President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Ranting and raving? If that is what you read into my post, knock yourself out.

This wasn't "planted" by AT&T and it isn't nonsense.

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AT&T has been told by the US Department of Justice that it needs to sell CNN, Time Warner’s cable news channel, to get its $84.5bn acquisition of the media company approved, according to three people with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

It's what happened. You are creating your own narrative that belies the corruption of this whole thing. It was the use of the justice department to harass an entity that Trump had a problem with.

BTW, farther down in that story:

But Makan Delrahim, the new head of the justice department’s antitrust division, has been more conciliatory, saying before taking office that he did not believe the merger posed a “major antitrust problem”.

“The sheer size of it, and the fact that it’s media, I think will get a lot of attention,” Mr Delrahim told a Canadian TV station in 2016 after the AT&T deal with Time Warner was announced. “However, I don’t see this as a major antitrust problem.”

People with direct knowledge of the antitrust negotiations said Mr Delrahim had changed his view since taking office.

 

No, the FT was not wrong. The DOJ got busted trying its strong arm tactics and as is the case with many things in the Trump White House, it shifted its story -- what you are linking to came days later because they were taking a beating from people were calling out the conflict between Trump constantly attacking CNN and then his justice department singling it out. So they tried to create a story that said, "Oh no, this isn't about the orange guy's vendetta for CNN."

First of all selling all of Turner would entail them selling CNN. So it's the same thing anyhow. Which was what Trump wanted. And the bullshit about (again, those stories you are linking to were days after it came out that they went to AT&T and tried to strong arm them into selling CNN. ... you want to talk about "planting" things?) "Or you can sell DirectTV," makes no sense. They may as well have said, "Or you can voluntarily just not do the deal" -- it was the POINT of the deal.

And the reality still is. ... 1) This was a vertical integration of non competing businesses. The DOJ hadn't gone after that kind of deal in decades, and had never gone after a deal like this one in particular. Even by the corrupt standards of anti-trust actions and the politics behind them, there was no basis for this. 2) Trump had made his feelings about CNN clear in those campaign rallies and had tweeted endlessly and angrily about them. Then. ... boom. 3) The head of the antitrust division had said he saw no problem with this deal (in large part because it was vertical). ... and then when Trump became president, he suddenly saw all kinds of problems with it. Amazing. 4) The government walked into court naked and put up a very weak case. It had nothing. It couldn't even plausibly make a case for the nonsensical "harm" it was alleging. 5) What the case did do was demonstrate what abuse of power looks like.