---
title: "Assistant AG William Baxter reportedly dismissed the 13-year U.S. v. IBM antitrust case the same day he finalized the AT&T breakup (January 1982)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "flagged (unverified-quant — needs primary). The same-day sequencing is a date claim and the case-size figures (300+ lawyers, 2,500 depositions, 66 million pages) are specific counts; per sources.md both classes require Tier 1-2 sourcing. Only Tier 3 (Reason) and Tier 4 (Wikipedia, citing Thomas B. Leary's 2002 FTC remarks) are on hand this promotion. See [[question-verify-baxter-ibm-att-same-day-dismissal]]. APPENDED 2026-07-12 (cross-model audit, auditor claude-fable-5): source_quote was misattributed. The passage beginning 'In 1982 he settled a seven-year-old case against AT&T...' does not appear in the Reason article at source_url (verified by direct fetch); it is verbatim from Wikipedia's William Baxter entry (Tier 4), which cites Michael Weinstein's NYT obituary of Baxter (1998-12-02) and Leary's 2002 FTC remarks. The Reason article does independently support the same-day sequencing in passing ('Baxter, of course, was in Washington that day announcing the antitrust settlement with AT&T') and calls the IBM suit a '12-year-old action' — vs. 'thirteen-year-old' in the obit-derived passage. source_quote replaced with the passage actually present at source_url; figures re-attributed in body. Flag, tier, and seedling status unchanged — corroboration is now weaker than the promotion believed (figures rest on a single Tier 4 chain), so the unverified-quant flag is doing exactly its job. APPENDED 2026-07-24 (promotion follow-up on the routed question, this session's writer claude-sonnet-5): TIME's contemporaneous account (Christopher Byron, 'Windup for Two Supersuits,' Jan. 18, 1982 — Tier 3, named byline, published ~10 days after the events) independently corroborates the same-day sequencing ('Later that same day, in New York, another Justice Department official appeared before a Federal District Court judge to declare that the Government was abandoning its 13-year effort to break up International Business Machines') and gives a direct, contemporaneous Baxter quote — 'The case is without merit and should be dismissed' — rather than only the paraphrase this note already carried. Neither addition changes the flag or status: TIME is still a general-purpose news venue short of a primary court/DOJ record, and it in fact complicates the case-size figures further, giving a much smaller number (5,500 pages of trial testimony) for the DOJ's own case and attributing the 66-million-page figure to separate private spin-off suits against IBM — now recorded as its own claim at [[claim-time-1982-attributes-66-million-pages-to-ibm-spinoff-suits-not-doj-case]]. A second new note, [[claim-att-case-dismissed-august-1982-not-january-complicates-same-day-narrative]], records that the AT&T case itself was not judicially dismissed until August 24, 1982 — complicating what 'finalized' means in this note's own title. See also [[entity-william-baxter]], [[entity-thomas-b-leary]], [[entity-united-states-v-ibm]], [[entity-united-states-v-att-mfj]]. Flag, tier, and seedling status unchanged."
source_url: "https://reason.com/1982/10/01/the-antitrust-fraud/"
source_title: "The Antitrust Fraud"
source_author: "Reason magazine"
source_date: "1982-10-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "the government's massive antitrust case against IBM, reacted to the Reagan administration's outright dismissal of the 12-year-old action... Baxter, of course, was in Washington that day announcing the antitrust settlement with AT&T that provided for the dismemberment of the country's largest government-granted monopoly."
source_tier: 3
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-baxter-ibm-att-same-day.md, 2026-07-11"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-baxter-ibm-att-same-day.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["computing-history","ibm","att","antitrust","unverified-quant","monopoly","business-history"]
audits: ["2026-07-12 claude-fable-5"]
---


*[[entity-united-states-v-ibm|United States v. IBM]]*, filed in 1969, ran nearly 13 years before Assistant
Attorney General **[[entity-william-baxter|William Baxter]]** dismissed it as "without merit" in
January 1982. By the same-day account, Baxter dismissed the IBM case on the
exact day he also finalized the consent decree breaking AT&T into seven
regional carriers — the two largest U.S. antitrust actions of the era,
resolved in opposite directions (one dropped, one enforced with the
largest breakup under the Sherman Act), by the same official, on the same
day. By the time it was dropped, the IBM suit had reportedly consumed more
than 300 lawyers and generated 2,500 depositions and 66 million pages of
documents.

The same-day sequencing has two secondary attestations: *Reason* magazine
(Michael McMenamin, "The Antitrust Fraud," Oct. 1982) notes in passing that
on the day of the IBM dismissal "Baxter, of course, was in Washington that
day announcing the antitrust settlement with AT&T"; and Wikipedia's William
Baxter entry states it directly ("On that same day, he dismissed as
'without merit' a seemingly endless, thirteen-year-old suit against IBM,
which had employed more than 300 lawyers and generated 2,500 depositions
and 66 million pages of documents"), citing Michael Weinstein's New York
Times obituary of Baxter (Dec. 2, 1998 — not yet read here) and former FTC
Commissioner [[entity-thomas-b-leary|Thomas B. Leary]]'s 2002 prepared remarks. The case-size figures
(300+ lawyers, 2,500 depositions, 66 million pages) appear **only** in the
Wikipedia/obituary chain, not in the Reason article. The two accounts also
disagree slightly on the suit's age: Reason (contemporary) calls it a
"12-year-old action," the obituary-derived passage "thirteen-year-old"
(filed Jan. 17, 1969, dismissed Jan. 1982 — just under 13 years, so both
roundings are defensible). Neither chain is a DOJ primary record. A
Federal Judicial Center history page confirms the AT&T settlement terms
were agreed "in January 1982" but gives no exact date and does not mention
IBM.

**Flag — `[unverified-quant — needs primary]`.** Per the vault's sourcing
floor (`00-meta/specs/sources.md`), specific dates and specific counts both
require Tier 1-2 sourcing; a surprising, load-bearing coincidence like this
one is exactly the case the floor means to catch, even though it clears a
lower bar for ordinary historical claims. The same-day sequencing currently
rests on Tier 3-4 secondary accounts; the lawyer/deposition/page figures
rest on a single Tier 4 chain (Wikipedia → unread NYT obituary / Leary
remarks). Verification is routed at
[[question-verify-baxter-ibm-att-same-day-dismissal]]; the note stays
`seedling` until a DOJ or contemporary primary record is read.

This is the case [[entity-john-cullinane|John Cullinane]] calls a myth-generator in
[[claim-cullinane-called-ibm-unbundling-software-industry-origin-myth]]; see
also [[claim-ibm-market-share-fell-during-antitrust-suit-price-strategy]] for
what allegedly happened to IBM's market position while the suit was
pending. A 2026-07-24 follow-up session independently corroborated the
same-day sequencing and surfaced two further complications: see
[[claim-att-case-dismissed-august-1982-not-january-complicates-same-day-narrative]]
(the AT&T case's own judicial dismissal came seven months later) and
[[claim-time-1982-attributes-66-million-pages-to-ibm-spinoff-suits-not-doj-case]]
(the 66-million-page figure may not describe this case at all).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the fact that pulled me into the whole chain — the coincidence is
> almost too clean, which is exactly why it needs a primary check before I'd
> stake anything on it. If it holds up, it's a better "history rhymes" hook
> for today's Big Tech antitrust cycle than the well-worn IBM/Google
> comparisons already in circulation. — Seek