“On the morning of Aug. 31, AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said in a television interview that he expected his company’s bid for T-Mobile USA Inc. to get government approval by the first quarter of 2012,” Sara Forden and Jeff Bliss report for Bloomberg.

“An hour later, his lawyers received a call from the U.S. Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the matter,” Forden and Bliss report. “The attorneys were told the government was suing to block the $39 billion transaction, the person said. The suit halted the biggest deal of the year and drew a line in the sand on antitrust policy that may affect pending acquisitions.”

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Forden and Bliss report, “The sudden turnaround occurred because the Justice Department came to a meeting the day before looking for AT&T to lay out a game-changing national remedy to eliminate what it saw as the anticompetitive defects in the proposed merger, and that didn’t happen, said another person involved in the meeting. AT&T was under the impression that it would have more time to present ideas that would assuage the government’s reservations about the deal, another person involved in the discussions said.”

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