With AT&T's plan to acquire Time Warner for $85 billion, AT&T's lobbyists are now beginning the daunting task of selling regulators, the press and the public on the deal. Consumer advocates worry this even-larger AT&T could limit streaming competitor access to Time Warner (HBO, CNN) content, and use zero rating to give the company's own content an unfair advantage in the market. They're also worried about the privacy implications of a significantly larger AT&T given its poor track record on the subject.

But according to the New York Times, AT&T has buckets of money and more than 100 lobbyists ready to help with its latest merger sales pitch:

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The company’s list of nearly 100 registered lobbyists already on retainer in 2016 includes former members of Congress. AT&T is the biggest donor to federal lawmakers and their causes among cable and cellular telecommunications companies, with its employees and political action committee sending money to 374 of the House’s 435 members and 85 of the Senate’s 100 members this election cycle. That adds up to more than $11.3 million in donations since 2015, four times as much as Verizon Communications, according to a tally by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

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That army of 100 lobbyists is technically much larger once you factor in all the think tankers, consultants, academics, and other PR and policy tendrils AT&T employs to give the illusion of support for what are frequently anti-consumer policies. But to avoid the fate the befell AT&T's attempted T-Mobile acquisition, AT&T may need to dial back the hubris and aggressively misleading claims that doomed the thwarted acqusition. Based on some of the early claims we're already seeing about the deal's supposed benefits, that's not likely to happen.