DOJ seeks October retrial of Tornado Cash’s Roman Storm

Federal prosecutors have asked a Manhattan federal judge to retry Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm in October on conspiracy charges tied to money laundering and U.S. sanctions evasion, following a hung jury on those counts in August.

In a letter filed Monday with Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York, the Justice Department proposed October 5 or October 12-dates the defense previously indicated were available-for a retrial on counts one and three of a superseding indictment. Those charges carry a combined maximum sentence of up to 40 years.

The request follows a trial in August in which a Manhattan jury convicted Storm of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Jurors deliberated four days and received an Allen charge, an instruction urging continued deliberations, before they could not reach verdicts on the money-laundering and sanctions-related conspiracy counts.

Storm’s Rule 29 motion seeking a judgment of acquittal on the contested counts remains pending, with a hearing set for April 9. His lawyers have argued it is premature to set a new trial date before that ruling. “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,” Storm wrote on X after the filing became public.

Tornado Cash is an open-source crypto mixing protocol that lets users pool and obscure transfers on public blockchains. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022, alleging the service laundered more than $7 billion since 2019, including funds linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. Prosecutors assert that Storm conspired to facilitate illicit flows and to evade U.S. sanctions through the protocol’s design and operation.

The filing arrived as federal agencies outlined positions on privacy tools. In a report to Congress released Monday, the Treasury Department wrote that lawful users of digital assets may use mixers to enable financial privacy. The same report urged lawmakers to consider a digital asset-specific “hold law” allowing platforms to temporarily freeze funds tied to suspected illegal activity.

Cybercrime consultant David Sehyeon Baek described the policy signals as conflicting:

“On one side, you have Treasury acknowledging that mixers and privacy tools can be lawful. On the other, the Justice Department is pressing ahead against a mixer developer even after a jury was not fully persuaded the first time.”

Miller Whitehouse-Levine, CEO of the Solana Policy Institute, called the government’s request “depressing” in a post on X and argued it makes passing the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act more urgent. The bipartisan bill, reintroduced in January by Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden, would clarify that non-custodial developers and service providers who cannot move customer funds are not money transmitters under federal law. The Solana Policy Institute pledged $500,000 last year to support legal defenses for Storm and Tornado Cash co-developer Alexey Pertsev.

Public figures have engaged with related cases. In December, Donald Trump stated he would “take a look at” a pardon for Keonne Rodriguez, a Samourai Wallet developer sentenced to five years in federal prison for building a Bitcoin privacy tool with a non-custodial design. Rodriguez is serving time at the federal prison camp in Morgantown, West Virginia, and wrote in January that prison “often feels like a bad dream I cannot wake from.”

Before any retrial begins, Judge Failla must decide whether the evidence at Storm’s first trial was sufficient as a matter of law on the contested counts. If the court denies the Rule 29 motion, the parties are expected to confer on firm October dates and pretrial deadlines.