Eleanor Terrett is a Journalist at Fox Business who has been covering the SEC Ripple XRP lawsuit. In this interview we discuss her research, the big updates in the lawsuit, Judge Torres telling the SEC to hand over the Hinman documents, multiple amicus briefs filed, Bill Hinman conflicts of interest, settlement and outcome in the lawsuit, and much more.
Transcript
Welcome back to the “Thinking Crypto” podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Ellie Terrett, who’s a journalist and producer at Fox Business. Ellie, great to have you on the show.
- Thanks for having me, Tony. Pleasure to join you.
- Ellie, there’s a lot to talk about on the research and journalism you and the folks at Fox Business have been doing on the SEC lawsuit. There have been some big updates yesterday as well as today. Before we get there, I would like to get to know you a bit better. Where are you from and how did you become a journalist?
- So I am actually from the United Kingdom, from England, and a lot of people don’t know that, because I don’t sound like I’m from the UK. I don’t have an accent. But I did move here when I was nine years old, so that was about fourth grade. So I was fairly impressionable and wanted to sound like my American friends. So that’s the reason I don’t sound like a Brit, although I can put the accent back on, even though it sounds a bit fake to me now. But, yes, I was born in the UK. I moved over to the States when I was nine years old because my dad is a reporter. He’s still a reporter, but at the time he was with the BBC and they moved him over here for a year. It was supposed to be a year, and then it’s actually turned into 20 now. So we,
- Wow.
- I know. It’s, December will be 20 years of being in the US and never thought I’d be here. Never thought I’d end up in New York. I actually live in New Jersey across the river, but Fox headquarters is here and I work here five days a week. So I am a Brit living in New York and I love it.
- So did you wanna become a journalist ’cause your dad was in the field and it was, it was kind of like something that you knew of and you know, it’s something that appealed to you?
- Kind of, yeah. So I always knew that I enjoyed kind of the dramatics, right? So my dad’s been a reporter my whole life. I used to go to work with him. He would bring me to Broadcast Center in London where the BBC headquarters are. And you know, I’d sit in the studio, I’d play around with the microphones, I’d put on like fake shows and I enjoyed it a lot. And I always thought maybe I would take up this kind of career path one day. But when I graduated high school I was determined to go into PR. That was kind of the cool job that all my girlfriends were going into, communications and PR. So that’s what I decided to major in. And about halfway through college, I decided it wasn’t really what I wanted to graduate with. I was kind of nervous. I know, ’cause these days you can graduate with a degree and actually do absolutely nothing towards the, you know, do nothing with that degree. You know? You could graduate with anthropology and you know, become a journalist. And that’s kind of, I was, so at the time I was a little nervous and I didn’t know that that was a thing. I was like all right, I just wanna graduate with something that I know I wanna stick with after college. So I took a semester off and during that time I went to be a production assistant, sort of an intern position ’cause I was just off for a semester at Al Jazeera America, which was a news organization based here in New York. And I became a PA. So I was cutting video, running strips for anchors, very kind of entry level, foot in the door stuff. And I really, really fell in love with it. So once my semester home was over, I went back to JMU and I continued working at Al Jazeera on the weekend. So I would drive up to New York on a Friday, do the weekend shift, drive back to Virginia on a Monday to do my classes. So that’s kind of what I knew. I really loved the production side of it. And then once I graduated, I applied to Fox. Fox is, was my first job out of college. And I did start as a PA here, actually was a guest greeter. So similar things, running scripts to anchors, bringing guests to hair and makeup. And then I was a production assistant again, doing cutting video, writing scripts, kind of more, doing field stuff as well. So I would go out with the reporters and do like live shots and packages that would roll in the network the next day. And then somewhere around going down to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, I decided I think I kind of wanna do this, you know, front of the camera for a living. And I kind of decided then and there that I wanted to pursue an on camera role and, you know, my dad has been doing it his whole life, so I’d like to think that it’s in my blood and I kind of have a flare for it. I hope I do and I’m not just blowing smoke. But yeah, so I mean really I’d never planned on it. I thought I would be PR, communications my whole life, but I guess it kind of all rolled into one, right? Like communications, PR, journalism, they’re very similar fields. So yeah, here I am. And it all kind of started with being on the floor of the exchange, watching the reporters do their live hits from the floor, and got up there on a box. And we had a little like apple box, our camera that pointed down, you know, on the floor of the exchange. You know, we’re shorter and my reporters and I would always have an apple box to stand on. So at the end of the day at four o’clock when everybody went home, all the traders left, I would stand up on the apple box and practice and just run through what happened in the markets that day. The DOW, how it finished, the SMP, stocks. And I got, you know, more confident. And then I started working with Charlie. And the great thing about Charlie is that he’s great mentor, right? He’s been around the block, he was a Wall Street Journal reporter. He went to CNBC. He’s been with Fox for the last 10 years. So he’s really, you know, a veteran in this industry. And what he’s best at is fostering young talent. So all the producers before me have gone on to do great roles at the New York Post, CNBC, they’ve all been hired as either, you know, on talent TV, on TV talent or as you know, like prestigious writers for prestigious publications. So I hope to be able to do that once I’ve graduated from Charlie. But that kind of solidified my thinking, like, okay, I’m in a good space, I have a great mentor who’s helping me not just write better, but perform better, research better. So that’s where I am and that’s how I ended up here.
- Very cool. Love it. And like you said, it’s probably running in your blood given, you know, your dad’s been doing it.
- Actually. And my mom did it too for a little bit.
- Oh, no way. Wow.
- My mom was a traffic reporter in the UK and that’s how her and my dad met. So kind of doubly as well.
- Yeah.
- My sister’s a nurse, my sister was like, I don’t want anything to do with this business. I am going into nursing.
- Very cool. So tell me about, how did you and Charles come across the Ripple lawsuit situation and decided to investigate and cover the story?
- Yeah, so I would say it is just a little over a year since we first heard about this. And actually Charlie had done some reporting on the Brooklyn Project back in 2018. And the Brooklyn Project was where a couple top officials, I think it was at Consensus, were trying to create the first SEC-sanctioned self-regulatory organization within crypto. And they had told Charlie this at a dinner I believe, and Charlie reported this on the network the next day. And then they came back and said, “Oh actually, you know, it’s not SEC-sanctioned,” but Charlie was like, “You told me it was SEC-sanctioned and that you’ve had conversations with the SEC.” And keep in mind this is like the Joe Lubins and the people at Consensus who, you know, were may or may not have been having meetings with the SEC at the time. So, you know, he reported that, they came back with, no, it’s actually not true. And I, that ended up on John Deaton’s CryptoLaw timeline. I remember seeing, you know, Charlie’s video where he broke it on Liz Claman’s show. He did a tweet about it as well. So Charlie had kind of already touched on a little bit of it, and then it was September 14th I believe of last year, we got a tweet from John saying, “Liz Clayman, Charlie Gasparino, you have the opportunity to report on one of the biggest financial stories in recent memory. Will you?” And Charlie saw it and said, “I will report.” So from there we kind of did some sleuthing, I guess. We looked at John’s CryptoLaw, you know, and you know as well as I do how detailed and packed with information it was. So we, you know, we’ve looked at it, we did our own research, we talked to, and I feel like I say this whenever I get interviewed about it, like we talked to the players involved. But that’s really like, you know, ’cause there was so much, you know, I say evidence, there was so much stuff to go through, but we as journalists, we had to go through it and corroborate literally everything and talk to everybody and get their side of it. So we did that. And you know, from September to November we were really educating ourselves on the topic, talking to people. And then the day, the week of Thanksgiving, I think it was the week of Thanksgiving, we released the 10,000 word opus that we like to call it, the rundown of the Ripple SEC case. What led to it, who was involved, and it got pretty good reception. I know people were waiting for it for a while, because I think we were really the only mainstream media outlet to address it, you know-
- Right.
- -especially in so much detail. So that’s really how we, how we got into it. And then from there it just kind of snowballed, right? Like that-
- Yeah.
- The court case has obviously been going on for, you know, the last two years. So we’ve been following the judge’s updates and all the filings and it’s been a crazy year, but so interesting and really how I got my sort of interest in crypto. That’s kind of what kicked off my love for, you know, reporting on crypto, the regulatory side, but then also, you know, the technology side, learning about the blockchain, learning about all the cool projects that are on the blockchain and will be on the blockchain in the future.
- Wow. What a way to get introed into the crypto market.
- I know, well the, the XRP community was like, it was like a explosion. We’re like, oh, okay. Like there’s a whole community of people behind this and they are so passionate and you know, like there’s, there’s the, there’s the community of the AMC Apes on Twitter who Charlie, you know, likes to do battle with sometimes. And it kind of opened our eyes up to wow, there’s real communities here on Twitter and they are passionate about what they believe in. And they all come together and they have your back. If they don’t like you, and I think, I think that Boyd tweeted something about this earlier. He was like, you know, “If you, if you off the XRP army, you’re done, because they will dig up some dirt and they will send you to your grave.”
- Yeah, I remember talking to macro investor Raoul Pal about this, and it’s Metcalfe’s Law with financial incentives at play where the token holders, they now have equity. They, it’s an equitable asset class and that you have say and change on. So people are much more invested and it’s an interesting dynamic to watch play out.
- Yeah, it definitely is. And the way it’s boomed, you know, in the last, especially over the pandemic, because I had heard of crypto, you know, I, obviously it was thought up by Mr. Nakamoto in 2008, Bitcoin was. And then all the other projects came. But I really started hearing about it in 2018, I’d say when I was down on the floor with the exchange. I’d hear the traders talk about it. Some of my friends were investing. And you know, I kind of respected it and I didn’t really understand it and I kind of just said, you know, all right, that’s seems like, you know, it’s gonna go places in the future. And especially during the pandemic, I think when everybody was stuck at home and they were like, “What do I do?
- Yeah.
- “Oh, let me invest, let in the stock market and crypto seems like it’s going bananas. Let me invest in crypto.” So just even over the last two or three years, the growth we’ve in this industry is just it’s phenomenal.
- So I have to ask, have you started investing in crypto? What do you hold in your portfolio?
- Yeah, so I do not own any crypto currently. Part of the reason is because I really only started getting into, you know, learning about crypto last year when we, like I said, when we first started reporting on the Ripple SEC case. And you know, ever since then, I’ve almost been a little worried that if I do invest it might, you know, pose a conflict of interest. It might look like I’m, you know, if I report on something then, you know, maybe I’m trying to push it in a certain way or a certain narrative, which absolutely I would not do, even if I did hold crypto. I’d like some time to be able to just sit down and, you know, open a wallet and really just like get to know like the, you know, the space a little bit more. Like the crypto exchanges. What’s the best one to download? You know, what’s the best coin to hold? And it’s not even just like holding the coins, right? It’s like investing. So like what do you believe is gonna be, you know, a great investment? And I know I’m sure you know, you believe XRP will be a great investment. Others believe Bitcoin. Others believe Ethereum. And I think it’s interesting ’cause a lot of people who obviously believe in XRP, they also hold like John Deaton and I think yourself as well. You said you own Bitcoin and Ethereum, I think I heard that in an interview-
- Yep.
- -you did previously. Am I right in saying that?
- Oh yeah, I’m diversified.
- Yep. I believe there’s not gonna be just one winner.
- Right.
- It’s gonna be like the the dot-com boom. There’s gonna be your Google, your Amazon, your eBay, and so forth.
- Right Right. And so I just wanna, you know, I wanna be able to sit down and take the time to really put some thought into it. And I hope to be able to do that soon. I’m kind of over, I’m through the other side now where it’s like, you know, I don’t think if I own crypto, it’s such a conflict of interest, you know. I think I will disclose. If I do buy, I’ll disclose everything I own and I think that’s enough. But there’s always been a little bit of a stigma around like financial journalists owning the stocks that they report on. It’s just gotta be like massive disclosure. And I didn’t want anything to, you know, like to jeopardize my reporting I guess. But I am a hundred percent down to buy crypto in the future and I hope it will be soon.
- Well, I definitely respect that and I’d certainly understand your perspective and trying to learn about it and so on and so forth. Let’s talk about the lawsuit. My goodness. Yesterday we had Judge Torres, you know, essentially tell the SEC, “Hey, you have to hand over Bill Hinman’s emails.” Following in Sarah, Judge Sarah Netburn’s order as well. Today we had two new amicus brief applications filed by TabJet and I-Remit. What is your take on what’s happening in this lawsuit and the dynamic between Ripple and the SEC?
- Wow, that’s a loaded question.
- Yeah. Well let’s start with today. I think the amicus briefs, they will help Ripple, I believe. It seems like they will go a long way with helping Ripple in the case. You know, obviously we were waiting for the digital Chamber of Commerce to come out with theirs. They said they were gonna do on. I read through it today. It doesn’t seem to take a side, it doesn’t say, you know, “We believe XRP isn’t a security,” and it doesn’t say, you know, “We believe the SEC is right.” It kind of goes down the middle and says, you know, “We endorse,” or “We believe that this case is gonna have, you know, it’s gonna set a precedent for the rest of the crypto community, cryptoverse. Down the line, this is gonna have big implications.” So, you know, they’re kind of lending their hand and saying, you know, “This is an important case, make sure you get it right.” But they don’t say, you know, who should get it right and who should win.
- Right.
- I know there’s people like John Deaton who say they could’ve gone a little harder. They could have maybe, you know, showed their cards a little more. But I respect the fa- you know, the need to be impartial. And as a journalist, you know, I know that better than anyone, to kind of give everybody the fair treatment on both sides. So the other two, I believe it was TapJet and I-Remit, they submitted their applications for amicus brief today. And those seemed more to be in the favor of Ripple. They, both of them said they use XRP as a currency and they both believe it not to be a security. And they give reasons why and they cite, you know, their business models and how their business model depends on XRP or is, you know, largely helped by XRP as a currency. And I believe that’ll go, if the judge allows them in court, they allow the applications to be read and digested, I believe that’ll go a long way to helping Ripple. And it kind of seems like this whole week has been a win for Ripple. Right? Just the news that’s come out. We got the Hinman calendar, which I’ll go into later. We got the ruling from Judge Torres that said the SEC has to turn over those documents. I think it was the sixth time she said that, or at least least the court has said that, because it’s been a year of them trying to evade that and trying to get out of showing those documents. But finally yesterday she came out and said, “No, you have to show them.” So really this whole week has been kind of a party for Ripple just ’cause it’s like, all right. It’s all these great headlines and the SEC seems to be, you know. Also as a journalist, I reached out to the SEC quite a bit and they decline to comment on pretty much everything. Unless there’s something that we write that they don’t like and there’s a correction that they wanna make. Like for example, the other day when I wrote an article about Brad, when Brad was on the network saying that the case will likely not go to a jury, I had said, you know. I’d mentioned the Hinman speech and I’d said, it seemed that the SEC had taken a stance on Bitcoin and Ethereum with Bill Hinman’s speech back in 2018. Something along those lines. Or the SEC took a stance. And then they came back and said, “That’s incorrect. We’ve never taken a stance on Ether.” So they’ll come back with stuff that they don’t like but they won’t comment on the case. And I think that is, yeah, I know they’re a government agency. I think that’s doing them, it’s not doing them any favors because you see how vocal Stu Alderoty is, for example, Ripple’s general counsel. How open he is to kind of, you know, giving his insight and his thoughts and Brad Garlinghouse is the head of the company and of, you know, giving his opinions and his thoughts and being open to people. And I feel like the SEC is just closed off and just doing things their own way, which is fine, but you know, maybe just giving some comments, some, you know, color. And this is my first time really dealing with a government agency like that and-
- Right.
- -as, on the journalistic side. So I don’t know if like all government agencies are like that, but I feel like it is doing them a bit of a disservice just to remain quiet. ’cause it just seems that, you know, it’s kind of giving Ripple all the attention, as it were.
- What’s surprising what you just mentioned, that they are, they’re listening, they’re watching, and they contacted you saying, “Hey, this is incorrect.” I find that very fascinating that they’re spending their time doing that as well.
- Yeah, I mean we didn’t always have, not say great relationship with them. We, when I first started working for Charlie, we weren’t covering, you know, as much of the SEC as we were when we started reporting on the Ripple case. But there are a couple instances where I would reach out to their flack and say, “This is what Charlie’s reporting.” And Charlie and I do that all the time. We’re gonna report something or say something that you know, is about a certain person or an organization, we’ll reach out to them and say, “Hey, this is what we’re reporting, is this okay? Just to let you know.” If there’s any issue, we’ll, factual issue, we’ll change it. But we recently had a conversation with the SEC Flack, I’d say it was about a couple months ago, and they took issue with an article that we’d written about Gary. I think it was something, him being potentially Treasury Secretary, wanting to be Treasury Secretary and his staff not being necessarily like happy under his rule and people leaving, et cetera. The morale was down at the SEc, that’s what we reported. And they took issue with a couple things that we said. We said that they, the SEC’s mission is to protect the small investor, right? But they took issue and said, “No, we actually protect all investors.” So there were very small little nitpicks, but ever since then, ’cause they stopped answering us for a while. Like I would, I would email them and say, we’re gonna say this, this, and this, and I’d never heard back, so.
- Yeah.
- You know, when they came back with that, with that change, I was like, okay, let’s establish like, you know, whenever we write something we’ll send it to you. If you don’t like it, let us know. And if it’s wrong, let us know. So recently they’ve been very responsive to Charlie and I’s reporting, we’ll, you know, we’ll send them what we’re gonna say. And they’ll either say, you know, “No comment,” which is, you know, 99.9% of the time they’ll say no comment or you know, they’ll fix or change something that they don’t necessarily agree with. But in that vein-
- Interesting.
- -Bill Hinman did say Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. They do not seem to be securities. And the market took it as guidance and you do a quick Google search and you know, every financial outlet in the world, in the country, was reporting, you know, “SEC Official gives blessing to Bitcoin, Ethereum. The prices have both jumped.” And now they say they haven’t taken a stance. It’s just, you know, it’s semantics. It’s, he said, he said, she said, and it’s just, it’s a lot. Yeah.
- But they have been more responsive and I, and I, you know, appreciate the fact that we have a better relationship with them as journalists and…
- For sure. But I feel, I think you see it too that the public is losing confidence in the SEC. And I think, you know, from my perspective, I’m just seeing them lacking integrity in the way they’re handling certain things. To your point, not speaking up and kind of staying quiet on certain issues. And people are seeing the dichotomy between Bill Hinman’s speech and it’s on the, it’s on their website, sec.gov. And commissioners, even Chair Clayton at the time, they all endorsed it. So it’s like, what is going on? And I think the judge, at one point I think it was Sarah Netburn who called out and said the hypocrisy, like you can’t have it both ways. So I’m curious, you know, based on the research you’ve been doing, and you recently, you mentioned you were going through Bill Hinman’s calendar. What did you find there and what are some of the major takeaways?
- So the biggest takeaways for me from Hinman’s calendar was the fact that it corroborated a lot of the timeline that CryptoLaw, John Deaton’s firm, had laid out, right? So we knew that there were meetings between Consensus and Bill Hinman. We knew that there were possible meetings between Joe Lubin and Bill Hinman, but we weren’t, we couldn’t prove it. There was, there was a degree of uncertainty there. And going through this calendar, there were indeed meetings between Consensus, at least two that I saw. Just Consensus themselves. One with Consensus’ general counsel and then one with Joe Lubin. So there were definitely meetings between them and the SEC. It’s TBD whether Bill Hinman was in on all of them because some of those meetings, and I’ll get to that in a minute, were meetings of his colleagues and other SEC officials. There, he wasn’t involved in personally or physically. He was supposed to be there maybe, but he actually wasn’t there. What I mean by that, an example is, the other thing that stood out to me about his calendar was that the day he gave that speech in San Francisco on June 14th, 2018, he, on his, on his schedule, on this document that we received, it said a meeting with Ripple. And it was a, it was a two hour meeting, I believe with Ripple Council. And that was the morning of the speech. And it didn’t even say on the speech that, you know, the night before, the morning of, you’d think it would say “traveling to San Francisco,” or “Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit,” but it didn’t. It didn’t say he was anywhere, you know, other than DC. So I reached out to Ripple and they confirmed that they did have a meeting with the SEC. Bill Hinman wasn’t present. So, you know, going back to what I said before, I’m not sure if he was in all those meetings, but they definitely had meetings with the SEC and SEC officials. So I thought that was really interesting. You know, another thing I thought was interesting was that there were more meetings with Ripple and the SEC than previously thought, or that Charlie and I had previously known about, or reported. I’d say there are about a dozen meetings between 2018 and 2020, when they brought the lawsuit, between Ripple and/or Ripple’s counsel and the SEC. And I think the narrative before that, you know, especially for the XRP community, people thought that there were way less meetings with Ripple and way more with, you know, Lubin and Consensus and, you know, top people at Ethereum. But I, it seems to me that Ripple did meet quite a bit with them. What those meetings were about, I have no idea. Did they know they were gonna bring a lawsuit? I have no idea. But that stood out to me as well. Something else I found out that I didn’t know before was the involvement of Val and I don’t know how to say her last name, but I’m not gonna try cause I know I’m gonna butcher it. But she is, was known as the “crypto czar.” She had a meeting weekly with Bill Hinman on cryptocurrency. So she was very involved in not just, you know, the talks with Ripple or the meetings with Ripple and the meetings with Consensus and all the digital asset talks that were going on at the SEC at the time, she was right there. So she would be a great person to talk to. I saw her speak recently at the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit and I didn’t, couldn’t quite catch her at the end to catch up and talk to her. And she’s still employed by the SEC so I’m not sure you know, how much she would be able to talk about the case.
- Sure.
- But she was definitely in on a lot of those meetings and seems like, you know, would be around, would’ve been around when those policies or, you know, decisions, high up level decisions were being made. So she’d be a good person to interview. I definitely plan on reaching out to her. But her name propped up quite a lot on the calendar, so that stuck out to me as well.
- Interesting. I also saw John Deaton post that the calendar that you, the information that you got regarding Bill Hinman’s calendar, it was, there was a lot of meetings omitted from that calendar, it appears like. What are your thoughts on that?
- Yeah. Yeah. That’s, I saw that tweet as well. And I didn’t go through and compare, you know, what meetings were the week that John might’ve found that weren’t on the calendar. I just, I saw his tweet, but I mean I would imagine it’s true because, you know, the glaring one for me was that Bill Hinman wasn’t in San Francisco for his meeting, for his Yahoo Finance speech, the one that we all know he did and saw he did on video. On that agenda calendar, it says he wasn’t there. It says he was in DC and had meetings with Ripple and other people throughout the day. So that doesn’t surprise me. But I is it, is it, you know, intentionally omitted, I don’t know. Is it Bill Hinman’s just DC calendar, was it just him, you know, the engagements that he was supposed to have in DC with other members of the SEC? Not necessarily like his movements like word for word, day to day kind of thing. Maybe. John says the SEC likes to play games. They’ve definitely played, you know, they’ve played to their advantage in the past. I wouldn’t be surprised if they omitted some things. But then, why omit something that we know happened like the speech and not omit meetings with Consensus and Lubin, which they know Ripple and people are trying to look for. Makes no sense. But I would imagine that there is probably some omissions there.
- So what are your thoughts on the potential conflicts of interest with the former SEC official, Bill Hinman?
- Well, I’ve said all along, I believe that the conflicts of interest here are pretty obvious. They’re pretty glaring, right? So we go through everything from the meetings with the top official at Ethereum to the potential ethics violations that Bill Hinman committed when he was in office. And you know, we don’t know how the SEC you know, treats that, right? We don’t know if in the eyes of the SEC what Bill Hinman did, having lunch with a former Simpson and Thacher partner, you know, buying lunch next to each other. We don’t know if that is actually violating their rules, white- right? It looks to us, to people who are, you know, all over this lawsuit and people who have been following it from the beginning, it looks a little sketchy. And then the fact that they were kind of bantering back and forth about it being like, “Do you wanna buy lunch next to me,” you know, “again, next time?” And I know people have kind of said, you know, they’re making fun of, you know, their position, they’re taking advantage. But you know, we don’t really know the tone and really how it went down.
- Sure.
- I do think that there’s something to be said for a possible investigation by the ethics office, you know, just in terms of did we miss anything? Was something overlooked? Could, you know, that speech had been run through our department maybe a couple more times. Could we have caught the fact that, you know, Bill Hinman was, you know, a Simpson and Thacher employee. They were part of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, even though they aren’t anymore. Apparently they left the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
- Yeah.
- And these are little things, right? Like in hindsight. Like, you know, we could have, maybe they could have caught that. Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal to them at the time. Maybe they just didn’t make the connection. But I think it wouldn’t hurt to do maybe an investigation. And I think that would help restore confidence, especially, you know, people who have been following this lawsuit, investors, people who have just kind of seen the emails, seen the correspondences and seen how the SEC’s been behaving and they have really lost, you know, move not respect, just confidence for these people that are put in power to protect them. I think that would go a long way.
- Yeah, absolutely. What is your take on this whole lawsuit situation and potential conflicts of interest? Is this like a scandalous story compared to other stories in different asset classes and industries?
- So as someone who’s like relatively new to the industry and someone who, whose first investigative piece was the XRP-SEC Ripple lawsuit, yeah. I think it, you know- To an outsider it would certainly seem that these conflicts of interest are quite glaring. And I’ve said that before in other interviews. It, there’s almost too many like, just neat coincidences, right? And I feel like the community sees that. And I feel like even other people here, you know, when we talk about the case, Charlie and I at Fox, they’re like, “Oh,” like, you know, “that’s interesting.” Like why would that person have not revealed that meeting with this person? And then why would Bill Hinman have, you know, broken those ethics, you know, why would he have violated those ethics rules that were, you know, so tantamount to, you know, being an SEC official? I think there’s definitely been other financial scandals that have been, you know, more high profile.
- Sure.
- I think this, because it’s crypto is a little more like low profile, but I think we, Charlie and I have, and obviously other journalists too, like Roslyn Layton has done a great job. Obviously John Deaton’s done a great job of, you know, bringing these conflicts of interest out into the open and really kind of laying out the timeline and talking about the scope of, you know, just how big the implications are here. I think, yeah, it’s definitely, it’s definitely up there and it’s getting up there. And I think the more we talk about it and the more we expose it, the you know, hopefully more high profile it will be.
- Sure. I wanna circle back to the amicus briefs. Do you, are you personally anticipating more applicants throwing their hat in a ring?
- You know, I think so. And I spoke to John about this, John Deaton, and he said that he expects at least two to four more amicus briefs to come. I know he is supposed to be filing his relatively soon. But we have the one from the digital chamber, the one from the jet company, and then the one company who uses Ripplenet. So that’s three. And then he said two to four more. I wouldn’t be surprised. And I think, yeah, the, it’s interesting because the people are really just going in for supporting Ripple, right? We’re not seeing any amicus briefs on the side of the SEC. And I think that’s interesting. I mean maybe we will see, I don’t know, but I think there’ll be more to come, as more people find out about it, as more, the conversation kind of goes on. And we, people realize in this space how important this case is to the rest of crypto and to what we could see, you know, 10, 20 years down the line. I think people will throw their hat in the ring. At who, I’m not sure. It’ll be interesting to see. But I think they have, there’s a deadline, right? I’m not sure about that. They have to have it in-
- Oh.
- -by a certain point ’cause the SEC has actually asked for an extension. If there are any more amicus briefs then they want an extension to be able to review them.
- Hmm. Yeah.
- I’m not sure if that timeline is, if that deadline is coming up this year. But there’s so many deadlines, you know.
- Yeah.
- There’s so many dates and it’s like, ah, to remember like which one, which one’s next.
- For sure. Final question here as it relates to the lawsuit. You know, what’s your prediction, so to speak, as far as an outcome if you have one?
- So I think it all comes down to how the judge rules on this thing, right? So they have described the SEC’s behavior as hypocritical. Their tone I feel like is just a bit fed up with how the SEC lawyers have been behaving. And I think if it’s down to the judge, I agree with Brad Garlinghouse as well. I think this probably won’t go to a jury. I feel like there are facts, I’m not a lawyer, but I do feel like the facts in the situation and the case were presented very well, especially by Ripple. So I think we could see a resolution by the judge. I don’t think it’ll go to a trial and I do think it’ll go way into next year. Like people are saying, I think, you know, possibly March would be the earliest. Potentially May. But then we don’t know now because, you know, if the SEC delays with the Hinman emails, trying to produce the Hinman emails, then that could add another two to three months according to James Filan, the XRP community lawyer. So I don’t think there’ll be a settlement either. The only way there’ll be a settlement is if the SEC concedes that XRP is not a security or today’s XRP is not a security-
- Right.
- -and that it’s not a security on the secondary market. I think that’s the only way Ripple will settle. And Stu Alderoty was the one who told me that. And he’s been saying that along, and I think Brad said that too. But then again, Gary Gensler is determined to, you know, not necessarily win this case, but to win over crypto. I believe he wants to go out with a bang. If, you know, if we get a Republican president down the line, then he’s probably gonna be out. And I think in the meantime, he wants to make his mark and be the one to say, you know, I was the one who regulated crypto. So, you know, the SEC is determined as well, but the implications and the way that the judges are kind of, the tone of them right now, it just seems that, you know, could be a potential win on the side of Ripple.
- Yeah. Yeah. We’ll have to see. But, to your point, things are shaping up in a way where the judges and the procedural, the process for, you know, it’s kind of moving in Ripple’s direction. But we’ll see what happens. Got some wrap up questions here for you. First rapid fire. Favorite food?
- Favorite food? Chocolate.
- Favorite .
- British chocolate though. Not Hershey. Hate Hershey. Go Cadbury Dairy Milk Galaxy are my favorite.
- Oh, of course. I mean, you’re from the UK.
- Yeah.
- Cadbury. Favorite musician or band?
- Favorite musician or band? Oh goodness, goodness, goodness. Harry Styles.
- Favorite movie?
- Favorite movie would be “Atonement.” And that was actually a book, but it was made into a movie. It’s a World War II romance.
- Gotcha. I’ll have to check that out. Favorite book.
- “Harry Potter.” Hands down.
- And when you’re not working at Fox Business, what are you doing for a hobby?
- Ooh, I like to work out. I like to run, I like to do yoga. And, what else? I feel like work is my life. Oh goodness. Oh goodness. Oh goodness. Play with my cat.
- And finally, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
- “Harry Potter.” I would live in that world all day, every day.
- Awesome. Ellie, pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for joining me today.
- Thank you, Tony.
