Dugan Bliss, Senior Advisor to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, wrote a letter to Judge Sarah Netburn to highlight the agency’s response to Ripple Labs’ request for the generation of documents (the “requests”) in what was the most recent developments in the legal fight between the United States SEC and Ripple Labs.
According to the applicant, over 81 Go of data comprised of 97,865 documents and 3,911 external e-mails have already been produced, including non-privileged and safeguarded material, third-party documents, transcripts, subpoenas, external e-mails and other communications related to them.
In accordance with the letter, the SEC has agreed that certain information that it seeks should be given to the defendants, including related e-mail communications containing key phrases like XRP or Ripple, communications between third parties and nine senior SEC staff, as well as documents received during research involving the said digital assets from third parties.
But the compromise proposed by the SEC did not actually satisfy Ripple’s expectations. Rather, the Ripple authorities requested two further documents, a) Bitcoin and Ether documents, b) SEC internal XRP, Bitcoin and Ether communications.
SEC officials argued that,
“……simply invoking Bitcoin and Ether comparisons (or labeling a currency digital asset) is no acknowledged defense. Consequently, Bitcoin and Ether findings in this case cannot affect the issues or at least do not match the needs of the case such as that held by Judge Hellerstein in a case of SEC digital assets”.
The letter referred to above further alleges that the requests of Ripple in this respect “are disproportionate, excessive and unduly burdensome.”
“…they demand not only irrelevant discovery, but also highly burdensome discovery, including internal documents requiring considerable privilege.”
The SEC reports that the accused are attempting ‘to shift the blame on the SEC’ for their own actions or inactions”.
