Lawyers for the US Department of Justice say that Google (parent company Alphabet Inc) destroyed some internal corporate communication documents.

They have asked a federal judge to sanction Google as part of an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.

In a court filing that was unsealed on Wednesday, DOJ lawyers say that Google failed to suspend a policy allowing the automatic, permanent deletion of employees’ chat logs.

So, conveniently, relevant communications were lost.

In 2019, Google told the government that they had stopped using the “auto-deletion” policy and were preserving chat communications as they are required to do so.

DOJ lawyer Kenneth Dintzer wrote in the filing, “Google’s daily destruction of written records prejudiced the United States by depriving it of a rich source of candid discussions between Google’s executives, including likely trial witnesses.”

Google “strongly” refutes the DOJ’s allegations, saying, “Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation.” Google adds that they have “produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world.”