AT&T is trying to undercut the government’s star witness in the blockbuster Time Warner trial

With the Justice Department's top antitrust attorney, Makan Delrahim, looking on from the government's table, AT&T's witness claimed that regulators' economic analysis of the Time Warner deal is "theoretically unsound" and riddled with inaccurate assumptions. "The evidence doesn't support the government's claim that this transaction will harm consumers," said Dennis Carlton, an economist from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. His own competing study, he said, found that consumers could end up facing lower prices, not higher. Carlton's testimony threatens to undercut that of the government's own star witness, Carl Shapiro, economist at the University of California, Berkeley. As Carlton criticized Shapiro's economic model as "very complicated," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon interrupted to agree with that description. "It's like a Rube Goldberg contraption," he said, reflecting skepticism about a core piece of the Justice Department's case.