Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) wants to see Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler's personal emails, while Gary wants to see 'crypto-focused' venture capital groups hauled into court

Coinbase appears to believe the old adage that the best defense is a good offense, as the exchange filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests

Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) wants to see Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler’s personal emails, while Gary wants to see ‘crypto-focused’ venture capital groups hauled into court on unregistered broker-dealer charges.

On Monday, attorneys representing the Coinbase digital asset exchange in its legal fight with the SEC filed a letter with U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York. The letter was a response to the SEC’s motion to “quash Coinbase’s subpoena for the production of documents to Gary Gensler in his personal capacity.”

On June 14, Coinbase served a subpoena requesting “documents on core matters in this litigation,” including personal communications that Gensler may have had with “issuers of digital assets.” On June 28, the SEC replied to this request, saying the subpoena “seeks nothing of relevance, imposes an undue burden on the SEC, and strongly disincentivizes public service,” the latter due to the subpoena being “an improper intrusion into a public official’s private life.”

Coinbase claims the SEC—which insists that it doesn’t represent Gensler in his personal capacity—balked at confirming whether Gensler had any “responsive communications in his personal capacity” regarding digital assets. Coinbase accused Gensler of refusing “to undertake any search to answer that threshold question.”

Coinbase points to the fact that Gensler has occasionally voiced his personal views on digital assets’ regulatory status, although he usually states at the time that his views are his own and not necessarily those of the SEC. Prior to his being named SEC chair, Gensler was a professor at MIT, a period in which Coinbase claims Gensler was “at the center of discussions with market participants” regarding digital asset regulation.

Coinbase claims these discussions are “probative of the objective understanding of the public and market participants regarding what conduct the securities laws prohibit.” As such, Gensler’s personal emails are “an appropriate source of discovery,” but the SEC “now contends all such communications are in Mr. Gensler’s capacity as [SEC] Chair.”

Coinbase’s chief legal officer Paul Grewal offered his personal take on the SEC’s refusal to cooperate, tweeting that Gensler was trying to avoid “exposing how the SEC’s enforcement action offends the Constitution’s requirement of due process.” The SEC maintains that Gensler shouldn’t be unduly burdened by Coinbase’s fishing expedition, possibly because he’s too busy preparing additional actions against ‘crypto’ scofflaws.

On Monday, the SEC also responded to Coinbase’s recent appeal to get Judge Failla to consider the recent ruling in the SEC’s suit against the Binance exchange in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. On June 28, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that secondary sales of Binance’s in-house BNB token didn’t necessarily qualify as sales of unregistered securities.

The SEC argues that Judge Jackson “made no findings at all about any of the 12 crypto assets at issue” in the Coinbase case. The SEC further argues that Jackson concluded that “the question of whether a secondary market transaction could constitute an investment contract under the Howey test depends on the facts and circumstances of the particular transactions at issue.”

As a result, the SEC believes the Binance ruling (a) supports Failla’s March 27 opinion that the agency had “sufficiently pleaded” that Coinbase engaged in the unregistered sale of securities and (b) “permits all of the SEC’s claims under the Exchange Act—the same ones at issue here—to go forward.”

Coinbase appears to believe the old adage that the best defense is a good offense, as the exchange filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests targeting both the SEC and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FOIA requests seek documents and communications related to both agencies’ digital asset-related investigations and enforcement actions.

The requests were filed on Coinbase’s behalf by History Associates Inc., a Maryland-based firm that conducts research and discovery services for corporations, government agencies, congressional offices and non-profit groups.

美國證券交易委員會的要求提供了「加密貨幣」行業可靠的OTT 言論的樣本，包括提及「焦土執法戰爭」、美國證券交易委員會的「要么提交，要么否則」威脅、「通過要求據稱，上述所有令人髮指的行為都是為了「把這個行業推入地下」。

History Associates 試圖迫使SEC 提供與2018 年和2020 年達成和解的兩項SEC 調查相關的文件。

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