US Prosecutors Reject Tornado Cash Founder’s Defense Amid Push For October Retrial

US Southern District of New York (SDNY) prosecutors have pushed again on the Tornado Cash co-founder’s protection, claiming that his arguments for dismissal lack applicability forward of an important listening to later this week.

DOJ Says Tornado Cash Founder’s Defense Is ‘Not Applicable’

On Tuesday, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton despatched a letter to Judge Katherine Failla rejecting Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm’s current letter in support of his movement for a judgment of acquittal.

Clayton’s response addressed an April 2 motion filed by Storm’s protection, which claimed {that a} 2026 Supreme Court case, Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, supported his pending Rule 29 movement.

The Cox case concerned a civil legal responsibility of an web service supplier for its subscribers participating in copyright infringement. The Supreme Court discovered that Cox was not contributorily accountable for copyright infringement on its customers’ accounts, because it didn’t induce its customers’ infringement nor present a service tailor-made to infringement.

In the Tuesday filing, the US legal professional argued that “The defendant and the Tornado Cash service are a far cry from Cox,” affirming that “Even if Cox had some applicability right here, its reasoning provides no assist to the defendant given the strikingly totally different info at concern.”

“As set forth intimately within the Government’s response to the defendant’s Rule 29 movement— and in distinction to Cox’s sturdy system for responding to infringement—the defendant deliberately carried out mere half-measures that he stated have been ‘straightforward to bypass’ to counter legal use of the Tornado Cash service, and his objective in doing so was to distract regulation enforcement,” the doc learn.

Clayton added that Storm’s use of the crypto mixer “was window dressing at finest and outright misdirection at worst,” as there was no proof that the Tornado Cash founders put in place efficient anti-money-laundering (AML) measures.

It’s price noting that the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022 for failing to impose efficient controls to forestall malicious actors from laundering funds by means of the protocol, together with $455 million by the North Korea-linked hacking group, Lazarus Group.

However, the sanctions have been overturned in March 2025 after the Court of Appeals dominated in November 2024 that OFAC had overstepped its authority by sanctioning immutable, decentralized good contracts moderately than a authorized entity.

US Prosecutors Seek Roman Storm Retrial

The prosecutors’ newest transfer follows his March letter looking for a retrial of the Tornado Cash co-founder on the 2 counts the place jurors have been deadlocked final August. In the letter, Clayton asked Judge Failla to schedule a retrial for Roman Storm, pushing for trial dates between October 5 and 12, 2026.

For context, Storm was detained and indicted following the Tornado Cash sanctions and charged with conspiracy to commit cash laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions violations, and conspiracy to function an unlicensed money-transmitting enterprise.

The jury discovered Storm guilty of 1 rely of conspiracy to function an unlicensed cash transmitting enterprise, however was unable to come back to a unanimous choice concerning the 2 different fees. Nonetheless, a hung jury doesn’t represent an acquittal, which opened the door to a possible retrial on these fees.

In September, Storm filed a movement for acquittal, which asks the trial choose to throw out fees or a verdict as a result of the prosecution’s proof is legally inadequate. The Tornado Cash founder’s attorneys argued that the federal government by no means proved he meant to assist unhealthy actors launder cash by means of the platform, which might invalidate the grounds for his conviction primarily based on negligent inaction.

Now, prosecutors and Storm’s protection attorneys are scheduled to fulfill on April 9 for an oral argument on the pending Rule 29 movement, which may form the course of this key authorized battle.