In early September, after Denise Cote, a federal judge in New York, found Apple liable for conspiring to fix the prices of digital books, she appointed a watchman to make sure the company complied with antitrust laws.

Cote had found earlier that Apple had collaborated with five publishers, in late 2009 and early 2010, to set e-book prices before launching iBookstore, its online marketplace. At the time, Amazon was selling many e-books at a loss to get more people to buy them, and, as Ken Auletta detailed in the magazine, publishers wanted to stop the price erosion. Cote sided with the government, finding that Apple had orchestrated a deal that gave publishers more control over their pricing, which resulted in an industry-wide increase in digital book costs. All of the publishers settled, and Apple was the only company to proceed with a trial.

“Apple has been given several opportunities to demonstrate to this Court that it has taken the lessons of this litigation seriously,” Judge Cote said when she ordered the external monitor. “I am disappointed to say that it has not taken advantage of those opportunities.”

Since then, the company has only proven her point. From the start, Apple’s attorneys resisted when the monitor, Michael Bromwich, a partner at the law firm Goodwin Procter and a former inspector general for the Justice Department, asked to meet with more than a dozen top executives and board members, including former Vice-President Al Gore, shortly after his appointment.

After weeks of polite deflections, Apple’s outside counsel bluntly told Bromwich that he was being “incredibly disruptive” and “counter-productive.” On the day before Thanksgiving, Apple escalated the fight, filing court papers accusing Bromwich of “operating in an unfettered and inappropriate manner,” “trampling Apple’s rights,” and prolonging the investigation unnecessarily to “generate profits” from his “excessive” fees, which Apple was footing. A short while later, Apple requested a stay in the appointment of the monitor until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit hears the case, sometime in the next few months. Briefs are due in February.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department filed a thirty-page document objecting to the motion. “Stripped of its blustery rhetoric and personal attacks, Apple’s motion is about its desire to shield its highest-level executives and Board members from the perceived inconvenience of having to sit for these interviews,” it said. The document continued, “Apple’s efforts to thwart Mr. Bromwich from carrying out his responsibilities only highlight the critical need for his monitorship to continue.”

But why is Apple putting up such a fierce fight? The company rarely does anything without first performing a thorough cost-benefit analysis. The cost, in this case, is the negative publicity the company will incur. But what of the benefits?

Businesses and bureaucrats have different expectations. An executive at a top company can’t easily drop his day-to-day responsibilities, especially to help an unwanted intruder. Apple said that Bromwich’s investigation, which began in October, was “premature,” because the company was still putting in place new compliance and training programs ahead of a court-mandated January 14th deadline. Bromwich disagreed. He was asked to begin the job immediately after his appointment. Apple also argued that Bromwich was going too far, requesting meetings with executives and directors who have nothing to do with antitrust compliance, and said that the hour-long interviews Bromwich called for would hurt market share and impede product development.

The Justice Department, in its filing, dismissed many of Apple’s arguments. And, in a separate filing with the same court, Bromwich said he had been allowed to interview just eleven people, seven of whom were lawyers. He was able to speak to only one board member and one executive. In total, he only performed thirteen hours of substantive interviews or discussions during two trips to California. When he made inquiries, a senior manager told him that the executives and board members were “very busy, and that we would see a ‘lot of anger’ about the case that still existed within the company.”

“In my 20 years of doing oversight work,” Bromwich noted in one footnote, “I have never before had the entity over which I was exercising oversight unilaterally dictate who could be interviewed, even in those instances in which I have dealt with very sensitive matters.”

People who run for-profit companies also naturally take issue with excessive rates. The monitoring fees paid by Apple amounted to eleven hundred dollars per hour for Bromwich, a thousand and twenty-five dollars per hour for Bernard Nigro, an antitrust attorney appointed to help Bromwich, and a fifteen per cent “administrative fee.” Calling the rate exorbitantly higher than company policy allows for suppliers, Apple suggested paying eight hundred dollars an hour for Bromwich and seven hundred dollars for Nigro, plus per diems of fifteen to thirty dollars for meals. Bromwich responded, indignantly, that he was not a supplier.

The company may also believe that the appeals court will overturn the judge’s decision, and wish to shield its executives from legal questioning and delay any oversight until then.

Judge Cote has yet to respond to the request to stay the order, but in the eyes of some antitrust attorneys the company is taking up a legitimate battle against the ill-defined authority of court-appointed monitors, who are often viewed as having a cozy relationship with judges. In its November filing, Apple accused Bromwich of having “secret communications” with the court and exceeding his authority by immediately requesting interviews with a number of executives and board members who had nothing do with antitrust matters. The hourly fees, it said, were more than Apple has encountered for any task. The company had to pay for two attorneys, because Bromwich isn’t an antitrust expert. The Wall Street Journal also published an editorial pointing out that Cote and Bromwich have been friends for some time, predating Cote’s appointment of Bromwich to Apple.

A reversal of Cote’s decision, however, is far from certain. The judge has an unshakeable reputation, and her rulings are known to be difficult to overturn. In her original judgment against Apple, she dismantled the company’s credibility, pointing out the inconsistencies and improbabilities in a top executive’s testimony. She called Apple’s evidence “not persuasive,” and accused its trial witnesses of being “less than forthcoming.”

Though appointing a monitor is rare when a defendant has no prior history of wrongdoing, Apple’s behavior over the past few months may help validate the judge’s decision to appoint one. And the question remains: Do the benefits of Apple’s strategy outweigh the costs?

To many, Apple’s obstructiveness is just the latest evidence of the company’s presumption that it answers to no one but itself. “They’re just trying to put off their judgment day,” David Balto, an antitrust attorney who isn’t involved in the Apple case, said. “They don’t want to change their conduct before that happens.” Balto believes that the government’s position is completely consistent with the law.

An anti-establishment defiance helped bolster Apple’s image during its underdog days—remember the famous “1984” Super Bowl commercial?—but is increasingly driving a crack through its image as a virtuous company. Journalists, meanwhile, enjoyed a little schadenfreude. For once, someone else was getting a taste of the stonewalling they regularly experience with the notoriously secretive company.

Yukari Iwatani Kane is a former Apple beat reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Her book, “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs,” is due out in March.

Angel Navarrete/Bloomberg via Getty