Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in declining to give drafts of a book he’s writing to Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for a lawsuit challenging the government’s bailout of American International Group Inc.

Greenberg is seeking book material, recorded interviews and other documents that are irrelevant to his $25 billion class action suit, Geithner said in a filing today in the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington.

Greenberg, the former chairman and chief executive officer of New York-based AIG, claims the September 2008 assumption of 80 percent of the insurer’s stock by the New York Fed, which Geithner headed at the time, violated shareholders’ rights to due process and equal protection of the law.

“Mr. Geithner’s importance is not a reason for compelling the production of hundreds of pages of non-responsive materials that he privately generated as raw materials for the purpose of organizing his thoughts before writing his book,” his lawyers wrote in the filing.

The case is Starr International Co. v. U.S., 11-cv-00779, U.S. Court of Federal Claims (Washington).

–Editors: Fred Strasser, Glenn Holdcraft