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Article snippet: SAN FRANCISCO — The last-minute evidence quickly mounted. A letter and an email full of damning claims. Apps that sent self-destructing messages. A payment of $4.5 million to an employee who threatened to be a whistle-blower — and an additional $3 million to his lawyer. In two days of testimony that ended Wednesday in Federal District Court in San Francisco, Uber lawyers had to defend what a federal judge has described as an effort to withhold evidence from an intellectual-theft trial. The case pits the ride-hailing company against Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The judge, William Alsup, delayed the start of the trial on Tuesday — one day before jury selection was supposed to begin — after the United States attorney’s office in Northern California alerted him to the existence of the letter, written by the lawyer for a former Uber employee to one of the company’s lawyers. On Wednesday, Judge Alsup continued to upbraid Uber’s lawyers for not being more forthcoming with evidence. “I have never seen a case where there were so many bad things done like Uber has done in this case,” he said. The trial was rescheduled for Feb. 5, with jury selection set to begin on Jan. 31. That is nearly a year after Waymo first accused Uber of conspiring with a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, to steal trade secrets. Waymo claims Mr. Levandowksi downloaded more than 14,000 files from company servers before eventually joining the self-... Link to the full article to read more