Law360 (July 6, 2018, 7:34 PM EDT) -- When AT&T public policy executive Bob Quinn sat down to a private dinner with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai last February, the meal at the chic Hotel Neri restaurant in Barcelona had the trappings of a typical meeting between U.S. politicos.

Pai was in town for an appearance at the Mobile World Congress, and Quinn had recently hired a consulting firm to offer AT&T insight into how to approach the Trump administration while the company tried to sell Washington on its proposed acquisition of Time Warner.

More than a year later, that rendezvous would contribute to Quinn losing his job after it was revealed that the consultant he hired was none other than Michael Cohen, the former attorney to President Donald Trump who'd paid adult film star Stormy Daniels to hush up an alleged affair. AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson called hiring Cohen a "big mistake," and Quinn's ousting created ripples in Washington circles where his conduct was nothing out of the ordinary. To many, he was simply trying every available avenue to reach the most unconventional White House in memory.

His fate calls attention to the fine line that's always existed between paying for legitimate expertise and the murkier practice of paying for access in Washington. 

"I don't think that any particular segment in the industry ... has really had enormous success at being able to figure out how to lobby the White House," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of advocacy group Public Knowledge.

After Quinn's downfall, major players in the telecom space are still trying to figure out where that elusive line falls between acceptable and disreputable relationships. T-Mobile now finds itself under the microscope for soliciting advice from embattled former Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski, who has been tied to a consulting firm hired to work on the wireless giant's proposed merger with Sprint. 

And T-Mobile's German parent company, Deutsche Telekom, spent roughly $16.3 million on domestic lobbying to track FCC issues during 2017, disclosure documents indicate. Under that arrangement, the U.S. subsidiary of the company was reimbursed hefty sums for monitoring media reports and attending public policy discussions in Washington, according to public records.

The advising arrangements also underscore that many people claim to offer access to a new administration, but the telecom industry is struggling to identify who can actually deliver policy outcomes, Feld said.

"With somebody as mercurial as Trump ... you can't be sure who the actual players are," he said. "Somebody who may have access today may be on the outs tomorrow."

This means that large companies like AT&T may have aligned themselves with unsavory characters early on. The telecom giant's six-figure sum paid to the same attorney who paid off Daniels was "a bit of a gaffe in the beginning," said Grace Koh, a DLA Piper partner who most recently worked as a Trump adviser on technology, telecom and cybersecurity policy.

Nevertheless, she said she was surprised to see Quinn forced out of his high-level post over the incident. In Washington, when a public policy executive aligns their corporation with well-connected individuals, it is often viewed as that executive doing their job. However, other factors can darken that perception, such as AT&T's high-profile acquisition of Time Warner, which likely attracted additional scrutiny, she said.

Inside the Beltway, this type of attempt to influence the public sector "sort of borders on the acceptable," Koh said. "That's the awful part about it."

It's important to remember, however, that hiring based on personal access to decision makers rather than industry expertise is common throughout presidential history, said David Goodfriend, a telecom expert and president of the Goodfriend Group.

"Politics has always been an influencing factor on regulatory, legislative and even law enforcement and merger review — always. It would be disingenuous for me to say that for the first time ever, we're seeing political favoritism," said Goodfriend, who worked as deputy staff secretary for President Bill Clinton.

For example, Clark Clifford become known as "the man to hire in Washington if you wanted to get something done" beginning in President Harry S. Truman's administration, and Tony Podesta was regarded as a powerful lobbyist during Clinton's tenure because his brother was Clinton's chief of staff, Goodfriend said.

However, a new level of egregiousness has surfaced during the Trump administration, Goodfriend said, as the president's inner circle is baldly "assessing friend versus foe" and offering rewards and impediments accordingly.

Some of these advantages appear to have directly influenced the telecom sector. Quinn's tapas dinner with Pai soon after Cohen's hiring is one example, said Austin Evers, executive director of watchdog group American Oversight.

"This arrangement strongly suggests that Mr. Cohen was hired to provide information about, or access to, FCC regulators by virtue of his relationship with the president," Evers said. "A private dinner with the individual who hired the president's personal lawyer suggests that corporations may have improperly influenced FCC policy."

Conversely, an AT&T spokesperson told Law360 that "there was no legal or lobbying work done" by Cohen. Instead, the company hired several consultants to help it understand how the new administration would approach issues including telecom policy, the spokesperson said.

According to an AT&T fact sheet, the company "didn't ask [Cohen] to set up any meetings for us with anyone in the administration and he didn't offer to do so."

Still, the saga can be read as "a case study of the transactional nature of Trump's Washington, D.C., where lobbying for the telecom industry along with other industries is extremely vibrant and apparently successful," Evers said. 

The group's study of FCC calendars and other records indicate high levels of access secured by other large companies with stakes in FCC decisions. Consider Pai's April 2017 trip to Silicon Valley, where he convened a roundtable discussion with tech leaders including Facebook, Salesforce and Oracle. He later said he was seeking "common ground" on the question of open internet rules.

After the event wrapped up, however, he headed to a private lunch with executives from Oracle, a cloud computing company that publicly backed the net neutrality repeal. The meeting occurred on April 17, less than 10 days before he announced details of his plan to undo the popular Obama-era internet regulations.

"There in black and white, you see an inside track for people who have policy preferences that align with the administration," Evers said.

In contrast with the friction that the AT&T-Time Warner deal encountered after the president publicly slammed the combination, other blockbuster media mergers may appear to be receiving kid-glove treatment. Take the proposed merger of broadcasting giants Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. and Tribune Media Co., which would reach more households nationwide than allowed under current FCC media ownership rules.

The FCC has simultaneously been rolling back ownership controls that many saw as stopgaps for the controversial deal, which is expected to create a right-leaning broadcasting empire if approved. The solicitousness with which the FCC has handled the Sinclair-Tribune deal so far seems to lack any pretense, Goodfriend said.

"The window dressing isn't even attached to the window. It's falling off," he said. "It's like, 'We're going to get these guys their deal.'"

While such matters may be top-of-mind for the telecom industry, media operatives must compete for Oval Office attention amid escalating rhetoric on hot-button issues like immigration and trade. And hiring well-connected advisers may seem like the only way to secure big asks for the telecom industry.

Experts agree that Trump tends to pay more attention to technology-related issues only when they intersect with other issues that are higher on his priority list, such as support for his controversial efforts to combat illegal immigration, trade policies and political fortunes. If a technology preference is emerging, it's that incumbent telecom giants and large corporations in general are now likely to find friendlier footing and an open door at the White House than the Silicon Valley darlings that former President Barack Obama championed. Big media companies are also well-positioned to get the president's attention by appealing to his "sheer interest in 'how does it affect me and my portrayal,'" Goodfriend said.

That's a marked difference from the Obama administration, which made tech a priority by lending a sympathetic ear to "edge providers" like Facebook and Google — Obama even put out a personal plea for the FCC to pass its now-reversed net neutrality rules.

For example, Trump briefly made FCC licensing policies a topic of national conversation last year when he suggested NBC could have its broadcast licenses yanked for running what he said were "fake news" stories about him.

Appealing to the president's self-interest may be helpful in more ways than one when it comes to reaching the White House. During her time as a House subcommittee staffer and a White House telecom policy adviser, Koh said she found success in "hooking things onto other national priorities."

On the topic of building broadband funding into the national budget proposal, Koh said she pitched the concept as something that's important to Trump's rural constituents. "That was relatively easy to do because it was so much a part of the president's voter base," she said. "One of the priorities for this administration was to show the rural voter base that there was attention being paid to what their issues were."

Now in private practice, Koh said she can't directly lobby the administration due to her previous government roles. But she can take her insider knowledge and apply it to the advice she gives her clients. This distinction between expertise and access is what still seems to elude some of the operatives in Trump's orbit.

"I think that that's where the line gets drawn," she said.

--Editing by Alanna Weissman.

Update: This story has been updated with the current name of the Goodfriend Group. 

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