Judge Netburn is setting this up to Order the SEC to give them to her to review in camera.
— James K. Filan 🇺🇸🇮🇪 (@FilanLaw) August 31, 2021
At a hearing on August 31, which was held via teleconference, the parties discussed the deliberative process privilege of the SEC. This is a principle of law that allows the regulator to refuse to disclose documents or testify, citing the confidentiality of data and sources.
Netburn said that Ripple made a strong case for its request, and therefore it needs to review the documents to determine whether it is necessary to protect them from disclosure.
The term review in camera used by Netburn means that at this stage, respondents will not be able to review the data provided by the SEC. If the judge deems them important to the process, they will be made public at a public hearing.
SEC claims a special treatment for Ripple
The Commission representative tried to challenge the judge's decision, claiming a Deliberative Process Privilege (DPP) and creating a "dangerous" precedent for the regulator, but Netburn rejected these arguments.
According to her, Ripple will not receive special treatment, since the company's lawyers will not see the documents until it decides otherwise.
(3/3) Netburn interrupts and reminds Tenreiro "the defendants won't be reviewing them" but that she will be, and schools Tenreiro how she does in camera review and why it is fair. 🔥🔥🔥🔥
— CryptoLaw (@CryptoLawUS) August 31, 2021
Netburn must review the SEC information before September 28, after which it must decide whether it is justified to conceal it. The regulator was instructed to submit documents with a minimum number of amendments.
During the meeting, the issue of providing the SEC with access to the correspondence of Ripple employees in the Slack messenger was not raised.
Read also: Ripple Lawyers Refused to Deliver Slack Communications to SEC
Earlier, the ex-director of the SEC's corporate finance department, William Hinman, said that he had warned Ripple about the risk of XRP being recognized as a security.
Recall too that Brad Garlinghouse's company has requested data on the transactions of SEC employees not only with the XRP token, which the regulator calls an unregistered security but also with Bitcoin and Ether.
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