The judge released the jurors for the rest of the day following a lunch break and instructed them to return on Friday morning. The unusual move came after Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said they planned to elicit testimony about the involvement of FTX lawyers in key company decisions like document retention and in crafting of loans to executives that prosecutors have said was one way Bankman-Fried stole funds.
Defense lawyers said the involvement of these lawyers showed that Bankman-Fried was acting in good faith, but Kaplan said he needed more information before deciding whether the testimony could be given to jurors.
Bankman-Fried began by testifying about FTX’s use of encrypted messaging platforms like Signal and Slack. He said he believed the use of such platforms was in line with FTX’s policies, which were crafted by lawyers. Prosecutors have argued that Bankman-Fried encouraged employees to use such platforms to hide their tracks.
There’s something in the article about auto-delete policies.
If those policies violated a recordkeeping requirement maybe a jury could infer it was done intentionally in furtherance of a crime
Or maybe even if it was set to auto delete messages after some really unusually short period. By that I mean if you configured it to delete messages after a few days it might be hard to explain the legitimate business purpose served by such a rule.
Especially when US finance law is very thorough. Anyone working in finance definitely knows about recordkeeping requirements.