AT&T-Time Warner merger to spite CNN, according to a scathing new profile of his cozy relationship with Fox News
President Donald Trump attempted to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner to spite CNN, according to an explosive new profile of the White House's tangled relationship with Fox News.
A report by The New Yorker out Monday said that Trump told Gary Cohn, then the Director of the National Economic Council, to "intervene" in the deal in a meeting in 2017.
Cohn reportedly stormed out of the meeting.
In the summer of 2017 the president reportedly called Cohn in for an Oval Office meeting with newly-appointed chief of staff John Kelly, who has also since left the administration.
An unnamed source told the publication that Trump said in exasperation to Kelly "I've been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing's happened!
"I've mentioned it fifty times. And nothing's happened. I want to make sure it's filed. I want that deal blocked!'"
New Yorker writer Jane Mayer said Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, understood that it would be "highly improper" for the president to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the US "as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him."
Mayer noted that News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch opposed the Time Warner-AT&T merger as "a matter of shrewd business."
She continued: "Trump also opposed the deal, but many people suspected that his objection was a matter of petty retaliation against CNN."
The source told the New Yorker that Cohn stormed out of the meeting, telling Kelly "Don't you f---ing dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way."
Despite the president's reported hostility to the deal, a federal judge last June approved AT&T's $85 billion merger with Time Warner, which owns CNN among a range of other media brands.