<\/p>\n
A Virginia judge overseeing Empower Oversight’s 2021 case against the SEC sided with a 2022 motion from the regulatory agency \u2014 with a few caveats.<\/p>\n
Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. said government agencies must conduct a “reasonable search for responsive records” in FOIA requests.<\/p>\n
In a few Empower’s<\/a> requests, the court found that the SEC’s “searches were not ‘reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents.”<\/p>\n The documents requested by Empower are related to communications between Marc Berger, Jay Clayton and William Hinman while they were at the SEC.<\/p>\n Marc Berger was acting enforcement director at the SEC until 2021<\/a>bringing the SEC’s complaints<\/a> against Ripple to light in 2020. <\/p>\n Jay Clayton led the SEC until 2020, then proceeded to sign<\/a> on with One River Asset Management’s advisory council. <\/p>\n Clayton told Blockworks last year<\/a> he didn’t expect to be involved with firms in the cryptocurrency space after he left the SEC.<\/p>\n William Hinman\u2014who is at the center of the Hinman speech documents that Ripple requested<\/a> in its court battle with the SEC\u2014 left<\/a> the regulatory agency in 2020 and joined Simpson Thacher & Bartlett as a senior advisor. <\/p>\n The SEC claimed that it complied with Empower’s FOIA requests for documents relating to SEC personnel’s communications with Enterprise Ethereum, One River Asset Management and Simpson Thacher and Bartlett. The watchdog specifically requested documents from May 2017 through December 2020.<\/p>\n The SEC did not, however, fully provide all of Empower’s requests with a “reasonable search” the court ruled, despite the judge deciding that the regulatory agency’s motion for summary judgment was granted in part.<\/p>\n “Defendant has offered no explanation why it confined its search to only a part of Plaintiff’s request, which indicates that the search was not conducted ‘in a manner reasonably certain to uncover all responsive records,” said a memorandum opinion filed on Wednesday.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be sure, agencies need not conduct backbreaking inquiries to find every possible responsive document. A search must be ‘reasonably calculated to cover all relevant documents,'” the filing states.<\/p>\n The judge also ruled that both the SEC and Empower must provide the court with a status update on July 19.<\/p>\n This is not Empower’s only case against the SEC with regard to FOIA requests. In May Empower filed another complaint<\/a> \u2014 this time in a DC court \u2014 requesting documents from the agency in regards to the XRP lawsuit and Hinman documents.<\/p>\n Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your email every evening. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter<\/a> now.<\/strong><\/p>\n Want alpha sent directly to your inbox? Get degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance, can’t-miss tweets and more from Blockworks Research’s Daily Debrief<\/a>,<\/strong><\/p>\n Can’t wait? Get our news the fastest way possible. Join us on Telegram<\/a> and follow us on google news<\/a>,<\/strong><\/p>\n A Virginia judge overseeing Empower Oversight’s 2021 case against the SEC sided with a 2022 motion from the regulatory agency \u2014 with a few caveats. Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. said government agencies must conduct a “reasonable search for responsive records” in FOIA requests. In a few Empower’s requests, the court found that the SEC’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[230,225,221,227,226,228,229,60,223,224,222],"class_list":["post-118799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-brave","tag-coinbase","tag-crypto","tag-decentralised","tag-decentralized","tag-decentralized-exchange","tag-erc-20","tag-featured","tag-meme-coin","tag-robinhood","tag-solana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118801,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118799\/revisions\/118801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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