Throughout its attempt to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion, AT&T has been polite to the government agencies investigating the deal. But now that that both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have opposed the deal, AT&T's chief lobbyist has bared his fangs.

Jim Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, blasted the FCC this morning after the agency released a draft of its internal review that was hugely critical of AT&T. "The document is so obviously one-sided that any fair-minded person reading it is left with the clear impression that it is an advocacy piece, and not a considered analysis," wrote Cicconi on AT&T's blog.

"In our view, the report raises questions as to whether its authors were predisposed. The report cherry-picks facts to support its views, and ignores facts that don’t. Where facts were lacking, the report speculates, with no basis, and then treats its own speculations as if they were fact."

Not getting the message? Cicconi tried again: "We believe that the utter absence of balance is clear, and demonstrates that the document lacks all credibility."

As Media Access Project's Andrew Jay Schwartzman put it, "AT&T has attacked the FCC staff in an uncharacteristically intemperate statement."

And the bellyaching is a bit rich after AT&T's own game playing. The company withdrew its merger petition from the FCC only hours before Thanksgiving Day in what appeared to be a clear attempt to avoid a negative outcome at the FCC. But the FCC, whose staff labored on the deal for months, went ahead and released the report anyway.

"The decision to issue such a report that has no legal status, without a vote of the Commission, and in a proceeding that has been withdrawn, was also without precedent, and underscores that this was intended more for advocacy and to impact public perceptions," Cicconi wrote.

For a company that has had its way in Washington for so long, the episode must be particularly hard to swallow—and it showed an unusual willingness to provoke the powerful on the part of the FCC's commissioners. Clearly, the FCC doesn't like being toyed with. As Commissioner Michael Copps put it in a statement last week, "While I welcome withdrawal of this application, I would like to think we will no longer be expending significant FCC resources to examine this paradigm-shifting and complex transaction. I would hope the withdrawal is not a strategic gambit along the road to resubmission of this or a similar application in the months ahead. That would not strike me as a good route to travel."

Sprint's top government affairs exec, Vonya McCann, said in a statement of her own today, "Let’s not forget that it was AT&T who tried to game the process by requesting to withdraw its merger application in the predawn hours of Thanksgiving. AT&T can’t have it both ways: either it wanted to have an application that would be judged on the merits or it didn’t. We agree with AT&T on one point however: the public should read the Analysis and Findings on AT&T’s proposed takeover."

Update: The FCC doesn't appear to be very happy about AT&T's comments. In a comment made via the FCC's Twitter feed, Joel Guerin, the chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said he was deeply concerned about AT&T's response to the release of the report.