WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Judge hearing the antitrust case against Alphabet’s Google (NASDAQ:) said Friday that he wasn’t convinced that he has the power to sanction Alphabet for excessive attorney-client privilege use if this occurred prior to the Justice Department filing.

In court, Judge Amit Mehta was asked by the department to sanction Google. The judge stated that Google’s program “Communicate with Care”, where employees were asked to attach a lawyer to many email messages, was often a “game” meant to guard communications from being subject to attorney-client confidentiality. Google said it was innocent.

Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia stated that 140,000 documents were originally considered to be protected by attorney-client privilege, but 98,000 of those were given quickly to the government. He also stated that the federal court does not have the power to approve the practice because it was done before the government’s lawsuit.

John Schmidtlein was Google’s lawyer in this case. He said that 21,000 emails are still under investigation.

Kenneth Dintzer (the Justice Department’s lawyer) asked for Google to be sanctioned and ordered to return the 21,000 emails. His argument was that Google’s practice wasted valuable time and cost the government precious time to put together its case.

In 2020, the Justice Department sued Google for violating antitrust laws in relation to its management of search. The trial was scheduled for September 2023.