May 2017

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is launching initiatives that will shape the fate of America’s wireless industry. It started to examine competition in the market, and it will propose taking Depression-era utility regulations off mobile broadband networks while protecting an open internet. This is only the beginning. The FCC is acting on a rare opportunity to correct its recent mistakes and restore the Clinton-era light-touch regulatory framework that will drive economic growth and job creation. The FCC should begin by liberating wireless from the heavy-handed rules of a 1934 law called Title II, which was created when phones were held in two hands. This antiquated law imposes powerful economic regulations on the internet, chilling investment in broadband.

The FCC will propose to unshackle the net from this millstone of a law. This would restore the bipartisan light-touch policies that nurtured the burgeoning internet Americans enjoy today. The FCC can take a few other discrete steps. It would accelerate the mobile revolution if it streamlined rules that slow the construction of wireless infrastructure—and deprive consumers of the benefits of next-gen technologies. The agency should also update rules that dictate how much of a particular radio frequency a carrier can own in a market. America’s brilliant wireless engineers are inventing new ways to turn yesterday’s junk frequencies into tomorrow’s gold, rendering current regulations obsolete.

[Robert McDowell is a partner at Cooley LLP and chief public policy adviser to Mobile Future; he served as a FCC Commissioner 2006-13.]

President Donald Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February 2017, according to a memo Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” President Trump told Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” President Trump told Comey that Flynn had done nothing wrong, according to the memo. Comey did not say anything to Trump about curtailing the investigation, only replying: “I agree he is a good guy.”

In a statement, the White House denied the version of events in the memo.

The existence of Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the President has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and FBI investigation into links between Trump’s associates and Russia. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the President immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Comey created documenting what he perceived as the President’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An FBI agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.