The federal officials, including Thomas Baxter, the general counsel of the Federal Reserve, called a recess. (There were also representatives from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the overcrowded room. The federal agencies didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story.) The government officials left for nearly an hour. When they returned, their message hadn’t changed. The officials strongly urged Lehman to file for bankruptcy protection that night. “They said it was ‘a critical part of a program they wanted to roll out,’ ” says Miller, who at 75 is the éminence grise of the bankruptcy bar. They didn’t explain what that program entailed, he says. It felt, Miller says, “ like we were facing a hanging judge.”