In August 2006, commission investigators interviewed the Dell executive, who had also testified about Intel in 2003 before the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In early 2008, Intel asked for a copy of the record of the interview. (Typically, in formal interviews, minutes are taken and the interviewee is asked to acknowledge his agreement with them.)
The commission told the company that it "did not interview" the Dell executive during the meeting "and no minutes of the meeting were taken," according to the ombudsman's report.
The commission later said one investigator wrote an "aide memoire" six days later that included his impressions of the meeting, but that it was an internal document that Intel couldn't look at. The commission also argued that it had discretion to determine what should and should not be considered exculpatory evidence, and that the information provided by the Dell executive might have duplicated other material already in the case file.
The ombudsman found that the commission's discretion wasn't so broad and that some information provided by the Dell executive wasn't already in the file at the time of the meeting