In the high-profile Waymo v. Uber trade secrets lawsuit, the barbs are flying at a nonstop pace.

Last Friday, the deposition of Travis Kalanick, who was CEO of Uber until June 2017, was made available for the first time as part of the court record. During the hours of his July 27 testimony, Kalanick described Levandowski’s given explanation for the claimed data theft—that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 proprietary Waymo files as a way to protect his $120 million bonus—as "fucking dumb."

Meanwhile, on Monday, attorneys for Waymo have now accused Uber of "trying to game the system" by only offering to make Uber board members available for depositions far too late during the already approved tight schedule.

Also on Monday, the Alphabet subsidiary alleged that Uber disclosed well after a judge’s deadline to do so that engineer Anthony Levandowski had deleted thousands of files that he was accused of stealing from his former employer, Waymo. As a result, Waymo says, Uber should be found in contempt of court.

All of these new submissions come as the two companies are quickly wrapping up depositions as part of the civil discovery process this month. Waymo sued Uber back in February 2017, accusing its former engineer, Levandowski, of taking 14,000 files and using them to create a new startup. That startup, Otto, was nearly immediately acquired by Uber. For its part, Uber has said that it never received the data that Levandowski is alleged to have taken.

All depositions are scheduled to be completed by August 24, with both sides rapidly headed for an October trial in federal court in San Francisco—barring a settlement beforehand.

Since the case began, Levandowski has been fired from Uber, and CEO Travis Kalanick was booted from his position for unrelated reasons. The case involves some of the highest-powered players in the self-driving space and could have a profound impact on the future of the industry.

In fact, Kalanick himself said as much in his own deposition, essentially indicating that in late 2014, Uber faced an existential crisis—it had to up its automation game or risk being driven out of business by Waymo.

A dangerous game

In one of the Monday filings, Waymo says it wanted to depose three current and former members of Uber’s board of directors, who approved the deal to acquire Ottomotto (aka "Otto") in April 2016. Those directors include Bill Gurley, David Bonderman, and Arianna Huffington. During an earlier court hearing last month, US District Judge William Alsup proposed that Waymo start with one board member and then argue why they’d need others—and Uber agreed.

However, according to the latest motion, the fact that Uber only made Gurley available on August 24, the last day of discovery, led Waymo to only one conclusion:

As Uber knew very well when it tactically offered that date and that date only, Waymo cannot depose Mr. Gurley, obtain and review a final transcript, make a determination of whether additional Board depositions are needed, fully brief a motion to compel, obtain a Court Order granting that motion, schedule deposition dates for Mr. Bonderman and Ms. Huffington, and then take those depositions, all in a single day.

Waymo has dubbed this deposition scheduling "discovery gamesmanship" and wholly rejected Uber’s proposal to have Bonderman and Huffington be available after August 24 because of one big problem: Judge Alsup won’t allow it.

"In no event may depositions be taken after the discovery cut-off," he wrote in a June 23 order. Of course, Judge Alsup is free to change his mind, but with such unequivocal language, it seems unlikely.

"Contempt is warranted"

Waymo also highlighted in a separate filing that Uber should be held in contempt of court, as it did not notify the court that any of the relevant data had been deleted. In the early stages of the case, Judge Alsup signed an order that required Uber to disclose if any such materials had been modified or deleted by March 31. It produced no such declaration when that date passed.

However, in a declaration submitted last Friday, Angela Padilla, one of Uber’s top lawyers, said that she attended a March 29 meeting at Uber headquarters with Levandowski and Travis Kalanick, the company’s CEO at the time.

"I recall Mr. Levandowski also saying that he no longer had the files he had downloaded because he had deleted them," she wrote. "I recall that Mr. Kalanick responded by telling Mr. Levandowski in strong language that what he did was incredibly stupid and that he should just tell the Court what he did."

As Charles Verhoeven, Waymo’s top attorney in this case, wrote in the Monday filing, as a result: "Contempt is warranted, as there is no excuse for Uber’s failure to disclose the destruction of these downloaded files that was communicated in advance of the March 31 deadline to the highest ranks of Uber’s executive and legal teams."

Showdowns abound

According to Kalanick’s deposition, which was released on August 4, when the then-CEO said that he learned of Levandowski's massive download, the explanation was that they were "backup discs."

Kalanick told Levandowski during this March 2016 meeting "that that content does not make it to Uber," and instituted a "double and triple check" to make sure.

During a meeting with a number of attorneys, which appears to be the same March 29 meetings that Padilla described, according to Kalanick, Levandowski: "…repeated the downloading while at home explanation, but also added that he was incredibly worried at the time about a very large bonus that he was supposed to get from Google. And he felt, essentially, like Google was going to stiff him on his bonus. And he wanted to—he wanted to have the sort of the work that he did, so he could show that he earned that bonus."

Kalanick added that he urged Levandowski to speak openly in court about what had happened—but Levandowski famously pleaded the Fifth Amendment right to not self-incriminate early on in the case.

During the deposition, when Charles Verhoeven, a Waymo attorney, asked Kalanick a few moments later why "it would make sense for an employee to steal corporate files for the purpose of showing that they are entitled to a bonus," Kalanick didn't mince words: "I am not saying that what he did was smart."

During that same meeting, after he heard Levandowski's explanation, Kalanick was even more blunt: "That’s pretty fucking dumb."

The deposition continued:

Verhoeven: So did you say, ‘why the heck didn’t you tell us about this before?’

Kalanick: It was more like, why are you so fucking—

Verhoeven: Stupid.

Kalanick:—stupid, yeah. Because, yeah, it just didn't make—it was just not…

Verhoeven: It didn’t make any sense?

Kalanick: Yeah. It—it—it felt like he was so insecure about this bonus that he started doing irrational things.

Later on in the deposition, Verhoeven presented Kalanick with notes from a December 22, 2015 meeting, which states: "[Anthony Levandowski] says that our biggest threat is Google, but also doesn’t have faith in Google pulling it off."

The timeline seems to suggest that around that time, Levandowski was having serious qualms about his work at Google, which coincided with Uber’s desire to ramp up its knowledge of lidar as a way to quickly expand its autonomous vehicle program. The net result, of course, was Levandowski's departure from Waymo in January 2016, founding a company—Ottomotto—and having it quickly be acquired by Uber within months.

Also during the deposition, Kalanick said that in October 2016, Google co-founder Larry Page called Kalanick ostensibly to talk about "flying cars." (Page has been investing in a new startup called "Kitty Hawk," which aims to release such a vehicle. One of Waymo’s founding fathers in self-driving cars, Sebastian Thrun, is now the CEO of Kitty Hawk.)

But really, it was seemingly a pretext to talk about "partnering on driverless cars."

According to Kalanick, Page was "not very interested," and was "upset about… us taking his IP," to which Kalanick responded that "hiring his people is not taking his IP."

"I told him, we will open up our facility if you think we have taken IP," Kalanick recalled. "Like, come take a look. We will have your people take a look. We will dig deep and make sure. But we were very confident about the process of acquisition and the process we have in hiring people."

Despite the friendly chat, Waymo sued Uber in February 2017.

The two sides are due to meet back in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 9 at 9am for a discovery hearing.

Uber did not respond to Ars’ request for comment on Monday.