“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible,” he said, adding he would pursue these issues “on my own, outside of this trial.”

I was a bit confused how a Judge would just decide to start investigating some additional matter that is not formally before them to decide.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation.

Pichai, and many other employees, also testified they did not change the auto-delete setting even after they were made aware of their legal obligation to preserve evidence.

And Pichai, among other employees, admitted that they marked documents as legally privileged just to keep them out of other people’s hands.

On November 14th, Pichai told the court that he relied on his legal and compliance teams to instruct him properly, particularly Alphabet chief legal officer Kent Walker — and so Judge Donato hauled Walker into court two days later.

Today, Judge Donato said it was “deeply troubling to me as a judicial officer of the United States” that Google acted this way, calling it “the most serious and disturbing evidence I have ever seen in my decade on the bench with respect to a party intentionally suppressing relevant evidence.”

And yet, the judge decided today that he would not issue a “mandatory inference instruction” — one that would tell the jury they should proceed with the understanding that Google destroyed evidence that could have been detrimental to its case.

The original article contains 595 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Disappointed this wasn't about GChat.

Judges don't really investigate, they rely on evidence presented by the parties in a given case. I'm not aware of any mechanism for a judge just to 'go digging' like he seems to suggest he wants to do. I guess he could just be a dick in future cases? I.e. issuing ridiculous discovery orders.