AT&T accuses Department of Justice of improperly enforcing antitrust laws

AT&T is accusing the U.S. Justice Department of “improper selective enforcement” of antitrust laws in its attempt to block the telecommunications giant’s proposed purchase of media company Time Warner Inc.

AT&T on Tuesday filed its response to the Justice Department’s high-profile lawsuit that seeks to derail AT&T’s acquisition of the media company that owns HBO, CNN, Cartoon Network, TNT, TBS and the Warner Bros. movie and TV studio.

Dallas-based AT&T, in a separate motion, asked that the trial begin Feb. 20 — two and a half months before the government’s suggested May 7 trial date. AT&T has argued that is too long of a delay because its merger agreement with Time Warner expires April 22. After that, either Time Warner or AT&T can walk away from the $85-billion deal.

“Further delay is unwarranted and unfair to the defendants, their shareholders, and their customers,” AT&T said in its Tuesday motion, adding the government has been assembling its case for nearly a year and that AT&T already has turned over 25 million pages of documents to the Justice Department.

Los Angeles litigator Daniel Petrocelli of the O’Melveny & Myers law firm is handling the legal case for AT&T and Time Warner. He criticized the government’s lawsuit in a 29-page rebuttal submitted to U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington, who will be overseeing the case.

Leon, 67, was appointed by President George W. Bush and joined the federal bench in 2002. He has experience in high-profile media mergers. In 2011, Leon criticized the Justice Department’s initial settlement agreement with Comcast Corp., when that pay-TV giant was poised to gobble up media company NBCUniversal.

The Justice Department did not sue to block the ComcastNBCUniversal merger and instead negotiated a long list of conditions that Comcast agreed to follow in an effort to win the government’s blessing. Leon initially questioned whether Comcast would abide by the agreement, but he ultimately signed off on that merger when additional safeguards were added.