Judge Says SEC Lawyers Care Only About Victory, Not Allegiance to Law

Founder of CryptoLaw.US John Deaton, who is a lawyer and follows the Ripple-SEC case closely, has taken to Twitter to once again take a jab at the SEC in the context of its legal suit against Ripple Labs.

Judge Netburn slams SEC lawyers

This time, he quoted federal judge Netburn, who criticized the legal team of the U.S. securities regulator struggling to prove its allegations that Ripple has been selling XRP tokens, as the regulator referred to them, as unregistered securities.

According to Deaton, the judge mentioned their “hypocrisy” when presenting arguments to the court about Hinman’s speech. The judge emphasized that the lawyers of the regulatory agency are more interested in expanding control over the crypto market than wishing to obtain justice.

The judge drew this conclusion from the fact that, on the one hand, the regulator argues that Hinman’s speech is not relevant to the market’s understanding of the SEC’s regulation of the cryptocurrency space, and on the other hand, Hinman had consulted with the regulator’s lawyers before delivering his speech on crypto assets.

cryptocurrency, and on the other hand, that Hinman sought and obtained legal advice from SEC counsel in drafting his Speech, suggests that the SEC is adopting its litigation positions to further its desired goal, and not out of a faithful allegiance to the law.”

-Judge Netburn

— John E Deaton (@JohnEDeaton1) February 20, 2023

Ripple and the regulatory agency are now awaiting the verdict of the judge after they had submitted the briefed documentation on the case and all the amicus briefs to Netburn.

Here’s what makes Hinman’s speech valuable

Back in 2018, William Hinman, former head of the Division of Corporation Finance at the SEC, delivered a speech in which he outlined why the regulator believes the two leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), to be nonsecurities.

These two crypto assets have been qualified as commodities both by the SEC and the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission).

Ripple lawyers have been striving to get the judge to make the SEC produce these documents in court. As reported by U.Today last week, a media personality and major contributor to Forbes, Roslyn Layton, has also requested to gain access to these documents by filing a motion to the judge.