I spoke recently at a conservative conference and opened with this little factoid.

AT&T, CNN’s new parent company, got $2.9 billion in federal funding in three years.

A recent Open the Books report revealed that AT&T’s funding actually went up in 2017, to $1.7 billion, from around $300 million in the Obama years, so that Federal funding is now around 1% of AT&T’s revenues.

Much of that money is coming from the Department of the Interior, Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Something to keep in mind after Trump’s recent call to boycott AT&T.

President Donald Trump kicked off his state visit to the United Kingdom on Monday with a complaint about CNN, the cable network he loves to hate, urging a boycott of the network’s new corporate owner, AT&T.

As the president traveled to Buckingham Palace in London for lunch with the royal family, Trump fired off a pair of tweets complaining that CNN, whose coverage the president often says is unfair to his administration, “is the primary source of news available from the U.S.” in the UK

He went on to suggest that the network’s parent company, AT&T, “do something” about CNN’s coverage and leveled a threat against the company.

“I believe that if people stoped [sic] using or subscribing to @ATT, they would be forced to make big changes at @CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway,” Trump vented in a tweet blasted out to his 60 million followers. “It is so unfair with such bad, Fake News! Why wouldn’t they act. When the World watches @CNN, it gets a false picture of USA. Sad!”

AT&T’s death grip on the cellular ecosystem is a bigger threat than its cable standing.

But one place to start is by looking at the flow of taxpayer money to companies like AT&T and Salesforce.