Coinbase Sues SEC Over Gary Gensler’s Deleted Messages
Coinbase has asked a federal court to conduct an «expedited due process search» of Gary Gensler’s deleted text messages after the Office of Inspector General reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission had deleted a year’s worth of his communications.
Gensler’s SEC destroyed documents they were required to keep and produce. Now we have evidence from the SEC’s inspector general.
Today, we are asking a federal court to review this gross violation of the public trust to ensure that something like this never happens again,” said Coinbase General Counsel Paul Grewal.
In September 2023, the SEC deleted text messages sent and received by then-Chairman Gary Gensler. It did so under a new agency policy. The messages may have been saved, but the agency’s IT staff “performed a factory reset on the smartphone, which permanently deleted the device’s data, including nearly a year’s worth of text messages.”
All of Gensler’s communications from October 2022 to September 2023, the same period that saw the FTX collapse and the SEC’s increased scrutiny of cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase, have disappeared.
The SEC under Gensler did this despite the fact that we requested information about “all communications” within the SEC related to cryptocurrency regulation and enforcement decisions years ago, Grewal said.
He added that Coinbase requires “expedited detection, sanctions, and immediate provision of all relevant texts.”
