States Back DOJ Call for Hearing Into Google’s Evidentiary ‘Misconduct’

The three dozen plaintiff states seeking to thwart Google’s alleged search monopolies support DOJ’s motion in the consolidated antitrust litigation to sanction Google for destroying evidence, said their own motion Thursday (docket 1:20-cv-03010) in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The states also support convening an evidentiary hearing “to determine the appropriate remedy for the destruction of relevant materials that would have otherwise been discoverable during the governments’ investigations and discovery in this action,” they said. The same misconduct in which DOJ alleges Google has engaged “is equally applicable” to the plaintiff states, “and should be subject to all the same curative measures,” they said. Google owes the states and DOJ “the same duty to preserve its internal chat messages,” they said. “Google’s duty to preserve employee chat messages began at least as early as 2019 when it anticipated litigation” stemming DOJ’s investigation, they said. Google’s practice of deleting chat messages “necessarily inflicted overlapping prejudice” on the states and DOJ, they said. Google’s “misconduct inflicted particularized prejudice” on the plaintiff states because the deleted chats were “likely relevant to the additional anticompetitive conduct alleged” by the states, they said.