Nearly 11 months of Gary Gensler's text messages vanished from SEC records, covering the period from October 18, 2022 through September 6, 2023, a stretch when the agency was aggressively suing crypto firms including Coinbase itself. That gap is now at the center of a settled Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that Coinbase filed against the regulator back in 2024.
The settlement, finalized Wednesday, requires the SEC to release two previously withheld documents, conduct a review of how it stores and preserves text messages and other official communications, and pay $150,000 in attorney fees to History Associates, the consulting firm that handled Coinbase's FOIA requests on its behalf.
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal argued that the missing records directly undermined the company's ability to get complete answers from the agency. Through History Associates, Coinbase had sought documents describing the SEC's internal position on Ether and various crypto-related investigations. Grewal, citing an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, characterized Gensler's tenure as a deliberate litigation campaign against the crypto sector. During that time the SEC sued Coinbase and a string of other firms, alleging failures to register under federal securities law.
The SEC case was not the only front. Coinbase also filed a separate FOIA suit against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2024, targeting internal "pause letters" sent to banks between March 2022 and May 2023. Those letters asked certain financial institutions to hold off on expanding crypto-related services. The FDIC settled that dispute in February, ahead of the SEC resolution.
Together the two cases put federal recordkeeping practices under unusual public scrutiny, with a private company essentially forcing two major regulators to account for gaps in their document trails.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or legal advice.
