Craig Wright’s hilarious attempt to claim attorney client privilege using a Linked In profile and a note saying ‘I am lawyer’ has failed.

The long running Wright/Kleiman court case over the Satoshi billions would make a great screwball comedy.

Leaving aside the inherent hilarity in Craig Wright‘s claim that a mysterious bonded courier would turn up in January to give him the keys – which is the plot from Back to the Future 2 – Wright then claimed the bonded courier was a lawyer and their communications were privileged.

Judge Bruce E Reinhart has just demolished all of Wright’s legal arguments and gave him a backhander saying he doesn’t believe any of Wright’s sworn statements, adding that Dr Craig S Wright is known for producing fake documents and could have knocked up a lawyer’s note submitted as evidence with word processing software and a pen.

This will make you happy too, I'm sure. They're chasing nChain. ???? pic.twitter.com/w3xnBhiKYi — Arthur van Pelt – Dragon Industries (@MyLegacyKit) March 9, 2020

The back story

In mid-January, Wright revealed he been given the required info to unlock an encrypted file with Satoshi’s BTC addresses that he couldn’t access before.

Wright’s team said he’d provided a list of Bitcoin holdings as required and another document asserting privilege over many thousands of documents.

The Kleiman legal team wanted to know how Wright had obtained the necessary information to generate the Bitcoin list and Judge Reinhart ordered him to do so.

Wright objected based on relevance, attorney client privilege and spousal privilege,

His team argued the “bonded courier is an attorney and his communications are privileged.”

And he argued that as his wife had dealt with the legal counsel for the Tulip Trust 3 and then passed the information on, that meant that spousal privilege applied.

‘I am lawyer’ says Kenyan with BA in law

Hilariously it turns out the lawyer in question is a guy named Denis Bosire Mayaka from Kenya. Wright submitted a sworn, un-notarised declaration reading:

“I am lawyer[sic]and obtained my bachelor of law degree in 2007 from Moi University in Kenya.”

Wright printed out Mayaka’s Linked In profile, showing Mayaka does have a Bachelor degree in Law, as evidence.

The Judge said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that this was total BS and no reliable evidence suggests Mayaka was ever counsel to the Trustee, therefore no attorney client privilege exists.

“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 … I give no weight to sworn statements of Dr. Wright that advance his interests.”

The judge knocked back the spousal privilege argument because the spouses both understood the documents would be given to Kleiman’s legal team and will eventually become publicly known.

Wright also claimed privilege over many thousands of documents from 17 companies he used to be involved in. All of them are defunct apart from two companies and Nchain where Wright works as chief scientist.

The judge knocked this back on many and varied grounds including the fact Dr Wright lacks authority to asset privilege on behalf of them. He has also ordered Nchain to produce any documents that could relate to the case.

Having demolished all of Dr Wright’s objections the judge then gave him three days to stump up the documents in question.