On Thursday afternoon, AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson fired the latest salvo at Justice Department anti-trust chief Makan Delrahim in the battle over AT&T’s $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner. Earlier in the week, Stephenson had reportedly been blindsided by Delrahim’s suggestion that AT&T sell CNN to gain approval for the mega media merger. “There is absolutely no intention that we would ever sell CNN,” Stephenson said from the stage at The New York Times’s DealBook conference, which, as it happened, was taking place just steps from CNN’s newsroom at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall inside the Time Warner Center.

Since news broke that the Justice Department may be using CNN as a leverage point to exact concessions from AT&T, CNN employees see the hidden hand of Donald Trump at work. “This is political, this is unprecedented, and the only explanation is political pressure from the White House,” one CNN staffer told my colleague Joe Pompeo. As a candidate, Trump inveighed against the deal, vowing to block it. And as president, Trump routinely bashes CNN and the network’s president Jeff Zucker. Trump even tweeted a video of himself body-slamming CNN’s logo Photoshopped onto a wrestler’s body.

Inside Time Warner, executives are now discussing another possible culprit behind the deal’s delay: Rupert Murdoch. According to executives I spoke with, the theory is that Murdoch privately encouraged Trump to scuttle the deal as revenge for Time Warner rejecting Murdoch’s $80 billion takeover offer in 2014. “A direct competitor, who was spurned from buying us, perhaps is trying to influence the judicial process? That’s corruption on top of corruption,” one Time Warner executive told me. “It’s bad enough what the president has been doing.” A Murdoch spokesperson called the claim “laughable and categorically untrue,” adding: “If Trump is doing this to punish CNN we have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

Murdoch’s political alliance with the administration has been notably close, with some of Murdoch’s Fox News name brands among the president’s most devoted water carriers. Sean Hannity hammers at how the Russia probe actually exposes Hillary Clinton and called the Republican tax plan “Reaganesque,” while Laura Ingraham scored an interview with Chief of Staff John Kelly on her first episode, and, later that week, the president himself.

While there’s no proof that Murdoch has directly influenced the process, there is some evidence to support the theory. Publicly, Murdoch has been critical of the deal, while privately, he’s told executives it’s a business threat. “He said he’d work behind the scenes to stop it,” one person close to Murdoch told me. And, executives point out, Murdoch has long used his media properties to prop up politicians to advance his business interests.

His U.S. outlets continue to be Trump’s most ardent backers. Fox News, in particular, has morphed into virtual state-TV. Trump and Murdoch speak by phone regularly, sources say. Before the inauguration, I reported that Trump even asked Murdoch to submit names for F.C.C. commissioner (Murdoch denied it at the time). Murdoch also could be under pressure to stymie the deal at a moment when his empire is vulnerable. His $14 billion takeover of European pay-TV service Sky is stalled. There is also an ongoing federal investigation of Fox News. And Monday, it was reported the Murdochs have been in talks to sell a large part of the company to Disney.