The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN. Time Warner saw the deal as essential to its survival at a time when the media business is increasingly dominated by giant competitors such as Google and Facebook. Murdoch understood this impulse: in 2014, 21st Century Fox had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Time Warner. For him, opposing his rivals’ deal was a matter of shrewd business. Trump also opposed the deal, but many people suspected that his objection was a matter of petty retaliation against CNN. Although Presidents have traditionally avoided expressing opinions about legal matters pending before the judicial branch, Trump has bluntly criticized the plan. The day after the Justice Department filed suit to stop it, he declared the proposed merger “not good for the country.” Trump also claimed that he was “not going to get involved,” and the Justice Department has repeatedly assured the public that he hasn’t done so.
However, in the late summer of 2017, 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!”
Richard G. Kleindienst, the former United States Attorney General, pleaded guilty today to a minor criminal offense growing from his testimony before the Senate in 1972 during an investigation of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation case.
Mr. Kleindienst, who was Acting Attorney General at the time, thus became the first Cabinet‐level officer to be convicted in matters related to the Watergate scandals. He is also the first former Attorney General ever to be convicted of misconduct perpetrated while serving in the office.
He appeared today before Chief Judge George L. Hart Jr. in United States District Court on a technical charge of refusing to testify before Congress.
Standing soldier‐straight before the bench, he listened as clerk read the charge in a criminal information filed against him by the Watergate special prosecutor, Leon Jawdrski. that, after calling him a vulgar name, had ordered him to drop any plans to appeal a key item in the antitrust case.
The White House later confirmed that such an order had been issued and Mr. Kleindienst confirmed it again today.Washington Post, 12/1/97:
The best way to intimidate the nation's three major television networks, President Richard M. Nixon concluded in 1971, was to keep the constant threat of an antitrust suit hanging over them.
"If the threat of screwing them is going to help us more with their programming than doing it, then keep the threat," Nixon told a White House aide in a tape-recorded Oval Office conversation recently transcribed for the first time. "Don't screw them now. [Otherwise] they'll figure that we're done
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