Friday, May 11, 2018

It's not often a CEO will concede a mistake


However it is not often that mistake is as high profile as paying a $600,000 bribe to the President's bagman and having it splashed across the headlines nationwide. Something of that nature does require a public apology.
AT&T's chief executive said Friday that the company made a “serious misjudgment” to seek advice from President Trump's personal attorney and announced that its top lobbying executive in Washington would be leaving the firm.

“There is no other way to say it — AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake,” AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson wrote in a companywide internal email.

The email comes after revelations that AT&T agreed to pay $600,000 to Cohen last year in exchange for advice on how to approach the Trump administration. Internal AT&T documents, obtained by The Washington Post on Thursday, outlined how Cohen was expected to provide guidance on matters facing the company at the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department, specifically mentioning AT&T's $85 billion Time Warner merger.

Three days after Trump was sworn into office, the telecom giant turned to Cohen for help on a wide portfolio of issues pending before the federal government — including the Time Warner merger, according to documents The Post obtained. Trump had voiced opposition to the merger during the presidential campaign, and his administration ultimately opposed the AT&T effort. The Justice Department filed suit in November to block the deal, and that case is pending.

Cohen’s deals with AT&T and other corporate clients were first revealed this week by an attorney for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, but the new documents obtained by The Post offered greater detail about his arrangement with the telecom company and the type of work he had been hired to perform.

It is unclear what insight Cohen — a longtime real estate attorney and former taxicab operator — could have provided AT&T on complex telecom matters. At the same time that he was collecting $50,000 a month from AT&T, Cohen was being paid large sums to advise other companies on a broad variety of issues, including the Affordable Care Act, accounting practices and real estate.

“Everything we did was done according to the law and entirely legitimate,” Stephenson wrote. Companies routinely hire political consultants at the outset of new administrations, he said, and AT&T has done so in the past.

But, Stephenson added, AT&T's Washington team failed to fully vet Cohen before hiring him, and that Stephenson takes responsibility.

In a supplemental document linked from the email, Stephenson explained that Cohen was the one who approached the company offering insight on the administration’s “key players, their priorities and how they think.”
And it was all a big mistake even though it was allegedly all legitimate. And we will never do it again unless we get another chance. And despite this example of patently bad judgement, Mr. Stephenson will give himself a big raise and a large helping of bonuses and stock options.

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