Google was accused of intentionally destroying evidence relevant to an antitrust case, the New York Post reported Tuesday.
United States District Judge James Donato claimed there is “disturbing evidence” that the technology company erased internal chat logs and instructed employees to label some documents as “privileged and confidential.”
Donato is presiding over an antitrust lawsuit filed by Epic Games against Google. According to the video game firm, the Google Play app store maintains an unlawful monopoly by using a “bribe and block” scheme to thwart competition.
One Google employee was reportedly told to “change the settings of this group [chat] to history off” by the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, who later attempted to delete his instruction. Pichai has stated that the policy to delete messages automatically has since been reversed.
Donato called it a “willful and intentional suppression of relevant evidence in this case” that “is deeply troubling to me as an officer of the court.”
“This conduct is a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice,” he continued. “It undercuts due process. It calls into question just resolution of legal disputes. It is antithetical to our system.”
“I have never seen anything so egregious,” Donato stated, vowing to “get to the bottom of who is responsible for the suppressed evidence.”
He further claimed that Google Play general manager Mrinalini Loew’s testimony “strongly underscored” that the tech firm had intentionally deleted the evidence so that it could not be used in court.
On Monday, Donato read final jury instructions, which stated in part, “You have seen evidence that Google Chat communications were deleted with the intent to prevent their use in litigation. You may infer that the deleted Chat messages contained evidence that would have been unfavorable to Google in this case,” the Verge reported.
Donato has encouraged the two parties to reach a settlement.
Katherine Van Dyck, with the American Economic Liberties Project, told the Post that the judge’s comments could cause more trouble for Google in other lawsuits.
Currently, the Department of Justice is suing Google for its alleged illegal online search monopoly. The company is also facing a wave of other antitrust investigations.
Van Dyck stated that Judge Amit Mehta, who is slated to decide the DOJ case against Google, will likely consider Donato’s comments.
“That’s something that the DOJ will, I’m sure, in their post-trial briefing, point out to Judge Mehta again and again. When one judge speaks first, other judges take note of that,” Van Dyck said. “If Judge Mehta looks at what Judge Donato has said about Google’s behavior and decides he agrees with it, that’s going to be a problem for Google. … This is very bad for Google to have this out there in the world.”
“We’re talking about a very sophisticated defendant here. This isn’t just some mom-and-pop shop,” Van Dyck continued. “They know that when they are facing a lawsuit, they cannot destroy documents, and they were specifically told to preserve these chats in Google search and in Google Play Store, and they didn’t.”
Google has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
“Our teams have conscientiously worked, for years, to respond to Plaintiffs’ discovery requests, and we have produced over four million documents, including thousands of chats,” a Google spokesperson told the Post.
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