![]() ![]() Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night-even if he was losing. The group of lawsuits also includes as plaintiffs millions of consumers and several companies.Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In the most serious cases, a judge may tell a jury “that the party destroyed evidence or allowed it to be destroyed and the jury should infer that the evidence was incriminating,” Walker said. ![]() District Court, said judges, when deciding on sanctions in such cases, give heavy weight to the importance of lost evidence. Vaughn Walker, former Chief Judge of the Northern California U.S. Pichai, other key Google employees, including those in leadership roles, routinely opted to move … to history-off Chats to hold sensitive conversations … in order to avoid leaving a record that could be produced in litigation,” the filing alleged.ĭonato ordered that Google pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and other costs related to litigation over destruction of the messages, and said “determination of an appropriate non-monetary sanction requires further proceedings.” The additional proceedings will shed light on how consequential Google’s failure to preserve the communications evidence is for the plaintiffs’ case, Donato indicated. ![]() ![]() The plaintiffs claimed in their filing Monday that Google CEO Pichai in one Chat started to discuss a matter relevant to the antitrust case, then immediately asked if the Chat setting could be set to “history off” so the message would auto-delete, before unsuccessfully trying to delete the “incriminating” message himself. It has not provided an explanation, which is worrisome, especially in light of its unlimited access to accomplished legal counsel, and its long experience with the duty of evidence preservation.” “The Court has repeatedly asked Google why it never mentioned Chat until the issue became a substantial problem. Shortly after the case was filed in October 2020 and before the issue with the Chat function arose, the company “falsely assured the Court” that it had taken appropriate steps to preserve all relevant evidence “without saying a word about Chats,” Donato wrote. He added that Google had the ability to set the Chat history function to “on” for all the employees whose communications were relevant to the case, but chose not to. Google initially claimed it had no ability to change default settings for individual employees’ Chat history, but evidence in a court hearing “plainly established that this representation was not truthful,” Donato wrote. with the intent to deprive (the plaintiffs) of the information’s use in the litigation,” Donato found. Those communications would then be given to the plaintiffs to use as potential evidence, in a process called “discovery.” Instead, Google “intended to subvert the discovery process” and the Chat evidence “was lost. Chats involving hundreds of specific Google employees were supposed to be preserved for the court case via a “history on” setting in the messaging platform, the judge wrote in his decision. ![]()
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