In a recent filing, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requested to seal certain portions of the parties’ filings regarding their motions for summary judgment. According to the securities watchdog, the proposed redactions and sealing requests are appropriate because they are “necessary to preserve higher values” and are “narrowly tailored to achieve that aim.”
Particularly, the SEC requested to seal the internal SEC documents reflecting debate and deliberation by SEC officials such as the 2018 infamous Hinman Speech documents. More so, the SEC wants the redaction of references to these Hinman documents in all Ripple filings that reflect non-public deliberations by the SEC ex-official.
Furthermore, the SEC revealed that Hinman’s 2018 speech internal documents were released to Ripple after Judge Analisa Torres denied the SEC’s objections to Magistrate Judge Netburn’s findings.
Owing to this, the SEC submitted that the Hinman Speech Documents be protected by the ‘deliberative process or attorney-client privileges’. “But if these documents were to become part of the public record, the SEC would be foreclosed from making any such argument in the future (on appeal in this litigation or in other litigation), which would be highly prejudicial to the SEC, part of the letter read.
XRP Community Members Curious Over Hinman Documents
Among those curious to discover the content of the 2018 Hinman Speech Documents is the popular United States Attorney Jeremy Hogan. The lawyer who is a partner at Hogan and Hogan noted this in his response to the SEC’s recent argument that Hinman emails are ” privileged”.
He wrote, “the SEC is still arguing that the Hinman emails are privileged despite losing that issue about 100 times already. Blows my mind and makes me recurious (is that a word?) about what is in them.” Also, note that the SEC requests to keep the emails from public view because otherwise it would be “foreclosed” from making “such arguments” in the future. That doesn’t even make sense to me – that disclosure of an argument would foreclose making it, Jeremy Hogan added.
It is worth noting that Hinman’s speech documents were released to Ripple after 18 months and six court orders in October 2022. However, the crypto solutions company has since withheld these documents from the public, given the SEC’s insistence on confidentiality.
This led to some members of the XRP community such as Digital Asset Investor seeking answers from Attorney John Deaton, the attorney representing over 75k XRP holders in the ongoing XRP lawsuit. As reported on Thursday, John Deaton detailed what is stopping Ripple from releasing the Hinman Speech Documents.
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