At the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in June 2018, former Division Director William Hinman gave a speech in which he stated that Bitcoin and Ether are not securities. The SEC made a second attempt to withhold the documents, the majority of which related to Hinman. U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres rejected the SEC’s request to withhold the documents and finally ordered the agency to hand them over.
In her words:
The Court has reviewed the remainder of the thorough and well-reasoned Orders for clear error and finds none. Accordingly, the Court OVERRULES the SEC’s objections and directs the SEC to comply with the Orders.
After District Court Judge Sarah Netburn’s ruling stating that the emails and drafts of the speech were not covered by deliberative process privilege, as the SEC has asserted, Judge Torres’ decision dismissed SEC objections to the release of the records.
The SEC has, nevertheless, failed in its attempts to eradicate the papers from evidence, and the court has agreed with Ripple on the issue by recognizing that the speech materials may be used to gather prospective contempt evidence or to condemn witnesses at the trial, particularly William Hinman.
An SEC complaint was launched against Ripple Labs, its former CEO Chris Larsen, and its current CEO Brad Garlinghouse in December 2020. The mess that surrounded Hinman’s claims is tied, more generally speaking, to this litigation. The SEC is suing the three entities because, according to the SEC’s allegations in the case, they improperly benefited from the sale of XRP coins as unregistered securities.
