The court stated “the SEC has conducted itself improperly by serving an unauthorized supplemental report on the last day of discovery”. For that, “the SEC is ordered to pay Defendants’ reasonable expenses in filing their motion to strike and re-deposing Dr. Metz. The parties’ prior agreement that each side shall cover the costs of their own expert’s time shall control; accordingly, the SEC shall also cover the costs of Dr. Metz’s time.
In parallel, the XRP Army has organized into a putative class of over 60,000 retail XRP holders led by friend of the court John E. Deaton. They’ve crowd-sourced an investigation of evidence that Hinman while at the SEC earned $15 million in “retirement benefits” from Simpson Thacher, a law firm linked to Ethereum. This conflict of interest has also won the attention of Empower Oversight, a non-profit legal watchdog which.
Adding yet another lawsuit against the agency, the watchdog’s FOIA requests have hit pay dirt, despite SEC claims that no relevant emails existed. These incriminating emails show the SEC’s lengthy process to explain away the unseemly payments to Hinman, including a