>The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.

This is exactly what I said and disproved what you said.

The US Gov is saying that Google should have expected it, but they never notified Google until much later.

There is no such thing as "reasonably anticipated this litigation" because nobody told them. This entire article is just taking the US gov at 100% fact when Google's side of the story is actually the more reasonable one. Every company on earth has auto deletion policies, although 24 hours is a bit short, it's not intentional destruction of evidence when they were never officially notified.

This is the government trying to shift blame to Google because they didn't want to tell them they were being investigated. This will get thrown out.