Donald Trump denies he's using the AT&T-Time Warner merger to get revenge on CNN

President Donald Trump was always against a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, and he's always hated CNN. So the appearance that he was using his position to force Time Warner to ditch CNN to close the $85 billion deal made a strange, vindictive kind of sense.

Now, however, Trump is denying any attempts to exact revenge on his cable news nemesis.

Trump said he “didn’t make that decision. That was made by a man who is actually a very respected person, a very, very respected person," Variety reported. Trump made the comments—likely about Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim—during his trip through Asia.

AT&T and Time Warner first proposed the deal over a year ago, before Trump was even elected, but a mega-merger like that was always going to encounter government scrutiny. Technically, the recent reports were that the DOJ would either require AT&T to get rid of DirecTV or Time Warner would have to divest itself of Turner networks, which include Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT, TruTV, and other brands along with CNN.

With a president who bashes "fake news" on a daily basis, that condition rang some alarm bells.

“I do feel that you should have as many news outlets as you can, especially since so many of them are fake,” Trump said on his trip.  “This way, at least you can get your word out. But I do believe you should have as many news outlets as you can.”

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson denied reports that he agreed to sell CNN.

And now Trump denies he had anything to do with it. The fate of the mega-merger—and CNN—is still to be determined.