A judge has ordered lawyers defending the state’s chief utility regulator to appear in court and explain why she denied possessing any electronic records concerning authorship of a controversial, anti-utility opinion column when she knew an automatic deletion program she activated on her telephone would have destroyed those records.

The order by Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik raises the possibility of sanctions against Public Utility Regulatory Authority chief Marissa Gillett’s lawyers for allegedly misleading the court about PURA’s compliance with his orders to produce records associated with a utility industry suit.

In his order, Budzik refers to the legal process of producing records as discovery.

“Parties have a duty to respond to discovery fairly and in a non-misleading ma

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