Good Friday morning, I'm Anna Palmer, and welcome to your Politico Playbook Audio Briefing,

sponsored by Morgan Stanley. We're kicking off this morning with a playbook scoop. I'm reporting,

along with lobbying reporters Marianne Levine and Theo Meyer, that the tech giant Amazon has nixed

multiple contract lobbying firms from its roster, including Squire Patent Boggs and

Aiken Gump Strauss-Hauer-and-Feld. The two firms said that they were working on Amazon's

unsuccessful push to include an online sales tax measure in the omnibus. The cuts come as President

Trump has re-uped his attacks on Amazon. The lobbying terminations

were not related to Trump's tweet, according to sources familiar with the decision. It's Good Friday.

Passover begins tonight at sundown. Burgess Everett scooped that Russian ambassador Anatoly

Anatov asked Senator Orrin Hatch for help earlier this month to try and get meetings with several U.S. officials and lawmakers who have declined to meet with him.

The Washington Post has a stunning story about how Connecticut Democrat Elizabeth Esty kept on her chief of staff three months after she learned he had threatened another staffer.

The woman, Anna Kane, told the Congresswoman that Tony Baker had punched, berated, and sexually harassed her when she worked in her office.

Here's the latest on the investigations.

CNN is reporting that a source told them special prosecutor Robert Mueller pushed Robert Gates for help on collusion,

while Reuters is reporting that Mueller is probing Russian contacts at the Republican Convention.

And Kyle Cheney is reporting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a letter to senior Republican lawmakers that a federal prosecutor

is investigating Republican claims of FBI

misconduct. And in a definite case of things that make you go, hmm, Bloomberg is reporting that

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt leased a Washington apartment owned by a lobbyist friend that allowed him

to pay just $50 per night for a single bedroom,

but only for the nights when he actually slept there.

The owner is a health care lobbyist, Vicky Hart.

...