Judge Nixes AT&T Access To Trump Information

A federal judge on Tuesday undercut AT&T Inc.’s plans to argue that the Justice Department is challenging its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. for political reasons, ruling that the company can’t have information on internal government deliberations, reports The Wall Street Journal.

AT&T has argued that the government’s case was influenced by President Donald Trump’s opposition to the deal and his disdain for Time Warner’s CNN, a network he has criticized repeatedly.

The Justice Department has denied the charges, accusing the companies at a court hearing Friday of raising a Trump-bias “sideshow” as a way to justify an anticompetitive merger.

The companies said they didn’t relish raising the bias issue, but said they had reason to question whether they had been treated fairly. They argue their $85 billion deal won’t hurt consumers and shouldn’t have been challenged by the Justice Department.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s seven-page ruling Tuesday said there are high legal hurdles for defendants seeking access to government communications to build a bias defense and the companies “have fallen far short” of overcoming them.

The companies “have not made a credible showing that they have been especially singled out” by the Justice Department’s lawsuit, Judge Leon wrote.

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson has called the tensions between President Trump and CNN the “elephant in the room,” and has noted that the department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, came to the position after serving as a deputy White House counsel for Mr. Trump.