He stinks.
What kind of judge responds to "they got this information illegally" with "well, the horse is already out of the barn"?
There was a lot of confusion there, and I can't say how much is Ashley's fault, the stupidity of the initial complaint, or Null's lawyer not communicating the situation properly.
Ashley was assuming the quash was to maintain the anonymity of the owner of kiwifarms, as is partially the case with the onaforums quash. With that assumption, what Ashley meant was that Brinton couldn't just erase the knowledge of who the owner is in order to not send them a subpoena. Once he knows it, it doesn't really matter at that point. Hence the horse and the barn etc.
Unbeknownst to Ashley, Null's info is public so this
isn't the issue. And why would Ashley presume this? It doesn't make any sense for Brinton to subpoena cloudflare unless it was a pretext to obtain information not needed in identification. Can we blame Ashley for not knowing all the details of the case? Sure, probably, but not for that comment specifically.
Null explained this in his thread. He said the subpoena was requesting information about other sites managed by the same account, billing info, country info etc. All things not needed to identify him. Barnes didn't really explain this objection properly. He mentioned a statute that said the info was obtained illegally, but we don't have his response so it is not clear what he meant.
What is not clear is if cloudflare acted illegally in sending the info before they said they were, given some implied contract, or another law (which barnes may have referenced). In that case the issue is between Null and cloudflare.
It's sort of like someone sending evidence to the police that was taken illegally from an office. The police can't use that evidence specifically, but they now know the name of someone to investigate and where to look to launch an investigation. What Ashley is basically saying is, Brinton has this info and can use it to do more discovery, there's really no way to go back in time and remove the knowledge of that.
~~this is not legal advice~~