Two Emails, One Controversy: Unravelling Craig Wright’s Correspondence with David Kleiman

22. The 12 March 2008 Kleiman emails

415. There are two different versions of the 12 March 2008 email from Dr Wright to David Kleiman. The first was the Third Pleaded Example in COPA’s Particulars of Claim, contained in {ID_001318}. The second is {ID_000465}, produced in Dr Wright’s original disclosure. Both are alleged by COPA to be forgeries. They differ only in the domain from which the email was supposedly sent and in part of Dr Wright’s explanations.

416. Understandably, COPA pleaded the Third Pleaded Example because it was one of the few publicly available documents when COPA commenced this claim. Although the Third Pleaded Example (i.e. {ID_001318}) comes first procedurally, {ID_000465} appears to be the original email and was the focus of the expert analysis.

417. I explain each version first, and then set out the detail concerning ID_000465.

(a) (Particulars of Claim at [28] – [29] {A/2/10}) The Third Pleaded Example ID_001318

418. In the Kleiman litigation in the United States involving Dr Wright (which is still ongoing), it is alleged that Dr Wright stole a substantial amount of Bitcoin and related intellectual property assets from a company named W&K Info Defence Research, LLC, after the death of its founder, David Kleiman, by forging documents (the “Kleiman Litigation”). In those proceedings Wright asserts that he sent an email to David Kleiman on 12 March 2008 which shows him to be the originator of the idea of Bitcoin. This version is the copy forwarded to Ira Kleiman (brother of David Kleiman) on 6 March 2014, when Dr Wright was seeking to persuade the Kleiman family to accept his claim to have created the Bitcoin system in collaboration with David Kleiman {ID_001318}. The email he claims to have forwarded is as follows:

(b) COPA’s reason for alleging forgery.

419. The domain used by the sender of this email is ‘information-defense.com’, which was not created until 23 January 2009. For that reason, COPA allege that the email could not have been sent in 2008 as claimed from the “[email protected]” email address and is a forgery.

(c) Dr Wright’s Explanations

420. In his Defence, Dr Wright claimed that he sent an email to Mr Kleiman on 12 March 2008 and that “the body of the email [cited in COPA’s Particulars of Claim] is the same as the email which Dr Wright sent on 12 March 2008”. However, he claimed that the header was different and that he believed “that the difference has arisen as a result of the original email being moved from one exchange server to another”: Defence [50] {A/3/17}. In his fourth statement (from para. 93), he gave a supposed technical explanation for the email address having changed in this email as the result of mailboxes being moved from server to server: {E/4/31}.

421. In Appendices B and C to Wright11, Dr Wright changed his account entirely. He claimed that he had written an email to Mr Kleiman on 12 March 2008 which contained the first two paragraphs of the email above, but not the third paragraph. He accordingly claimed that all versions of the email in disclosure (all of which include the third paragraph) are fake. He said that the document had been faked by his enemies for deployment against him. See: {CSW/2/44}; {CSW/3/7}.

422. Dr Wright’s final explanation was an assertion that the authentic email is on a QNAP server, to which he does not have access.