Craig Wright’s lawyers object to court motions with weakest arguments yet 🚨 This article is 5 years old...
Craig Wright’s lawyers object to court motions with weakest arguments yet
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Updated: Dec. 25, 2019 at 9:50 am UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
In the latest responses to motions and objections in the Kleiman case, Craig Wright’s legal team presented some of the weakest arguments seen in the trial. While one of the filings maintains the position that Wright was unable to comply with the court, the other claimed the plaintiff’s inability to pay the costs for the deposition of his wife means she shouldn’t have to testify.
New filings in the Wright case claims he always acted ‘in good faith’
While many things can be said about Craig Wright‘s behavior, “reasonable” and “in good faith” aren’t one of them. Nonetheless, those are the exact words Wright’s legal team at Rivero Mestre LLP used to persuade the court to reverse one of its orders against him.
On Dec. 23, Wright’s lawyers filed two documents with the Southern District court in Florida—one was a reply in support of an objection to an earlier court motion, while the other was a response to a motion filed by the Kleiman estate regarding the deposition of his wife, Ramona Watts.
The first document aims to deliver more information that would prove that Wright shouldn’t be sanctioned for being unable to comply with court orders. This is in reference to Judge Reinhart’s August ruling, in which he said Wright willingly refused to provide the list of his Bitcoin addresses.
Wright’s team argues that not only did Wright “prove” he was unable to provide the addresses of the Bitcoin he mined prior to 2013, but that he also directed Steve Shadders, the CTO of nChain, to investigate the matter. This alone proves that he did his best to comply with the court’s orders, they said.
The Kleiman estate cited Shadders’ testimony as proof that Wright was lying, as he said he never saw the encrypted file where Wright claims the keys to the addresses are held. Wright’s legal team said in the reply:
“So what? Mr. Shadders’ testimony was about the work that he performed on Dr. Wright’s behalf to reconstruct a list of the bitcoin that Dr. Wright mined. It was not necessary to see the file to perform that work.”
You get what you pay for
In case “So what?” wasn’t a weak enough argument, Wright’s legal team filed another objection on even thinner legs. Earlier in December, the Kleiman estate called for Ramona Watts, Craig Wright’s wife of 6 years, to testify at trial.
According to a Dec. 21 motion, the Kleiman estate was willing to pay the cost associated with Ms. Watts’ travel to the U.S. and deposition before a U.S. court. The Kleiman legal team also said they were willing to change the date of her deposition and take it in an English court if she was unable or unwilling to travel to the U.S.
However, Watts soon demanded that the Kleiman estate must pay her between $65,000 and $164,000 to cover the cost of her travel and legal counsel. The plaintiff’s said in the motion”
“Plaintiffs should not be forced to pay $100,000 or more to take routine discovery the Federal Rules allow.”
“The issue that plaintiffs raise in their motion concerning Mrs. Ramona Watts is entirely of plaintiffs’ own making,” Wright’s legal team said in their response. They also claimed they only recently found out that the plaintiffs would completely forego Watts as a witness if the costs to depose her were “too high.”
It seems that Kleiman’s estate will get what it pays for, which in this case is nothing.
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Bitcoin, a decentralized currency that defies the sway of central banks or administrators, transacts electronically, circumventing intermediaries via a peer-to-peer network.
Craig Steven Wright, commonly referred to as CSW, is an Australian computer scientist and business professional who has been at the center of controversy within the cryptocurrency community.
Dave Kleiman (1967 – April 26, 2013) was a computer forensics expert, an author or co-author of multiple books and a frequent speaker at security-related events.