... Dump Documents, May Overwhelm Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Following a timeworn script, Goldman Sachs and its lawyers are dumping documents by the boxcar on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. While unsuccessfully seeking private meetings with Members of the Commission to quietly and privately resolve the Commission's subpoena for documents relating to Credit Default Swaps, among other things, Goldman has apparently repeatedly been using "the dumping diversion" tactic.
The dumping diversion is a tactic that has long been employed in response to discovery requests in lawsuits. It involves attempting to overwhelm the requesting party with mountains of irrelevant documentation. That is exactly what Goldman and its lawyers have been trying to do concerning documents subpoenaed by the Commission, according to Members of the Commission itself. See Sewell Chan and Gretchen Morgenson, "A Subpoena For Goldman In Inquiry" p. B1, col. 6 (New York Times Nat'l ed., "Business Day" Section, Tuesday, June 8, 2010).
Apparently exposed to the old "dumping diversion" tactic for the first time, Commissioners have called Goldman's 'responses' "mischief-making," "deliberate and disruptive," the moral equivalent of 'pulling up a dump truck to our offices and dump a bunch of rubbish,' and forcing the Commissioners to use American Taxpayer Money to play "Where's Waldo?" in order to find anything sensible in the production. Id.
Whether Goldman and its lawyers will prevail in this effort has a lot to do with whether the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is more serious in seeking the information, than Goldman and its lawyers so clearly are in resisting its disclosure.
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