AT&T’s $600,000 payment to Michael Cohen looks like wasted money

[Commentary] AT&T's hiring of Michael Cohen in January 2017 to advise the company on an $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner looked like a smart strategy. In retrospect, AT&T's contract with Cohen appears to have been a complete failure. In November 2017, 10 months after AT&T retained Cohen, the Justice Department sued to block the company's purchase of Time Warner, citing antitrust concerns. Whatever efforts Cohen made to grease the skids did not work. The only visible evidence of President Trump taking a friendlier posture toward AT&T during the period when the company paid Cohen a total of $600,000 is the shout-out President Trump gave AT&T in December 2017, during a White House event marking passage of a Republican tax bill. Short of persuading AT&T to oust Zucker or sell CNN — something the Trump administration would like AT&T to do — Cohen may have had little chance of paving the way to regulatory approval of the Time Warner acquisition. Still, the exposure of his apparent ineffectiveness on behalf of AT&T adds insult to the ongoing injury of his federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations.