The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has challenged a court order to disclose internal documents in the lawsuit against Ripple.

We are talking about the text of the 2018 speech of the former director of the corporate finance department of the regulator William Hinman. He then stated that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities for various reasons.

SEC argued that the former official’s speech reflects his personal views. In February, the Commission filed a lawsuit in court, according to which Hinman expressed the position of the corporate finance department. The department is expected to extend the action DPP to drafts of speech.

On July 12, 2022, Judge Sarah Netburn called the regulator’s position hypocritical and rejected the motion to block disclosure of internal documents.

On August 16, the Commission accused Ripple’s lawyers of using a “fundamentally inconsistent argument”. In an appeal against the court’s decision, the SEC noted that Hinman’s speech was irrelevant.

According to the document, speech drafts are internal documents that are not subject to disclosure. At the same time, the regulator emphasized that process-related information also falls within the scope of the DPP.

The former employee’s speech at the SEC was again called “preliminary” and “consulting” because it “reflects the author’s personal opinion,” not “the policy of the institution.” As in the previous petition, the organizer referred to the attorney-client privilege privilege.

Earlier, the Fox Business channel aired an extensive investigation into the SEC case against Ripple. Journalists concluded that employees of the department behind the filing of the lawsuit may have been linked to Ethereum.

A possible conflict of interest in the actions of former senior officials of the commission was also noted by the non-profit organization Empower Oversight.

Recall that in May, representatives of the SEC “could not confirm or deny” the authenticity of the videotape of Hinman’s speech at the 2018 Fintech Week conference, and then said that transactions with Ethereum were not “transactions with securities.”

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