A judge on Thursday ruled that a series of emails between the Stanford University dropout-turned-entrepreneur and the famed litigator are fair game for prosecutors to present at Holmes’s upcoming trial. The messages remain sealed from public view, but court filings and Holmes’s lawyers at a hearing revealed they concern the Journal’s 2015 reporting by John Carreyrou that Boies aggressively tried to quash.
Boies was deeply involved in Theranos, representing the company in litigation, investing in it, and as the controversy with the Journal heated up in late 2015, serving on its board of directors. In his book about Theranos, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” Carreyrou published a letter Boies wrote to the Journal that presciently describes the criminal indictment served on Holmes in 2018.
Boies, chairman of the firm
Holmes’s lawyer,
Holmes failed to show “that that the substance of her conversations with Boies and Boies Schiller Flexner did not concern matters within the general affairs of the company,” Cousins said in his ruling. None of the documents or communications discuss Holmes’ individual legal interests, the judge said, and instead relate to her official duties or general affairs of Theranos, like conversations with investors, billing, and media strategy.
Wade and
Theranos ceased operations in 2018, turning over its rights as a company to a person tasked with liquidating its assets. Prosecutors argued Holmes no longer controls the attorney-client privilege associated with Theranos and that the person assigned to the liquidation told the U.S. no such privilege would be asserted.
The case is U.S. v. Holmes, 18-cr-00258, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).
(Updates with requests for comment from Holmes lawyers and Boies.)
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Peter Blumberg
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