A lawyer for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes blamed the federal government Wednesday for the loss of a database that Holmes’ company dismantled four days after giving the government an encrypted copy but no way to open it.

Holmes’ 10-member legal team wants the judge overseeing her criminal fraud case to prevent the jury from hearing about certain customer complaints, blood-test results and government findings, on the basis that the lost company database contained critical information for her team’s responses to that potential evidence. The data included “almost certainly millions” of accurate test results helpful to Holmes’ case, her lawyer Amy Saharia said Wednesday during a video hearing.

Federal prosecutors, however, say the information in the database would have highlighted serious problems with the company’s technology.  The case is currently in pre-trial proceedings in San Jose U.S. District Court.

Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, is charged with a dozen felony counts in connection with her failed Palo Alto blood-testing startup. The federal government alleges Holmes, now pregnant and expecting a baby this month, bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauded doctors and patients through false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full array of tests using just a few drops of blood. She and her co-accused, former company president Sunny Balwani, have denied the claims.

From early in the hearing Wednesday, Saharia faced skepticism from Judge Edward Davila concerning her attempts to convince him that the government — not Theranos — was responsible for the missing data.

“So the government, in essence what they were given was a non-working copy if you will of the database — they couldn’t access it,” Davila said. “Even if they had tried to access it in the parking lot when they received it they wouldn’t have been able to access it.”

Saharia did not dispute that Theranos had the database dismantled, but she disagreed with Davila’s use of the word “destroyed.”

“It’s not like someone took a hammer to the server,” Saharia said, adding that the Laboratory Information System database was taken down when Theranos closed shop in 2018.

She argued that federal investigators knew about the database long before asking for it. “The government was fully aware that Theranos was closing and yet it waited a year and a half, until the eve of the company closing, to request the database,” she said.

Saharia said evidence shows people connected to Theranos “might have had” the software key to get into the database “if the government had promptly realized that they needed that key.” Federal investigators’ staff had recommended contacting the FBI with its “most sophisticated experts in the world,” but there’s no evidence of any FBI contact, she said, adding that the government also made no attempt to get the database servers, from which the data might have been retrieved.

Davila asked about an email from a Theranos lawyer to someone the judge didn’t name. “Didn’t he just say, ‘We should give them the database, they won’t be able to figure it out and the people who (could) are in India?'” Davila said. The judge also suggested that Holmes, if she knew how important the data were, could have acquired a usable copy of the database for herself. “Your client had actual possession of the database before it was decommissioned,” he said.

Saharia, in response to Davila’s mention of the lawyer’s message, said “I don’t think that email has nefarious intent.” Holmes, at the time the database was decommissioned, was no longer CEO, as she’d already been indicted, Saharia said. “Ms. Holmes had no role in these events,” she said. “There is a severe risk of prejudice to Ms. Holmes if we have to litigate these facts about who lost the data in front of the jury. God forbid they may infer that Ms. Holmes had something to do with it. The government keeps (implying) that.”

Prosecutor John Bostic said that while Holmes was still CEO and months before the demise of the database, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had served a subpoena on Theranos “for the entire universe of lab results” from the database. Holmes was still chair of the company’s board when the government was given the unusable copy of the database, he said.

At no point did Theranos tell the government a key was necessary to access the copy of the database, which the government believes contained information that would have shown “serious and global problems with Theranos’ accuracy and reliability,” Bostic said.

Davila said he would rule on the matter shortly.

Holmes’ trial, delayed three times because of the pandemic and procedural matters, is scheduled to start Aug. 31. She faces maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and a $2.75 million fine, plus possible restitution, the Department of Justice has said