Google data center project details focus of Arkansas court challenge

An Arkansas federal judge on Wednesday denied a request by an energy company to temporarily block the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from publishing additional details from confidential documents that the newspaper obtained about the company’s involvement in building a facility that will supply power to a $4 billion Google data center in that state, a court filing showed.

The company, Entergy Arkansas, also had asked Judge Lee Rudofsky to order that the Democrat-Gazette remove from its website information in an article published on Monday about the documents.

“I think you have a strong case here,” Rudofsky told a lawyer for Entergy at a hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Little Rock, according to a report in the El Dorado News Times. “But the First Amendment gives me pause here.”

The judge said, “It would take a lot to get me to do a prior restraint,” the News Times reported.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation has noted that “The Supreme Court has made clear time and again that prior restraints” — barring a media outlet from publishing certain stories — “can be justified in only the most extreme circumstances.”

Rudofsky, who was nominated to the bench by President Donald Trump, in his order Wednesday denied Entergy’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Democrat-Gazette and other defendants. A court filing showed he plans to set a briefing schedule on Entergy’s request for a preliminary injunction in the case at a later date.

CNBC has requested comment from Entergy about the order.

Lee Wolverton, executive editor of the Democrat-Gazette, in a statement Wednesday, said, “This case is first, foremost and in its entirety about the First Amendment. Our duty as a news organization and the duty of all news organizations is to inform the public as fully as possible about issues of high public interest.”

“Any attempt to impede that effort by using the courts to apply prior restraint to any news organization’s First Amendment rights represents an attack on the very freedoms that define our country,” Wolverton said. “That must not stand.”

Entergy said in a court filing Tuesday that the documents, which contained “trade secrets” and “highly sensitive protected information,” were “disclosed in error” by the Arkansas Public Service Commission to a woman, Jessica Kivell, who had requested them under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Kivell then gave the documents to a reporter for the Democrat-Gazette, which published a story on Monday under the headline “Google to pay Entergy Arkansas $526 million for solar facility to feed West Memphis data center.”

The reporter, Sydney Sasser, wrote that the $526 million payment will cover “about one-third of the $1.6 billion price tag of the facility known as Cypress Solar,” a 600-megawatt solar field and 350-megawatt battery facility that will “feed the grid from which Google’s West Memphis data center will draw massive power.”

Sasser noted…