Coinbase seeks court order over SEC’s alleged deletion of Gensler texts

Coinbase has asked the federal court to order an “expedited proper search” of Gary Gensler’s deleted text messages, after the Office of Inspector General revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission had erased a year’s worth of his communications.

In a court filing Thursday submitted through History Associates, Coinbase referenced a Sept. 3 report from the Inspector General, saying that the SEC had “excluded officials’ text messages when processing FOIA requests, even though many qualified as agency records subject to FOIA.”

“The Gensler SEC destroyed documents they were required to preserve and produce. We now have proof from the SEC’s own Inspector General,” Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said on X on Thursday. “Today we ask the federal court to address this gross violation of public trust to ensure that it never happens again.”

In September 2023, the SEC erased nearly a year’s worth of text messages sent and received by then-Chair Gary Gensler under a new policy. However, the Inspector General’s office noted that the messages could have been preserved, but the agency’s IT staff “performed a factory reset of the smartphone, which resulted in the permanent deletion of the device’s data, including nearly a year’s worth of text messages.”

According to the report, all of Gensler’s texts from October 2022 through September 2023 were lost. That period overlapped with the collapse of FTX and the SEC’s heightened enforcement actions against crypto exchanges, including Coinbase.

“The Gensler SEC did this even though we asked for information about ‘all communications’ within the SEC related to crypto regulatory and enforcement decision-making years ago,” Grewal said Thursday, adding that Coinbase demands “expedited discovery, sanctions, and immediate production of all responsive texts.”

The Block has reached out to the SEC for comment.