The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) contests a significant judgement verdict in its ongoing fight with Ripple Labs.
James K. Filan, a crypto attorney who has been following the SEC against the Ripple issue since December 2020, shares with his 106,700 Twitter followers a copy of an SEC request to prevent the release of speech draft by the agency’s previous director, William Hinman.
In a letter submitted on behalf of the SEC to US District Judge Analisa Torres, attorney Ladan F. Stewart asks permission to file a pair of papers opposing the recent ruling by Judge Sarah Netburn forcing the SEC to provide a draft of Hinman’s 2018 speech.
In a 2018 lecture, Hinman said that Ethereum (ETH), the dominant innovative contract platform, was not a security.
Federal Judge Sarah Netburn ordered the SEC to provide emails related to the speech earlier this year, but the SEC contested the order. Netburn rejected the argument and ordered the SEC to deliver the required draughts and communications in April, but she did allow for clarification.
The SEC then asked for further time to protest Netburn’s decision to reject their challenge. The regulator said that the attorney-client privilege protected the Hinman papers. In contrast, Netburn rejected this line of reasoning in her most recent ruling.
The duplicity in claiming before the Court, on the one hand, that the Speech is irrelevant to the market’s understanding of whether or how the SEC would regulate bitcoin, and on the other hand, that Hinman sought and received legal guidance from SEC counsel in preparing his Speech implies that the SEC is adopting its litigation positions to advance its desired purpose, and not out of genuine adherence to the law.”
Judge Netburn blocked the SEC’s prior effort to keep the speech’s contents confidential, marking the most recent victory for Ripple in a series of disputes involving the address.
In late January 2020, the SEC filed its first lawsuit against Ripple, claiming that the payments company offered the digital asset XRP as unregistered securities.
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