Attorney James Filan has announced that Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn has ordered the SEC to send an e-mail to Ripple with a draft of a speech by the regulator’s former director of corporation finance William Hinman, in which he claims that Ethereum is not a security.
The speech was for a talk by Hinman at the Yahoo Finance conference in June 2018. Then, the former official said that, for various reasons, Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. However, he made no mention of XRP.
Over the past few months, the SEC and Ripple have debated over what information should be disclosed in the lawsuit. Lawyers for the fintech company have demanded a number of documents, including internal SEC messages about the content of speeches and other public communications.
Regulator officials have insisted these documents were subject to the deliberative process privilege. This is a principle of law that allows the regulator to refuse to disclose documents or testify on the grounds of confidentiality of data and sources.
In his ruling, Netburn has agreed that some documents were indeed protected by such a right. However, this principle cannot be applied to other recordings, such as Hinman’s e-mail.
