By Brian Womack of the Dallas Business Journal
(July 27) – The U.S. Department of Justice wants the appeals court in the AT&T Inc. case to be more public about past quiet conversations.
The federal government, which earlier filed a notice of appeal for the case it lost, is asking the court to unseal transcripts of bench conferences, or meetings held at the judge’s bench with lawyers, according to a new filing. The Justice Department is asking that all “all nonconfidential portions of the trial transcript, including the district court’s bench conferences throughout trial, be unsealed and released to the public,” the filing said.
“Regularly during the trial, the district court conducted bench conferences under seal to hear arguments, make rulings, and state the bases for those rulings,” the DOJ’s antitrust division said. “The district court addressed and resolved several substantive motions and nearly every evidentiary and confidentiality issue at these bench conferences.”
That’s often left the public record unclear, the DOJ said. About 660 pages of the trial transcript are under seal, and that doesn’t include confidential information.
AT&T declined to comment.
The company is coming off a big victory with the last trial in which Judge Richard Leon sided with the telecommunications and now media giant. The win cleared the way for AT&T to finalize the $85 billion merger with Time Warner, adding key assets around content such as HBO and Warner Bros. However, earlier this month, the DOJ filed its notice of appeal of the case, saying the tie-up could raise costs for rivals and stifle the growth of new entrants.
AT&T executives have expressed confidence in their case. “The court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based, and well-reasoned,” David McAtee, AT&T general counsel, said in a prepared statement earlier this month. “We are ready to defend the court’s decision.”
In the new filing, the DOJ said the transcript of the sealed bench conferences were not made available to the parties during the trial, even though the U.S. sought access on multiple occasions. Less than a week before the judge ruled on the case last month, the court allowed the transcripts’ release, but only to the parties’ counsel of record.
Before the end of June, the U.S. moved that the court “release the nonconfidential portions of the sealed trial transcripts because ‘the public has both a First Amendment and common law right of access to judicial records.’”
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