Craig Wright is looking to challenge Judge Reinhart’s decision that dismissed his Kenyan lawyer’s declaration, saying he doesn’t believe any of the Australian computer scientist’s sworn statements.
The person who claims he invented Bitcoin has filed his objection with the US District Court of Southern Florida to challenge Reinhart’s recent ruling. The motion explains that the Magistrate Order on Discovery “erroneously disregarded the attorney-client relationship between defendant and his Kenyan attorney based on preconceived and previously formulated conclusions of defendant’s character.”
Wright told the court he is unable to prove his access to the trust due to attorney-client privilege. But Judge Reinhart doesn’t appear to buy this story, expressing doubt about Wright’s credibility and questioned the lawyer's existence.
Wright claims that the order should be reversed and vacated as the judge unfairly treated him based on alleged personal characters, and not on the grounds of hard facts.
“Character evidence is of slight probative value and may be very prejudicial. It tends to distract the trier of fact from the main question of what actually happened on the particular occasion,” he explains.
The billion-dollar bitcoin lawsuit continues in Southern Florida as court documents filed show that the fierce battle between the two parties wouldn’t come to an end any time soon. This case has been developing since 2018, and in its latest episode, Judge Reinhart was quick to throw out all of Wright’s legal arguments, adding that the self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor is known for producing fake documents.
“Particularly given my prior finding that Dr. Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation, I decline to rely on this kind of document, which could easily have been generated by anyone with word processing software and a pen,” the judge added.
This isn’t the first time that the self-styled Satoshi Nakamoto fails to prove his case after presenting court documents that appear to be fake. For instance, the plaintiffs’ counsel suggested that computer scientists had forged a number of emails supposedly dating to 2011 and 2012, as the messages bore “metadata” placing them far more recently. Additionally, a font copyrighted in 2015 appeared on an email message that Wright claimed to have sent in 2011.
Background
The estate of Wright’s late business partner, David Kleiman, filed a lawsuit over claims that Wright misappropriated a potentially 10-billion dollar fortune. Kleiman died in 2013 after having been confined to a wheelchair for years following a motorcycle accident in 1995.
The allegations concern the ownership of between 550,000 and 1.1 million bitcoins, as well as the intellectual property rights of various Blockchain technologies.
Kleiman was an IT expert in Pam Beach, Florida, who had much expertise in computer forensics and security. The relationship with Wright, which remained mostly hidden, was born out of a mutual obsession with cryptography and data security, the court papers say.
In 2015, leaked emails from Wright to Kleiman showed they had been discussing a new form of electronic money, months before the launch of Nakomoto’s whitepaper about Bitcoin in January 2009.
Shortly after his death, according to the filling, Wright made contact with Kleinman’s brother to inform him that they had been working on a project together and that Kleiman had mined enormous amounts of bitcoins, and requested to check his old computers for wallet files.
This might have given Wright access to information that only Satoshi could have known, which in turn have been used when Wright once tried to offer proof that he is the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
