... a few months before the Justice Department filed suit, Trump ordered Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the Justice Department to intervene. According to a well-informed source, Trump called Cohn into the Oval Office along with John Kelly, who had just become the chief of staff, and said in exasperation to Kelly, “I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened! I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!”
Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, evidently understood that it would be highly improper for a President to use the Justice Department to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the country as punishment for unfavorable news coverage, and as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him. According to the source, as Cohn walked out of the meeting he told Kelly, “Don’t you ****ing dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/182497...re-new-yorker-jane-mayer-gary-cohn-john-kelly
y'all would be on much more solid ground complaining about censorship if y'all could acknowledge that this happened and is an extreme example of improper pressure being brought to bear on a news organization for more favorable coverage
Trump regularly threatened Jeff Zucker (then head of CNN) that harm would befall him (both personally and as head of a business) if he did not change his coverage.
The Trump administration was notably lax in its antitrust enforcement. His interest and demands for scrutiny of the AT&T-Time Warner deal stood out as unusual. To put it mildly.
