Trump’s DOJ Seeks October Retrial for Tornado Cash Developer Roman Storm

Federal prosecutors have asked a Manhattan judge to retry Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on money-laundering and sanctions-evasion charges that a jury deadlocked on last August, even as the White House previously signaled openness to pardoning another crypto privacy developer for comparable conduct.

In a letter filed Monday to Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York, prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton have requested a retrial date of October 5 or 12, consistent with windows the defense indicated it was available. 

The government intends to retry Storm on counts one and three of the superseding indictment, which carry a combined maximum sentence of up to 40 years.

“If I can’t fund a defense, they win by default. If you care about financial privacy, if you write code and believe that code is speech—this is the moment,” Roman Storm wrote on X after the letter was made public.

Last August, a Manhattan jury convicted Storm of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, but deadlocked on the two heavier conspiracy charges after four days of deliberations and an Allen charge from the judge urging jurors to keep trying.

The U.S. Treasury blacklisted Tornado Cash in August 2022, alleging that $7 billion had been laundered through the protocol since 2019, including by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The sanctions were later ruled unlawful and lifted after an appellate court questioned the agency’s authority to sanction open-source smart contracts.

In December, Trump told Decrypt he’ll take a “look at” a pardon for Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez, who was sentenced to five years in federal prison for building a Bitcoin privacy tool with similar non-custodial architecture to Tornado Cash.

Rodriguez is currently serving time at FPC Morgantown, where he wrote in January that prison “often feels like a bad dream I cannot wake from,” according to a letter published by The Rage.

Mixed signals

The retrial request for Storm also arrives amid mixed policy signals from Washington around crypto privacy tools.

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury sent a report to Congress outlining “lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy” on public blockchains, even as regulators continue to warn that such tools are often used to obscure illicit funds.

“This moment really exposes how incoherent U.S. crypto policy is right now,” cybercrime consultant David Sehyeon Baek told Decrypt. 

“On one side, you have Treasury finally acknowledging out loud that mixers and privacy tools can be perfectly lawful,” he added. “On the other side, you have the DOJ pressing ahead with a very aggressive criminal theory against a mixer developer, even after a jury already sent a fairly clear signal that it was not fully persuaded the first time.”

Speaking on the timing, Baek warned the case appears to be an “attempt to create a precedent” holding open-source developers responsible for what strangers do with their code, adding that if the DOJ succeeds, “it will matter far more than any favorable language” in policy reports or speeches.

In a Monday post on X, Miller Whitehouse-Levine, CEO of the Solana Policy Institute—which pledged $500,000 last year to fund Storm’s legal defense alongside Tornado Cash co-developer Alexey Pertsev—called the move “depressing” and said it made passing the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act “all the more critical.” 

The bipartisan bill, reintroduced in January by Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), would explicitly bar non-custodial developers from being classified as money transmitters under federal law, provided they cannot move user funds. 

Before any retrial begins, the court must rule on Storm’s pending Rule 29 motion, a request for acquittal on legal grounds, scheduled for argument on April 9. Storm’s defense has said it is “premature” to set a trial date before that motion is resolved.