WASHINGTON — As AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson pitched Congress in late 2016 on his company’s proposed megamerger with Time Warner, he offered lawmakers an aw-shucks account of his experience in the nation’s capital.

“I’m a novice in the world of politics,” he said.

That notion, which strained credulity, faces new skepticism after the Dallas-based telecom giant admitted it had paid President Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen hundreds of thousands of dollars last year for "insights into understanding the new administration."

The payments put AT&T in the thick of the controversy surrounding Cohen — Trump’s longtime fixer who, among other things, gave hush money to a porn actress who alleges an affair with Trump.

On Wednesday, AT&T said it had been contacted by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The company said that after an inquiry from Mueller's team, it provided information last November and December about its payments to Cohen.

"A few weeks later, our consulting contract with Cohen expired at the end of the year. Since then, we have received no additional questions from the Special Counsel's office and consider the matter closed," the company said in a statement.

But the high-dollar arrangement, which AT&T says involved no lobbying or legal work, also offers a peek behind the curtain at the vast political machinery the company employs when it has enormous business and policy stakes before the federal government.

A once-in-a-generation overhaul of the tax code. A repeal of net neutrality rules. And, most important, a fight with the Justice Department over its planned $108.7 billion Time Warner merger deal.

All of those issues have been met head-on in recent months by AT&T — which, contrary to Stephenson’s depiction, is among the most active companies in America in spending millions of dollars on lobbying and political contributions to lawmakers of both parties.

Big stakes

In a Washington where everyone is trying to get a read on an unconventional president, AT&T would have been as motivated as anyone to find an edge.

“You’re going to be desperate to try to get information about what and how he thinks,” said Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, a nonprofit think tank. “As unpleasant and ugly as it is, you’re going to go to the people who know him best.”

AT&T’s payments to Cohen were disclosed Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels who was paid $130,000 by Cohen’s company to keep quiet about her alleged tryst with Trump.

The telecom giant made four payments totaling $200,000 between last October and January to Cohen's Essential Consulting, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. But a source told Reuters on Wednesday that AT&T had a yearlong contract with the company. A full-year contract for $50,000 per month would total $600,000.

Essential Consulting also received payments from other companies, including one linked to a Russian oligarch.

AT&T confirmed its payments to Cohen in a statement Tuesday. On Wednesday, it sent an email to all of its U.S. employees, saying it wanted them to "know the facts."

The company said it hired “several consultants to help us understand how the president and his administration might approach a wide range of policy issues important to the company, including regulatory reform at the [Federal Communications Commission], corporate tax reform and antitrust enforcement.”

AT&T said that Cohen was simply one of those consultants, and that the company hadn't become aware of the “current controversy surrounding” Trump’s lawyer until January of this year.

But AT&T’s response left many questions unanswered: How did AT&T know to make payments to Cohen’s firm? Did AT&T approach Cohen or did he approach the company? What expertise did Cohen have in those areas? What advice or access did the money buy?

For some in Washington, the practice of paying insiders — exemplified by the AT&T episode — is all too familiar.

Yosef Getachew of Common Cause, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that advocates for a more ethical and open government, called AT&T's payments "another example of the power of big money to gain access and influence in all layers of government."

"The swamp is only getting swampier," he said, referring to Trump's vows to "drain the swamp" on the campaign trail.

Getachew said that AT&T, a company in the highly regulated telecom industry, has many matters that come before government agencies or Congress. For example, the new Trump-appointed leadership of the FCC made the call to roll back net neutrality rules. And the Justice Department made the decision to file an antitrust lawsuit over the still-pending AT&T-Time Warner merger.

"When a company is getting regulated like that, they are looking for every possible angle to influence the process," he said. "They are going to find ways to pay big money to influence those outcomes."

But Gene Kimmelman, who leads the policy group Public Knowledge, said that “on the face of it, based on what we know right now, there are no obvious legal or ethical issues that arise unless other facts raising such concerns are uncovered in the days to come.”

Public Knowledge has been a critic of the AT&T-Time Warner merger.

On Wednesday, Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, during a news conference convened to criticize the net neutrality rollback, called for an investigation of AT&T's payments. Two other Democrats, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and U.S. Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, wrote a letter to antitrust chief Makan Delrahim, asking if the Justice Department knew of AT&T payments to Cohen or any attempts to influence the merger's outcome.

AT&T admitted Tuesday that it paid President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen. It said Cohen provided insights, not legal or lobbying work. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) (Mary Altaffer / AP)

Seeking insight

What the payments could point to — at the least — is the latest evidence of AT&T’s catch-up work in wooing Team Trump after the real estate mogul won the White House.

No AT&T brass gave to Trump's insurgent bid in the 2016 race, with two top company executives giving instead to Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis early last year of campaign finance records.

Across Texas, corporate titans mostly avoided the contentious campaign, despite a traditional preference for conservative presidential candidates.

But the ambivalence among AT&T executives stood in stark contrast to their stance in the 2012 presidential race, when eight higher-ups, including Stephenson, gave a total of $81,000 to Republican Mitt Romney in his campaign against President Barack Obama.

AT&T didn’t waste time in rectifying the discrepancy after Trump won the election.

The company’s federal political action committee in December 2016 gave $65,000 to the Trump Victory Committee. The company also gave $2.1 million for Trump’s inauguration. And Stephenson made a pilgrimage to Trump Tower in January 2017 to meet with the then-president-elect.

Those moves point to AT&T's deep experience in navigating Washington.

AT&T last year spent nearly $17 million on lobbying, ranking the company ninth among all groups in the U.S., according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That kind of spending has been the norm for many years, too.

Tech rivals such as Google and Facebook, meanwhile, have ramped up their lobbying operations to such levels only in the last few years.

Several strategies

AT&T also makes use of other levers.

Its political action committee spent nearly $3 million on political contributions in the two-year cycle that ended in 2016. That tally ranked the company third among all groups in the U.S., according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

It’s not just about the money, either.

JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, explained last year how Stephenson had helped mold the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for top executives, into a “fighting force” that can readily identify the lawmakers who really matter on a given issue.

The focus at that time was the tax overhaul desired by big business.

“We will know in every congressional district how many employees we have,” Dimon said in a panel discussion with Stephenson at the Dallas Citizens Council’s annual meeting.

AT&T — through that playbook and other means — saw success last year when Congress passed a tax revamp that provided it a $20 billion windfall. The company won another victory last year when the FCC overturned Obama-era net neutrality rules, that prevented it from favoring its own content on its network.

But the U.S. Justice Department in late November — just before AT&T ended its contract with Cohen — sued to stop the big merger, arguing that the combination of Time Warner’s premium content and AT&T’s expansive distribution networks would harm competition and consumers.

AT&T, which rejected those claims, raised an intriguing argument against the government’s case: politics.

Trump, who called the merger "an example of the power structure I'm fighting," never relented in his complaints about Time Warner’s CNN. Stephenson, despite his efforts to charm Trump, called the president’s possible influence in the antitrust lawsuit “the big elephant in the room.”

And while AT&T’s lawyers were not successful in bringing that argument before a judge, they hinted at the dynamic.

“This whole case is a house of cards,” AT&T and Time Warner’s lead attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, said last month in closing arguments before U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, adding that the government’s case was “manufactured.”

That prized merger still hangs in the balance. The judge’s ruling is expected by mid-June.

Staff writer Melissa Repko in Dallas contributed to this report..