President Donald Trump ordered his former economic adviser Gary Cohn to pressure the Justice Department into filing a lawsuit to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger, the New Yorker reports, in an effort to retaliate against CNN.

The magazine reports that in the summer of 2017, a few months before the Justice Department filed suit to stop the plan, Trump ordered Cohn to intervene. But, according to the New Yorker, Cohn understood it would be improper for the president to use the Justice Department to undermine the powerful companies as punishment for unfavorable news coverage. “We are not going to do business that way,” Cohn reportedly told then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. The New Yorker said a spokesperson for Cohn declined to comment and Kelly did not respond to inquiries.