Swamp News: AT&T fired its chief of political lobbying and the company president said hiring President Trump’s personal lawyer to advise about the new administration was “a big mistake.”

Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said in a memo to employees, “Our company has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons these last few days and our reputation has been damaged.” AT&T  paid Cohen to provide advice on dealing with the federal government involving the telecommunication giant’s deal to buy Time Warner and other regulatory matters, none of which are in Cohen’s range of expertise. He used to run a taxi company. Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said yesterday that the President had no knowledge of Cohen receiving payments from AT&T, Novartis AG, and a firm linked to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg called Columbus Nova.

Of course, Trump also denied knowing about the $130,000 paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels, and that turned out to be a lie.

Probably more interesting than AT&T’s payments is the $500,000 paid to Cohen by an opaque financial management company called Columbus Nova, established as the US base of Vekselberg’s holding company, Renova Group. Vekselberg is one of the Russian billionaires under US economic sanctions. Columbus Nova denies that it was used to funnel Vekselberg’s money to Cohen, but this is another case in which a Russian is hovering awfully close to Trump.

Mean Girls: The White House has refused to apologize for a staffer who said at a meeting that it’s alright to ignore Sen. John McCain’s opposition to the CIA director nomination because he’s dying.

McCain has terminal brain cancer. He opposes the appointment of  Gina Haspel because she was involved with the torture of terrorist prisoners. McCain was tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

During the meeting with congressional communications staff members the aide, Kelly Sadler, dismissed McCain’s opposition saying, “It doesn’t matter. He’s dying anyway.”

Asked about it later, Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “I’m not going to validate a leak one way or the other out of an internal staff meeting.”

President Trump set up McCain as a target during the 2016 campaign saying McCain, a Navy pilot, was not a hero during the Vietnam War because he was captured.

The same day Sadler made her remarks, retired Air Force Gen. Thomas McInerney said on Fox Business Network dismissed McCain’s opposition to torture. “The fact is, is John McCain, it worked on John,” he said. “That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’”

No one has ever said John McCain behaved less than heroically when he was a prisoner.

The Health Dept.: President Trump abandoned his campaign promise to have Medicare negotiate lower drug prices. Speaking yesterday in the Rose Garden, he vowed instead  to “bring soaring drug prices back down to earth” by promoting competition among pharmaceutical companies. His announcement threw such a scare into the system that stocks in drug companies went up.

The Gun Beat: Three adults and four children were shot to death on a rural property in Western Australia in what appears to be that country’s worst mass shooting in more than 20 years. The police said they were not hunting a suspect but refused to say whether the massacre was a murder/suicide.

Australia had a significant drop in mass shootings after it banned assault rifles following a 1996 shooting in which 35 people were killed. American supporters of gun regulations often point to Australia’s law as a big success.

Black Lives: The Alpharetta, Ga., police department suspended an officer who screamed an obscenity at a 65-year-old black woman as five cops pulled her from her car for failing to sign a traffic ticket. She had been stopped for failure to stay in her lane.

It’s another in a string of recent incidents, many of them verified by videotape, in which black people doing nothing wrong — or not much wrong — have been confronted by cops. A white student at Yale University called the police when she saw a black woman napping in a common area of a dormitory. The sleeping woman was a graduate student. In California a white neighbor called the police when she saw five black women leaving an Airbnb house they had legitimately rented. And of course, there’s that  incident in Philadelphia when a Starbucks employee called the police after two black men asked to use the bathroom and then sat down without ordering coffee.

Things are looking up, though. Starbucks announced that now anyone can use their bathrooms, latte or no latte.

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