Fannie Mae: Is the Butler Gonna Claim Privilege Next? by Todd Sullivan, ValuePlays
So it seems as though everyone in Washington was involved in the drafting and implementation of the 3rd amendment (NWS) to Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s conservatorship. Want proof?
Attached is Fairholme’s filing challenging the government’s designation of certain documents as “protected”(and by “certain” I mean “every single one”).
Go to appendix A,B,C and you’ll note there are 62 pages.
The usual names are there, Obama, Geithner, DeMarco, Ugoletti, Lockhart, Miller, DeLeo, Mudd, Deese, Bowler, Stegman etc….
After that the scope of the number of people involved is staggering (all of them are also claiming privilege). One has to assuredly wander down into the bowels of Treasury/FHFA to find out who these folks are. It is becoming far clearer now why Treasury is stonewalling and desperately trying to limit information and access. There is no conceivable way all these folks give the same narrative under deposition. No way…… once holes in stories start to appear, things unravel pretty quickly.
Peter Chapman opines:
Cutting through the parties’ gamesmanship — which refers to both the Government and Fairholme — we now have a copy of the Government’s Privilege Log dated Jan. 16, 2015 (reproduced at pp. 61 through 81 of the attached document). I would anticipate that Fairholme wants to depose virtually every person named in the privilege log about what they knew and what they perceived as the Third Amendment was crafted, deliberated, evaluated, presented to FHFA, negotiated, revised, and finally executed. I’m personally surprised by how many people were involved and how many documents actually exist.
Fannie Mae: Fairholme Filing
PLAINTIFFS’ PUBLIC, REDACTED MOTION TO REMOVE THE “PROTECTED INFORMATION” DESIGNATION FROM DEFENDANT’S MARCH 20 PRIVILEGE LOG
Plaintiffs Fairholme Funds, Inc., et al. (“Plaintiffs” or “Fairholme”) respectfully move, pursuant to Paragraphs 17 and 19 of the Protective Order (“P.O.”) entered in this action (Doc.
73), for entry of an order requiring the Government to remove the “Protected Information” designation it has affixed to its fourth privilege log, which was produced to Plaintiffs on March 20, 2015 (the “March 20 Log”). Because the March 20 Log contains no information that meets the Protective Order’s definition of Protected Information, the Government’s designation of the log as protected was inappropriate.
In seeking this relief, Plaintiffs ask that this Court treat the Government’s March 20 Log in the same way that the Government itself treated the first three privilege logs that it served in this case. The Government did not designate its first three privilege logs for protection. Nor could it have done so; those logs contained no proprietary, confidential, trade secret, or marketsensitive information. Although the March 20 Log is no different, the Government nevertheless chose to designate it as Protected Information. Notably, the Government has not even attempted to explain why the March 20 Log qualifies as Protected Information; nor has it attempted to explain how that log differs from its earlier, unprotected, logs. As far as Plaintiffs can tell from their own comparison of the logs, the March 20 Log appears to differ from the first three logs only in that the Government has now elected, on its own initiative, to include the government email addresses of the senders and recipients of several catalogued documents. The unrequested addition of such email addresses does not suffice to render the March 20 Log as Protected Information, but even if it did, those email addresses could easily be redacted from the log.
Even without this fundamental and irreconcilable disconnect between the Government’s treatment of the March 20 Log and its very different treatment of its previous logs, the Government’s effort to shroud the March 20 Log in secrecy would be unprecedented. In fact, Plaintiffs are aware of no reported decision holding, over another party’s objection, that a run-of-the-mill privilege log like the March 20 Log should be treated as a protected document. When one adds in the fact that the log that the Government seeks to treat as confidential is essentially indistinguishable from the multiple unprotected logs that the Government had previously produced, the unprecedented and inappropriate nature of the Government’s actions is obvious. The courts have already criticized litigants’ increasing tendency to over-designate discovery materials as confidential. The Government has now taken that practice to new, and disturbing, heights.
See full PDF below.
