SEC Attorney Moves to Withdraw from Ripple Case

Dugan Bliss, senior trial counsel at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is seeking the court's permission to withdraw from the Ripple case.

The attorney says that he is leaving the agency after spending over 10 years there.

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After Bliss's departure, the SEC will be represented by the remaining counsel: Jorge G. Tenreiro, Daphna A. Waxman, Jon A. Daniels and others.

The litigation process is being supervised by SEC attorney Preethi Krishnamurthy.

The Ripple case is still in its pre-trial discovery phase. As reported by U.Today, the SEC is now seeking to expand the number of depositions.

Earlier this month, Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn greenlit the SEC's Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) requests that are being sent to foreign securities regulators to obtain documents from overseas trading platforms and Ripple's non-U.S. partners.

In April, the court granted Ripple's motion to compel the SEC to produce documents related to Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP.

During an Apr. 9 conference, Bliss said that the agency had not taken an official position on Ethereum despite a comment made by Bill Hinman, the former director of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, about Ether not being a security:

So I want to make clear that this is my understanding of the current situation and I don't want to be overly technical, but the SEC, itself, my understanding, it has not taken an official position. There is no action that it took to say Bitcoin is not a security, Ether is not a security.