Secret Software Convictions The Roman Sterlingov Nightmare

on the Aaron Day show tonight at 6:15, the black box that sent an innocent man to prison for 12 and 1/2 years. Defense attorneys Mike Hassard and Tor Eklund join us 27 days before the DC Circuit decides Roman Sterlingov's appeal. 6:00 a.m. Tanks through the front door for a radio host who said the word Bitcoin. Ian Freeman, Roger Ver, Roman Storm, Keonne Rodriguez still locked up. This is 6:00 a.m. in Keene and this is what happens when you dare to speak truth about financial freedom in America.

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[music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> 6:00 in the morning. Last week on the show

how Five Eyes intelligence agencies systematically destroyed a working decentralized securities blockchain called Equibit. Chris Horlacher walked us through the full playbook, a regulatory sabotage, infiltrated developers, even physical attacks, and then the DTCC quietly built the exact same technology for themselves. It's the same pattern we've seen with Liberty Dollar, e-gold, Tornado Cash. They crush the competition, then absorb the innovation. If you missed it, watch S313 now. I'm running for US Senate in New Hampshire. One demand, pardons for every crypto political prisoner. Ian Freeman, Roger Ver, Roman Sterlingov, Tornado Cash, Samurai Wallet. In 2016, my spoiler run cost Republicans

the seat by 1,000 votes. In 2026, that's enough to take it. Not bought, not sold. Pardons or I take the seat. Live free or die, but that's not the worst. >> [music] >> It's waking up empty, it's dying of thirst. Trading your [music] days for insurance and pills while the machine builds your [singing] cage and you're paying the bills. >> [music]

>> Quiet desperation, [music] that's the real grave. A life half lived as a comfortable slave. This ain't what [music] you were born for, you know it's true. You feel it in your chest breaking [music] through. They're wiring the walls, closing in, [music] tracking your dollars underneath your skin. Left and right, same song, same crowd. No one stands [music] up, no one makes a sound. They hand you a ballot like it means something real. Two wings of one bird, same deal, same steal. We say no. No to the chains. >> [music] >> No to the dollar running through our veins.

No [music] to the white coats, no to the lies. This is the day that we [music] rise. >> [music] >> It hurts right here, it hurts right [music] now. Your rights are yours, you take them back, not given out. Not [music] from the left, not from the right. They were always yours, now step into the light. >> [music] [music]

[music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Two weeks ago we released Ohio Captured exposing how technocrats seized every level of Ohio's government. Jobs Ohio controls billions with zero transparency. Two and a half billion in data center tax breaks for just 356

jobs. The intelligence line runs from Max Fisher to Wexner, to Epstein, to Thiel, to Vance. And this is the blueprint they're rolling out in all 50 states. Born in Russia, raised in Stockholm. 12 and 1/2 years for a crime with no evidence. This is Roman Sterlingov's anthem, let him fly. Go to freeroman.org. >> [music] >> Born in Russia, >> [music] >> raised in Stockholm. Bitcoin made me young

and free. I flew to California [music] to learn to fly >> [music] >> a plane for me. Landed in Los Angeles >> [music] >> with my laptop and my life. Men in dark suits [music] waiting at the gate. Never made it out that night. >> [music] >> LET HIM FLY. LET HIM FLY. HE CAME TO LEARN TO FLY. They locked [music] him in a cage for two. Nobody understood.

LET HIM FLY. >> [music] >> LET HIM FLY. LET THE PILOT FLY. They took my diaries. They took [music] my drives. Searched every password and folder of my life. Found nothing in the wreckage. [music] No server logs, no keys. Just a company theories. And a judge [music] who wouldn't see. 395 million is [music] what they say I owe. But I had 1.8. I guess they didn't know. LET HIM FLY.

LET HIM [music] FLY. HE CAME TO learn to fly. They locked him in a cage for two. [music] Nobody understood. Let him fly. >> [music] >> Let him fly. Let the pilot [music] fly. The [music] defense asked me under oath, am I aware of scientific evidence that this software works? I am unaware. I am unaware. I am unaware of scientific evidence >> [music] >> this software works.

>> [music] >> I came to fly. I came to fly. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Let the pilot touch the sky. 12 and 1/2 years for a crime they couldn't prove. >> [music] >> Let him fly. Let him fly. Let Roman fly. >> [music] >> Roman Sterlingov

>> [music] >> 4 dicks >> [music] >> May 12th 9:30 >> [music] >> IN THE MORNING. >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

>> LET HIM FLY. >> [music] >> LET him fly. Three things coming up. May 21st through 25th, Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Saturday, May 23rd, Enemies of the State, a live event with Ammon Bundy, Afroman, and speakers for crypto prisoners still behind bars. I'm running for US Senate in New Hampshire in day2026.com, using that race to pressure Trump on pardons. Same leverage that freed Ross. May 25th, Rage Against the War Machine, also in

Grand Rapids. That's the pre-show. The Aaron Day Show starts now. All right. Tonight, a man you've never heard of is sitting in federal prison for the next 12 and 1/2 years. Convicted with no server logs, no private keys, no communications, no confession, and not one single witness who says they ever dealt with him. No direct evidence. Zero. >> [snorts] >> What they had instead was a piece of software, a black box built by a private company worth $8.6 billion. No published error rate, no peer review, no independent audit. Its competitor ran the same data and got a 64% discrepancy and called the government's use of it reckless. The prosecutor who what who won the case now

works at that company. The IRS investigators who built the case, their firm got bought by that company 5 months after the arrest. The man in a cell, a dual Russian-Swedish citizen, who had never set foot in the United States until federal agents grabbed him at LAX on his way to flight school. His name is Roman Sterlingov, and in 27 days, May 12th at 9:30 a.m., the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decides whether secret, unaudited, privately owned software can send an American or anyone standing on American soil to prison. If Roman loses, you are next, because once a black box can convict one man, it can convict anyone. Uh tonight, I'm joined by uh three people who have taken this fight all the

way to the federal appellate bench. Tour Ekland, the man who called Chainalysis the Theranos of blockchain forensics. Nationally known CFAA defense attorney, one of the first lawyers in America to accept Bitcoin. And his co-counsel, Mike Hassard, the lawyer who picked up the phone, took the case when no one else no one else would, and has been in the trenches ever since. And Jeff Fishback. Hi Jeff. I don't have don't have a lot of background on you, so I'm I'm happy [laughter] to happy to uh talk about that. Uh they're standing between Roman Sterlingov and a life destroyed by an algorithm. They're standing between you and a justice system where the evidence

against you is a trade secret. This is the test case. This is the line. This is the secret software convicting innocent Americans. So, Tour, Mike, Jeff, welcome to the Aaron Day Show. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank Thank you. Actually, well, there's a lot >> Just for the record, Yeah. just for the record, Jeff is the forensic investigator we worked with for years. He's a digital forensic investigator, and he was our chief digital forensic expert on on the case. And so, um uh that's why he's here today. Yeah. Uh ex- excellent. Well, certainly a lot to talk about in that regard. Actually, I've talked about Chainalysis quite a bit uh in different context, not related to to these legal

proceedings, but more to talk about the extent to which Chainalysis is being used to track people's transactions. And I I had last year three separate people come to me either with a business dispute or in a divorce, and I learned that you can now, as a private investigator, get a license in Chainalysis. And people are using this software in these court cases. Um and and based on kind of now what I understand from this case, this may actually be junk data, but it's actually proliferating. So, Chainalysis is becoming this kind of standard part of of legal proceedings, not just criminal proceedings, but civil proceedings.

Yeah, and you know, that's one of the things that was problematic for us um with Roman's case. Like, one of they used Chainalysis in Roman's case to say to A, the investigators use it to make an attribution uh of him as the operator of Bitcoin Fog, even though there's no uh direct evidence uh of him ever operating it. And for those of you don't know, Bitcoin Fog was a Bitcoin mixer um that would basically [clears throat] sort of mix up your Bitcoin address, so um it was untraceable. Because if you do a transaction on the blockchain, you can follow the transaction. Your name's not on the blockchain, right? There's no personally identifying information on the blockchain, but the transaction's

there, and you can follow it. And so, if you take out your Bitcoin through an exchange like Coinbase or whatever and flip it to US dollars, usually your name gets attached to the transaction. And so, they use it to uh trace it there. But so, what they said they used chain analysis mainly for in this case is to say, "Well, Bitcoin fog laundered $400 million of the drug money through things like Silk Road, and when we do all these traces with it, we find Roman's name like whatever 14 addresses down the line, and the only name there and that's actually the main reason we think he's in jail right now is just because he was the only one back in 2011 2012 in Sweden

putting his name on you know his Mount Gox account kind of thing. Like he's in jail because he was a boy scout and he followed the rules. Yeah, now by the way, not not that he was the only one involved in any of the transactions. Just he was I I and matter of fact, I think Tor asked the question under cross whether they had bothered to you know to look for anyone else, and I believe the answer was he's the only one that we could identify. It seems like there was some parallel construction in this case as well. Yeah, so so to take a step back, so let's So who is Roman Sterlingov? What's what's his you know background and you know, how how did he get involved in all

of this? So Ro- Roman's a really good guy, and I think that's what we got to get off first. He was born in Vernads, Russia, which is in the middle of Russia. It's deep into Russia. And when he was I think he was about 14 years old, his family with his mother left his father behind in Russia and moved to Sweden. So he was a a new immigrant to Sweden. He didn't know any Swedish. He barely knew English. And he tried to find his way in high school. While he's doing that, he kind of felt found a little bit of you know home in the computer world. He's a little bit introverted at the time. He's been working on himself ever since. But he really got into computers at around that time as an as an

introvert in a new country. And Bitcoin provided him a community, and he really talks about that often about how the first time he bought Bitcoin back in 2011 when it was around 30 cents. He met a guy at a bar and they opened up their laptops, and he really enjoyed that camaraderie with his fellow nerds. And you know ever since then, he he began to go around to these meetups in in Scandinavia and the Baltics. And he had accumulated this Bitcoin in 2011. I think he If I remember correctly, he bought 2,000 euros worth from this guy when it was worth 30 cents. By 2013 2014, that amount the value of it had skyrocketed. The way he described it to us was it was like a wallet you could spend as much

money you wanted out of it and it would never go down. It would just [clears throat] keep going up. It would keep going up. And uh so he would go to these conferences, and he became one of the people at the conferences where if you wanted to buy Bitcoin, mind you there were no exchanges at the time, you would go find Roman Sterlingov and then give him cash and he'd help you set up your wallet and give you some Bitcoin. At one of these conferences, somebody told him that hey, you know with the amount of Bitcoin you have in your wallet, you know you're a target for a wrench attack, and that's when he first learned what a wrench attack was. Around this time, people had

started to realize that when you do a transaction, there's five pieces of information that go on the blockchain. The sender's address, the recipient's [clears throat] address, the amount of Bitcoin that's being transacted, the transaction ID, and the date and time. So by having the recipient's address and the transaction ID, you're able to look up the sender's address, and then when you type that into a block explorer, you can see how much Bitcoin is in that account. And if you have a large amount of Bitcoin, you become a target, especially at this time and especially in in areas where he was, which was the Baltics and Scandinavia. So at that time, somebody had also told

him that hey, you know there there's ways to obfuscate your transactions, and one of these ways is Bitcoin fog. So he starts to use Bitcoin fog as part of his personal privacy measures when he's transacting with these people he doesn't know at these conferences. He's using Bitcoin fog to send the money through so as not to expose his own Bitcoin address that held the majority of his funds. When 2014 2015 come around, we start to see the growth of exchanges where you can transfer funds into US dollars or or euros and spend them. So he created a Kraken account. And that was a big piece of of the government's evidence during trial. He took a a large portion of what

he had accumulated early on, transacted it through Bitcoin fog, and put it in into his Kraken account. And the government argues in in their prosecution that those funds going from into Kraken from Bitcoin fog were the Bitcoin fog service fees. They were not. The pattern does not look like it. It's very consistent with somebody who had a large pile of early Bitcoin. But that was a a key piece of the government's evidence. They had this [clears throat] entire case, and we can get it we're going to get into the chain analysis stuff as well. But in 2021, his life is kind of you know he doesn't know what he's going to do. He's just been spending his Bitcoin. He doesn't have a career, so he

decides that he wants to become an airline pilot. He registers for a pilot training course in California, and he flies into LAX, and that's where they arrested him. After he was arrested, he reached out to a cousin of his, and his cousin happened to be really good friends with my my best friend who since passed away. Rest in peace, Sam. Sam gives me a call and says, "Hey, like can can you figure out what's going on here? My buddy's cousin just got picked up in LA." And that was the beginning of our journey on the case and how we got involved with it. >> [clears throat] >> You know Mike, it probably should be at least clarified since the government made such a big deal about the the

flight lessons that he and he actually he testified to this that one of the things he was worried about was that he referred to this as his magic wallet. Like he couldn't spend enough. It just kept filling itself back up. But what his real concern was was >> [clears throat] >> he had also seen it take deep dives and was worried about a crash, and he thought he really needed to take some of what he had and get himself a career. And pilot being a pilot was something he thought would be a fun career. And part of the government's Go ahead. Cuz I just think what's really concerning about this case so and why everybody should be concerned because you could be Roman Sterlingov sitting in

a jail cell right now. Anybody who's done a transaction is So when they arrest him in April of 2021 at LAX, they basically arrest him for running Bitcoin fog the mixer for 10 years and money laundering $400 million of the drug money that they say went through like Silk Road and AlphaBay and all this stuff like that, right? They arrest him. He's got three laptops, you know three terabytes of storage devices, thumb drives, handwritten notes, a spreadsheet with all of his passwords, all sorts of stuff. He doesn't know he's going to be arrested. He's not thinking he's going to get arrested for running Bitcoin fog. Not a single piece of evidence anywhere on any of his devices of him ever operating

Bitcoin fog. Not a single piece of evidence in the record anywhere directly showing him operating Bitcoin fog. The unique thing about this case, I've never had a case like this, right, is every single piece of evidence you have to speculate from to get him as the operator of Bitcoin fog. I have never had a case like that. I've never had in in my 12 15 years of representing, you know A-list hackers, I've never had one get caught, and Jeff and I have talked about this too cuz I don't think he's ever had this happen in any of his 20 30 years doing this, get caught that they didn't leave a freaking trace somewhere in their devices, and that's

just not here. They're they're basing everything on these speculative traces between addresses that they don't have the private keys for, and you know as most people probably know, you need the private key definitively tells you who controls the blockchain address. No private keys, like nothing. It it it's maddening this case that way. So I think this is an important part. I just want to make sure that's that's clear for everyone, which is that I mean at this point, you know I I I'm not sure Bitcoin fog even according to to current government policy is even an illegal thing. I I think often times we talk about Roman Storm and others in the idea of a mixing service, you know is that

even illegal? That's not even what's at at question here or it it was to a certain degree, but in this particular instance, Roman Sterlingov didn't even create the service that shouldn't even be illegal to begin with. So I mean we're talking about this is a whole new level here of they've got the wrong guy on the one hand. The thing that he did isn't illegal anyway, and the methods that they used to prosecute the case, if the precedent stands, it basically opens anyone up to the interpretation of how this chain analysis software works, which which as we'll get into is really really really

shaky. So >> Actually, sorry. The the the evidence that they have that he ran Bitcoin fog is that he had a server, which they which they seized and found nothing. But that that then was evidence that he hid it. And this case is important because this is the case that chain analysis was built on. You know through the course of from 2014 when they started investigating this case all the way up to when he was arrested, chain analysis was involved the entire way, and they were not told, "Hey, can you guys try to figure out who runs Bitcoin fog?" They were told, "Hey, can you prove that Roman Sterlingov operated Bitcoin fog?" And what's disturbing I think My biggest problem with this whole area of

blockchain forensics is it's completely unregulated. There's no standards, right? And it looks like a lot of like at least in criminal law when junk science comes in, like something like 51% of the wrongful convictions that the Innocent Project gets overturned comes from junk science. And it's it happens just like this. These people see this area to go rushing in and make money with this forensic stuff. It happened with bite marks, DNA, fingerprinting, all this stuff before there's any standards and the juries buy this stuff because it's really impressive. It seems really scientific and whatnot. But when we asked you know, Chainalysis' expert on the stand on cross-examination, can you name

us your software's error rates? No. Have you done any internal error rate analysis? No. Can you tell me it's rate of false positives? No. Can you tell me it's rate of false negatives? No. Can you name me one scientific peer-reviewed paper attesting to the accuracy of your software? The answer was no. Right? Like So in our our this is one of our big arguments on appeal. This doesn't belong in a federal court and they tried to hide like we wanted to see their source code. We wanted to see their full set of heuristics, which is just sort of the you know, guessing algorithm they set up to to cluster their data and they fought us every step of the way as if somehow

they were surprised that they would be challenged in a federal court yet they willingly chose to go to the law enforcement market, but they seem to have gone into this market and all they thought about was making money and they didn't at any point consider oh, well, is this stuff accurate? Because if they were concerned about getting the right people innocence, they would have the accuracy of the software. The fact that they ended up in a federal court and they answered all those questions that I asked them about the scientific basis for their software in the negative tells you what they were really thinking you know, when they went into this market. But everybody buys into it. Like

you said, they they hired they didn't hire the winning prosecutor in the case. They hired one of the prosecutors who worked on this case. Their expert that they came in and testified in this case was from DEA. They've hired people from the FBI. They spent of money and they did buy a company but like you said by one of the IRS criminal investigators. This guy starts a company. He uses it to investigate Roman. It gets top billing in the DOJ press release when Roman is arrested. Mind you the the government prosecutor has been talking to the press in a way they shouldn't have been for years before this. So as soon as Roman is arrested, Wired runs a piece and there's this you know, great DOJ press

release and here's this great company that did so much work on this case, right? So 5 months later Chainalysis buys the company and we don't see any evidence from that company in any of the discovery in the case or it doesn't even come up in the case, right? You know, to me this is a case where profits got put before justice. Well, they Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say their argument but just expanding on what Tor is talking about. Their argument which also included not even letting us see how they trained officers, what materials they used, any of that stuff. Their argument was effectively, well, if they shared any of this with us, people would be able to

get away with it when I think any of us here, probably anybody watching this knows that there's there's nothing to get away with. It's all public data. There's no way that you can change your behavior. You wouldn't be able to use Bitcoin at all if you wanted to quote unquote get away with it. So they just didn't want it. They didn't want us to see how uncertain their results were. I'll be the most generous of everybody here. I won't say that it's useless data. It's just it's not conclusive data, not the way they presented it. >> [snorts] >> Well, one thing I mean is I've had a number of different people on here. A lot of people are not familiar with the court system at all. If you've never

actually dealt with it and specifically if you've never dealt with a criminal case where you're on the opposite side of the federal government you may still have some notion that the way that the system works is the way that you learned about it in civics class Right. Or TV. Or or TV and so what I found is you know, in each individual case it seems so outlandish that that people have a hard time believing it or they they get into this mode where well, this must be one isolated case. However, we have enough isolated cases where we are seeing a number of patterns emerge and I I kind of wanted to run some of these by you but but I you know, I may even you know, at some point get get a get a

panel together to discuss discuss the fact that this is kind of standard operating procedure. But first of all, you know, you might think that the goal should be justice and finding the truth. But what we find is that the prosecutors are interested in building up a record and having wins. That it's it's less about the truth and that often times what happens is a prosecutor will build up a resume and then what they do is they leave the government sector and then they become they work on the defense side and they make you know, huge amounts of money based on their track record prosecuting people. So the idea is hey, we know how the system works and so we can kind of

we can protect you from the other side and and and that I mean, I saw this in the Ian Freeman case, which which really kind of radicalized me, which is that you know, they were omitting evidence. They were they were clearly trying to even manipulate the information that they were presenting. So a lot of people you know, don't realize how how stacked the deck is and so when you go into these trials the jury knows almost nothing about this. You're very unlikely to find a juror that that knows anything about crypto. That may be changing now, but certainly for a case like Roman's and and these earlier cases you're at a disadvantage and frankly the way that I've described it is the

prosecution often baffles the jury with bullshit because the jury is non-technical and can't understand it. So it looks like oh hey, they've got this. Here's somebody from the FBI. Here are all these people in suits and they presented all of this stuff and they don't even know how to how to interpret it or or understand it. But a lot of that presentation is actually fake. It's fake information that's being presented. The information on the paper itself doesn't even say what they say it means while they're presenting it to the jury. Am I off base here? Well, you're you're getting the CSI effect, you know. They have [clears throat] shows like CSI and Law & Order where the government is always

getting the bad guy at the end of the show and people are trained to believe what the government say. And if the government is saying something, they usually think it's even worse than what the government was saying because of those shows and because of that attitude. Well, I think the government comes in with a little bit of I think the government comes in with a little bit of an advantage of sort of the psychology of that they're the protector and you know, like you say everyone's grown up seeing on TV and they've learned that the lot of people unless you grew up in the hood or you know, you're a person of color in the United States maybe, you you've grown up with this notion of

law enforcement as protector and the savior and so they get a lot of deference in a courtroom that you know, over my 15 years now I've kind of come to see as slanted towards the government in all these small ways that aren't anywhere in the record like the I'll give one example and then I'll move on. When I was just starting out in federal court and I were doing these hack cases all over the country, I asked my mentor like how do I know where to sit in the courtroom? And he just looked at me and said, well, the prosecution's table is always closest to the jury. And I was like, huh? And if you read, you know, just basic psychology text, you'll see that whoever's closer

gets primacy and authority with the people that they're talking to. I've been in a couple courtrooms in the United States where the prosecutors weren't their table wasn't right in front of the jury, but that wasn't Roman's trial and that's not most of them and the conviction rate in federal criminal trials is between 90 and 99% depending on the year you look at it and that is not a fair system. That's not a fair system. I I I I you know, I mean, while we're in it, I respect the institution, but there's so many ingrained institutional prejudices and a pro prosecutorial bias are the like 40% of the federal bench is former DOJ prosecutors. You know, you're not um

you know, it's not a rational and fair system. You know, it baffled me early on in the case during a pre-trial conference that one of the prosecutors [clears throat] said that it was up to us to prove that Roman was innocent. And we were like talking about >> blood You know, you guys you guys have the burden to do that. >> But you know, he was right. He was telling the truth. Like he was speaking the actual truth of the system as opposed to what you've been taught, which is that you're innocent you know, until proven guilty. But actually the reality is you are guilty and you're probably not going to be able to prove yourself innocent if you are innocent. Well, innocent until proven guilty.

Innocent until proven guilty really depends in the United States on who you are. There are some people that get that presumption. It's also written nowhere in the Constitution. Right. Yeah, also notice if if you go up to any courthouse and you find scales of justice, take a good look at them. They're never completely balanced. They're always weighed down on one side. That's a fair point. So I so I want to talk a bit about Chainalysis just to give people some backstory. I don't know if you guys I I've talked about in previous episodes that the history of Chainalysis, but I think it's really important that people understand who Chainalysis is, the history of

Chainalysis and then the importance they played in this particular case. Does anyone want to comment on I'm kind of the background of of Chainalysis? Yeah, of course. The uh Chainalysis was founded by Michael Gronager. He came over from Kraken. And uh he I think he used a lot of the government contracts and he had learned he had learned about the AML requirements that he was going through while setting up Kraken and that's what he built Chainalysis to uh do in the marketplace. So, this is like 2014, right? Yeah. Right. And you can That's they come in on Roman's case around 2014, 2015 and I think they start working with Treasury, IRS. And [clears throat]

uh then uh this case is one of those cases that they use to sort of leapfrog over to get a contracts with DOJ. And um you see them start I think this may have been like one of kind I don't know like for sure, but I think this may have been one of Chainalysis' first cases really that they're working on the government with. And it just kind of lingers on and it goes on for years and years and years and and I think like one of the things that happened with Roman's arrest is that they were they really rolled the dice thinking that when they arrested him they would get all the corroborating evidence and they just didn't. And there was this on the side note there's this because I've just been

thinking about this a lot going into the the appeal. You know, after they arrested Roman you know, they were cooperating with the the the Swedish police and they could have gone and searched Roman's apartment in Sweden and taken it gotten his laptop and his computers and everything in the apartment. They never did that. It was like after they arrested him they were like oh shit, we don't want to look any further cuz we don't want to find out, right? Like >> the jury though they did they did present the fact that he had like a bunker tour tunnels from his remote computers to his home servers. And because they didn't go and search his home in Sweden because they didn't

physically have those servers probably because they knew there was going to be nothing on it. Well, he didn't have servers in his house, but they didn't have servers in his house, but but >> his home um his home network his home network his home network he had his plant watering system. The guy's the [laughter] guy's a computer nerd, right? Like as far as I can tell his crime is that he got into Bitcoin in 2010, right? And I the best we can figure the reason he's in this mess is cuz he did some peer-to-peer transactions with somebody who started Bitcoin Fog, right? But like you know, they're giving him basically he's he's accruing what they call them in our business downstream

liability. And it's sort of like blaming the bank like uh for the guy who withdraws cash out of the ATM then that cash goes through like 12 different people and that 12th person commits a crime. Like essentially the reason Roman's in jail is they're saying, "Okay, we're holding you responsible for what that 12th person downstream used." Another striking thing about this case and these Bitcoin prosecutions in general is they would never do this to a bank. They would never ever hold a bank liable under the criminal theories that they're using against people engaged in cryptocurrency transactions. And I don't see what the difference is it when you just look at it legally. It's if you're

considering it all money you have you you you can't let the banks off, right? But they would never do that, right? So, there's this element of it and and DOJ has this as an issue I think generally is they're defending an old financial order that's very ingrained in them. And um I don't even think they're aware that they're doing it. I think it's you know, part of that is just sort of like an institutional reflex and that's what I think the big battle is between the left and the right right now to to speak in crude terms is whether or not they're you know, this revolution in finance which is is it's happened. You're not going to get it to go away, but are they

going to just get to criminalize it? But someone like Roman will always be the target uh especially compared to a bank cuz you can't seize all of a bank's money, but you they were able to seize all of Roman's money. That was that was easy. Uh and ultimately if you follow these or at least at least my cases following my cases nobody gets arrested unless there is some evidence. Nobody Well, nobody gets prosecuted not like this unless there's some evidence that there's enough money to to justify that prosecution. Mhm. And and it was pretty obvious. And remember we you guys were talking a little bit more about Roman personally before. I didn't I didn't want to meet Roman. Um I didn't meet him

until trial and the reason was because both Tor and Mike told me right off the bat, "Oh, you're going to love him. He's innocent. You're going to love him. He's a great guy. Just wait till you meet him." And I said, "Well, then I can't meet him because if I'm going to like him that much I need to be able to you know, to remain dispassionate and be able to find something wrong." Probably what I spent a year on the case before I met Roman, something like that. Um and then when I finally met him one of the first questions he said to me was he said um actually it wasn't a question a statement. He said, "Well, I must have done something wrong to deserve this."

And by that point I I just just met him at that point. I said, "The only thing I can see that you did wrong to deserve this was you got into Bitcoin too early." Yeah. I mean that it's it it is tragic right looking into that. Well, you know, actually in from what I've seen with this it's not even obviously Jamie Dimon is not going to prison or no one's charging him for Yeah. 3 FC. But in this case uh you know, Roman's not even the bank. This is like charging someone for using the same ATM that someone else used that was involved in in bad activity. Like this is like just so far removed from from any any possible crime or liability that that it's just it's nonsensical. So, so as I

was going through and looking at all of this and I you know, I've watched um a lot of your other talks. Obviously I saw Mike recently at a an event we were at together. Um so what potentially might be some of the motivation here? So, what's going So, let's go into some of the details on what they were trying to present with respect to Chainalysis cuz I found some of that some of your my your presentation on that to be jaw-dropping. Yeah, so the the government's key piece of evidence from Chainalysis was they were trying to trace back the money that was used to register the domain registration for the clearnet website www.bitcoin fog.com. Now, this clearnet website

>> was on the open internet and it did it wasn't the actual Bitcoin Fog service it didn't exist there. The Bitcoin Fog service operated on the Tor network. But bitcoinfog.com had a link that would that would direct you to the Tor network to be able to use the service. And so the government was trying to trace back the registration of that website and trace the funds to figure out where they came from. And in order to do so they put up this big you know, poster. The government loves to put up these posters for the jury to to look at during trial. And you had the transaction for the DNS registration way down here on the bottom, right? And then 16 convoluted hops with no private keys

and then you have Roman's KYC Kraken accounts. And in between those the those two known addresses were all these different uh wallet addresses that were linked to different emails. None of those emails appeared anywhere in Roman's possession. None of the passwords or logins appeared anywhere in his devices or networks. Uh yet they they brought this up. So, it it very much is like if you if you're Roman at the top here you do a transaction right away you had two blockchain addresses Bitcoin addresses that had no attributed owner. Right? So, they could have been anybody, but the government tried to argue that those belonged to Roman and he hid them and all this stuff. But what

happened to Roman is something similar to if you have a $10 bill, you go to buy some coffee, then the barista takes that $10 bill and goes and gives it to the neighbor and the neighbor takes the $10 bill and goes and buys a pair of shoes and then the shoe store guy goes and buys drugs with it. And now the government's coming and say, "Hey, Roman funded the purchase of these drugs. It's illegal activity." Uh the downstream liability aspect of how the government is prosecuting Roman Sterlingov is scary for anybody involved in Bitcoin because it doesn't matter who you transact with. If the government can use Chainalysis to make up these attributions and be able

to present it with authority in front of a jury it dangers everybody in the in the Bitcoin world. Well, in fact they told us. They said, "If you can just tell us who he did who he who he transacted with." You know, give us another name. How's he going to figure out who he transacted with? It's And that's like one of the one of the like tougher things about this case as far as it's like how can we cut a deal with the government when our guy didn't do it? Right? Like when when you know, you guys done it or they've got him on something or whatever, you go cut a deal, right? Because you can give information, you can leverage that into a deal and unfortunately like 90% of

criminal cases get disposed of in a plea deal. Really fucked up police system, but that's another sh But so but here in a situation where you've got somebody who's innocent and the government's coming to you and saying, "Well, just give us all the information." And you know, we'll let this off. We'll let this go. It's like dude, we don't have anything to give you. Our client would have to lie. Right? And like what are we going to do here, right? Like um and they wanted What did they want at the beginning? Did they want it 25 years? for him That that was the plea offer. The plea offer was 25 That was the plea offer? 25 years. Then uh the US sentencing guidelines which

are themselves a whole story and a whole complete mess. They were life in prison. Life in prison cuz you had to see. Uh after trial the government was requesting 30 years in prison. Uh we ended up getting 150 months or 12 and a half years. And kept his right to appeal >> But we kept his right lie. >> appeal, yeah. And he didn't have to lie. He didn't have to lie. But at least by trial, the DOJ made it pretty clear that if he wanted to give up more Bitcoin, if he wanted us to, you know, to give wallet addresses, if he wanted to give access to, um, to the the proceeds of Bitcoin Fog, deals could be discussed, but he didn't have any of that. And he still has a hot wallet

sitting there with all the Bitcoin that generated the fees. It never never went out to to anyone, let alone Roman. That reminds me of one of my favorite facts in this case. There There in the indictment, there's a There was that that address with the They're saying What What did they call it? The Bitcoin Fog, uh, address. I forget what they called it. The consolidation address. So, they're saying there's, I don't know how many, like, millions dollars worth of Bitcoin in there. I can't remember now. But I remember we go look at it. Or let's let's look up the wallet address, right? There's $0 in it and it hasn't transacted since like 2013 or whatever. And they're like, "Oh, yeah, but we've

got this secret sauce in Chainalysis and we know that actually there's all this money in it." And uh that's part of that $400 million asset forfeiture to him. And we're like, "We can't even look it up." And it's like, "But if there's this, um, So, in my computer cases coming into this, there was always this people have this weird superstition. They almost look at like hackers and stuff like that as witches cuz I think they just don't understand the computer science and it kind of triggers this primordial fear of the unknown in people. You get that with Bitcoin, too, right? And it's another thing you're fighting in the juries in these criminal Okay, not fighting with

them, trying to overcome with them, uh, is this This guy looks like evil and they just did everything they could to make Roman look, um, evil. Which is just ridiculous cuz the guy is not evil. I I mean, this is an innocent guy sitting in jail right now that they just destroyed. Um, they haven't destroyed cuz he's not broken, but they're trying to destroy. Well, I mean, it seems like if your name's Roman and you're from Russia, then you're automatically It feels like, you know, we get him. Like, he's the guy that we want to go after. But you're not I mean, you're not far off because they they repeatedly mentioned that he was from Russia. They repeatedly mentioned

that he wanted to fly a plane. They couldn't decide whether he was part of Taliban or Yeah, right. It was It was bizarre. Well, and then and then they threw out accusations that, uh, that that he was a pedophile. And there was absolutely nothing Nothing Nothing in the case that even came close to that. They kept on putting up this image of a bad ID photo he had. He had a big scraggly beard. You know, a computer scientist guy beard. Big one. And it was on his, uh, his Swedish driver's license. And they just kept putting in that picture in front of the jury over and over and over again. And I besides the fact that he was Russian. Not a single eyewitness testifies

that they saw Roman operating Bitcoin Fog, that he heard him talking about it, right? All the government witnesses were after-the-fact investigators, people who'd done tracing on, you know, Chainalysis Reactor, or forensic accountant saying, "Well, my guess is this is what he would have gotten You know, because they They said that the money that he mixed through Bitcoin Fog is own money he got cuz he started trading in Bitcoin in 2010. They said after he mixed it through Bitcoin Fog and put it in his KYC'd Kraken account." KYC just means he stuck his name on it, right? Um, that those were the royalty payments for Bitcoin Fog, but he should have had way more money. And please,

please explain to me why the supposed founder of Bitcoin Fog after setting up the sophisticated mixing thing and being all this great and all this stack stealth would mix it had sent his royalty fees from the mixer to a KYC'd Kraken account. Why would the Like, it just like so much of this shit in this case when you turn around and you really really look at it, it makes no sense. And it's why it's so maddening that they got the conviction on this. And that they're probably getting, you know, maybe get affirmed on appeal because I think the, you know, who knows what the appellate judges think about crypto. Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's it's confusing for everyone. And, um,

it it hasn't it hasn't been great so far. And I know the other cases that that I've been following. So So, yes, we have somebody where they didn't find any actual evidence on any of his own computers, but yet he's going to have this KYC account. A Kraken account in Poland. >> not I mean, in fact, he he did them a you know, an inadvertent favor. He flew over because he didn't know whether whether he was going to stay or go back or He was sort of a digital nomad at that time. He flew over with with a suitcase filled with devices with, uh, with storage, you know, with with memory, with They They did complete forensics on everything and they found They couldn't even find a login related

to Bitcoin Fog. Nothing. Wow. I Well, so I You know, Mike, you'd mentioned that What Wasn't there somebody else on your side working on the forensics at one point? Yeah, this was a fascinating story. So, in 2021, Tor and I went down to speak at the Bitcoin conference when it was in Miami. And we did the whole presentation. This is before the trial. So, we're telling everybody, you know, we got this innocent guy. We need the support. After our presentation, this guy comes up to me in the hall at the conference center and he says, "Hey, you know, this is really messed up what's happening to Roman. You know, this is my Alamo. I want to help you guys out." And he

worked for a company called CipherTrace. CipherTrace was an early competitor with Chainalysis. They also did blockchain tracing. They had different heuristics, different methods. And when I spoke to everybody from CipherTrace, everyone said the same thing, "This isn't art, not a science. You cannot make an attribution 100% using the kind of heuristics that exists in this industry. >> [clears throat] >> But we do want to help you. We do want to combat Chainalysis. And we we want to help you get this innocent guy to prison." So, we ended up working with one of their top blockchain tracers. We went to work at her house for a week [clears throat] and we went through

everything, all the information. She was lined up to be our expert witness at trial. We had been prepping the entire trial to have CipherTrace be our expert witness to combat Chainalysis' attribution. Uh, about a week before trial, uh, MasterCard, which owns CipherTrace, pulled their support. Everybody on their side lawyered up. And we weren't able to introduce them as an expert witness at trial in front of the jury. We couldn't even talk to Jona. >> Couldn't even talk to them. It was like somebody had made a phone call or something. It I don't know, like, why, >> right away, right then then and there, MasterCard completely dissolves the entire company. It doesn't exist anymore.

And we haven't heard or spoken to anybody from CipherTrace since. And those people were dedicated for the cause. They were all trying to help prove Roman's innocence. Um, and that's how it goes sometimes. We don't know what happened there. They had Chainalysis had a lawyer come in from, uh, California to represent them in the case. They tried to put everybody under this very very strict, uh, protective order. Uh, non-competition order. So, we had to sign >> non non-compete clause, uh, to look at the discovery in a federal criminal case, which has never happened in the history of the federal courts. And for those of you who don't know what a protective order is, it's just an order

from the court that you're not going to share the evidence in the case that's going between the government and you. You know, you got to keep it secret until it comes out of court. Fine, we sign them all the time, right? But, um, what was crazy about this one when we were pushing and pushing and pushing to see everything about Chainalysis Reactor, right? Cuz we want to know how you're coming up with these numbers and blah blah blah blah. Um, they wanted us in order to see this stuff, to everybody, our experts, everybody to sign a non-competition clause for 5 years with Chainalysis Reactor such that the Chainalysis, if they determined later after the case that somehow we were using the

information that, um, they disclosed to us in this case, they could sue us in business matters, right? To which everybody said, "No fucking way." Right? And it scared away all our experts because nobody wants to get sued by multi-billion dollar corporation, right? And I asked the court We asked the court. We said, "Your Honor, well, first of all, this is a criminal case. Somebody's liberty's at stake and you're putting, you know, proprietary corporate interests above somebody's constitutional liberty. It's just big problem right there, right? But number two, can you name me one time one time in the history in I'm talking the entire history of federal criminal

jurisprudence, cases, courts, anytime. Just show me one time that there has ever been a non-compete clause in a protective order?" Guess what they showed me. Absolutely nothing. I was shown one case from an intermediate New Jersey appellate court uh, on a DNA matter, right? So, like, one of the things here that's like a really really deep constitutional issue is why are the courts, or at least in this instance, favoring corporate interests and profit over a defendant's liberty interests and their Sixth Amendment right to confront

an accuser. And in this case, Chainalysis Reactor and Chainalysis is an accuser. They're saying, "You laundered all this money, right?" And yet their excuse, like we were saying earlier before, is like, "Oh, well, hey, you know, you terrorists might be able to use it in the future." Well, tough shit. You know what? Guess what trumps that? The defendant's, you know, Sixth Amendment rights, right? And you know what? You can use open source. There's a zero reason for this to be closed source. The only reason is that they're worried about competition, but they should have stepped into the law enforcement compliance zone marketplace without validating their software and expecting

it to be examined. Cuz right now we're just taking its accuracy on faith and people that they have paid to say that it's accurate. Actually, Aaron, you'll you'll find this fascinating on on what Tor is talking about. So, I have been doing this just shy of 30 years now. And for most of at least the first 20 years it was there was barely a fight to be able to examine software or hardware in the technology sphere. Basically, we got to I mean, I literally have down by my legs. Ironically, by my legs, I have some ankle bracelets that literally were sent to us so we could test the GPS systems, you know, how well they work. Um It was it's never ever been a problem.

Maybe we occasionally will have a fight, but I've always been able to examine hardware and software that was used in a case. Over the last the last than 10 years something has turned around. Something's really changed. All of a sudden, the corporate interests of software have have definitely taken over. And now all of a sudden, instead of a court ordering that they have to give us a copy or they can't use it in court, now we are being told uh you know, if if we give it to you, you're going to use it to help people circumvent Somehow in fact, I testified in federal court uh in Alaska. I said, "I don't I don't know if the prosecution understands my business model, but I

don't make any money by helping people get away with anything. There's there's no incentive for me. Um but despite having received national security clearance in prior cases this case I could get nothing. And it got worse than just the money because at one point there was even a criminal clause in their protective order that was coming through. And when when Chainalysis or when CipherTrace was withdrawn by their overlords at MasterCard, we tried to get another tracing expert to hop in. And the community had been great. We've been really public about what was going on with Roman's case. And we had two potential expert witnesses that were ultimately rejected by the government

for the most ridiculous reasons. The first we tried to bring in Laurent Salat from OXT, which is an open-source blockchain tracing firm. The way blockchain tracing firm should be, it should be audited, it should be open-source, people should be able to look at the code. And he was going to come in and contest Chainalysis's attributions. Uh because of the of the criminal clause in the protective order, and because of the fact that Laurent Salat was French, and French France does not extradite its own citizens, the judge was worried that if he comes in and then gets to look at the Chainalysis source code, and then goes back to France, there would be no recourse for the American government to

put him in jail. So, he cannot be an expert witness and he cannot testify in this case. The second person who we brought in was or tried to bring in was Brian Bishop, who is one of the most elite Bitcoin core developers. He's been part of the Bitcoin project for for over a decade. And the prosecution brought all this evidence in to say, "Oh, this guy is unacceptable as an expert witness because he's into bioengineering." You know, he's into working with genetics and and and trying to play around with the fundamental building blocks of life. Somehow makes them a bad blockchain analyst. It didn't make any sense, but we ended up having to go to trial without any expert witness on that front.

Well, as a matter of fact, I and it was we won't we won't know how it would have gone the other way, but it seemed pretty clear that the only reason I was even able to testify was because right up front during the hearing I volunteered that I wasn't there for the purposes of Bitcoin tracing or crypto tracing. That then all of a sudden I was okay. Oh, and can I say my favorite part of the proceedings that I just absolutely I'm still in shock about? It's um So, when we go you do something called a Daubert challenge when you want to challenge this kind of, you know, Chainalysis's expert kind of testimony. So, we we we mount a Daubert challenge, expert challenge, and we have two days of hearings.

And mind you, at this point that we're having these two days of hearings, Roman has been in jail now for a year and a half pre-trial. And you can't jail a defendant in the United States pre-trial unless you find a you know, they're flight risk and you weigh the evidence against them, right? So, we're on I think it's like day two of this hearing. You know, the entire case turns on blockchain and everything. We're a year and a half in and the judge just goes, "I'm sorry. I I just have a question. Does the blockchain have an administrator?" Exactly. So, Aaron, you're laughing right now. I can tell whether or not somebody knows something about the blockchain simply by telling that story

because everybody who knows something about the blockchain immediately laughs. And it's fine if you're a beginner or still learning this stuff, that's a great beginner question. The answer to which is, "No, Virginia, the blockchain does not have an administrator because it's a decentralized ledger and that's why it's one of the greatest innovations in finance in the last few thousand years, right?" But for a federal judge to ask that in a hearing a year and a half after he's jailed somebody, and one of the factors he evaluated was the weight of the the evidence, is very problematic and is also indicative of sort of like the lack of knowledge base in the courts. And it's also probably going to

find it in the juries and the general public about this subject area, right? Like wow, right? And that guy, after that judge, after that hearing, he's the one who says, "Oh, it's okay to let Chainalysis Reactor in to the courtroom and put it in front of the jury." Somebody who just blatantly told you, "I don't really know even the basics about blockchain, but I'm making the decision to let this forensic software in as evidence um anyhow because law enforcement says it works." Yeah, this is this is common that I've heard in other cases as well where the judge doesn't even know how to uh handle a question or handle the information, and there's often just deference to law enforcement.

And that's I we're seeing that over and over again. So, so to get this straight, so so the government is presenting this black box evidence. It hasn't been peer-reviewed, that that hasn't been validated, and then you're trying to mount a defense, and you have a company that is, you know, that MasterCard has an investment in that is fully understands what's going on here, and they get pulled at the last minute. And so now so the jury just basically is seeing a one-sided argument that has no no backing behind it. Is that basically it? It would it Yeah, and it was like a week before trial we'd gotten all these [clears throat] extensions on the trial date. We weren't going to get another

trial extension realistically. So, like it was we just had to go. And we had to go without an expert to challenge all their stuff. And I don't know we don't know what happened, but it's like one of those things that looks like somebody made a phone call and or said, "Listen, man, if you want to if you want our government contracts maybe you should think twice about what you're doing here or whatever." You know, it's like it's probably that same like de-banking thing kind of stuff. Like it's it's this is it's all crazy like almost like I don't know what the word is, existential metaphysical battle going on between these forces that think that, you know, Bitcoin and

crypto is somehow some evil malevolent force. Like, you know, Paul Krugman is like lost his mind over it or like the old guard. And and people who are like us are like, "This is no big deal." And actually, well, it is a big deal in that it's a huge revolution finance. And you know, I think eventually crypto's going to win. But right now, unfortunately, you know, Bitcoin whatever, you know, um but unfortunately right now we're on the first wave of of its adoption and um they're going to be trying to throw more people in jail. Well, the government does have I mean, they do have an incentive to you know, to to fight it. I mean, it's hard to tax, it's hard to control, it's um it's certainly not

not their preferred model of currency. Well, [snorts] financial privacy is the key to capitalism. You know, when I talk to people who are starting to learn about Bitcoin. I had a good conversation with some businessmen in Hong Kong about this at the Bitcoin Asia event. And they said, "Well, why why was Bitcoin fog so important? Or why did the government want to go after it so badly?" And I tried to explain how, you know, Roman was, you know, availing himself to rent a tax through not having a financial private system here. But what disturbed him the most was when I said, "If you can transact with somebody and put a down payment on a business deal and they can

see your address, they can look up to see how much money you have in there, and they can raise the price. You know, you're not [clears throat] going to be getting the best prices in an open financial world and on an open blockchain where you don't have any element of financial privacy. That is going to destroy capitalism." And when he understood that, his eyes lit up and he's like, "Man, I get that. I get it. That's why it's terrible." So, that should be one of the strongest arguments for, you know, why why financial privacy measures are important, particularly on the blockchain. In in this case, we couldn't talk about it in front of the jury, but as as a

part of an earlier hearing um we saw the exact reason that financial privacy is so important. They they went and pulled Tor's Tor's wallet to see how he had been paid. I had this this cracked me up, man, because they did So, I had like I think we were one of the first law firms in the world to take Bitcoin as payment like in January 2013. I've never you know I bothered to fact-check that, right? And and we were trying to raise money for a case in 2013 and somebody was like, "You take Bitcoin." I was like, "What's Bitcoin?" They were like, "It's money." And I'm like, "Yeah, I take it, right?" And so, I just like I I I never thought Bitcoin was a big freaking deal, right? I was just like,

"What's money? I can exchange it for goods and services." And then you know around 2016 2017, you know, regulatory agencies start going crazy. But so, I just kept I hadn't thought about this stuff. I just kept the same address like this Coinbase address I got for like all the Bitcoin payments over the years and everything like that and and whatever. And then the government goes in this hearing just goes, "Well, Mr. Eckel has gotten somehow $1.2 million on this case." And I was like, "I've gotten $1.2 million on this case? I'm like, this is great. [laughter] Let me GO CHECK MY ADDRESS. I'M DOING GREAT, RIGHT?" BECAUSE RIGHT NOW WE CAN'T AFFORD FUCKING COFFEE,

RIGHT? AND um it turns [snorts] out they just looked at my address and everything I'd gotten over the the last like decade and they hadn't bothered to think it through. And that's really what happened here is they went down this rabbit hole. And you know, with their confirmation bias and their need to get a conviction and close this case and they just didn't really think it through or ever find that collaborative piece of evidence that they thought was always around the corner. You know, he was in Miami in 2017 and they put him under wire like wiretap surveillance IP you know, everything like nothing, right? Like you cannot point I challenge anybody listening to this reach out to me if you

see a single piece of corroborating evidence in this case that doesn't require you to speculate in some way. And and it's I compare it a little bit if you've ever broken up with somebody and you're kind of going down the rabbit hole I would never do this you know, looking at who they like and who's liking them and you kind of go down this like tailspin, right? That's what the government did here. They went down the internet rabbit hole and they they were too invested after a decade to admit um that they just gotten it wrong. Well, and the thing is they couldn't find anything, they made it up. We had a huge issue with uh the IP overlap analysis. And the evidence that they brought in

through FBI investigator uh uh Madzarine. And she had to retract testimony in the trial because we caught her in a straight-up lie. Basically, they went through Roman's all all of Roman's devices and they couldn't find anything on Bitcoin Fog and so they started look for anything that they could find. They had to find something, right? And so they find this uh uh text message, right? And the text message said something along the lines of uh you know, uh what's it like about me? My beard makes me look like a terrorist or my bank wallet bank account makes me look like a money launderer. I think what happened is they just filtered for the word money launderer

and that's all that they could find. Uh they ended up attributing that text message in in court in front of the jury to Roman. And that came up and we're like, "Where'd that come from? We didn't see that anywhere in the in the evidence." So, I'm sitting there at the table and I have to really look over to my shoulder and I'm like, "Jeff, like you got to help me figure out where this came from." And Jeff goes to work and sure enough he gets it. It had come from an ebook that was on one of Roman's ebook devices. It was had a books file. And the statement was just an image that was in the book. It was an e-dating book like how how to talk to women online via text and stuff. And it was one of the

text messages that was included in the ebook. They had cropped it out. It was low resolution and they had blasted it up big and they had attributed it to him just completely fraudulently. I think you're being kind and and I testify to this. I don't think I don't think it came up in a search at all because it was a low resolution image. It was it was just an image and the was an old ebook format a format um well out of date. None of the forensic software that they were using that we were aware of was even capable of finding text inside of an image. I think they literally stumbled upon this image and said, "Let's use that." I mean, it just it it it was it was cut it was cropped

and it looked good in front of a jury and it was absurd. And not only that but it first time in my career it actually required the agent to get back on stand and deny something she'd already testified to that she found it. >> She had to apologize for uh Yeah, she had to apologize. This is this is the agent who conducted the IP overlap analysis which was the government's key piece of evidence linking Roman to some of those accounts that we discussed earlier that were in those middle uh blockchain transactions between the DNS registration and Roman's KYC'd accounts. Because it looks like at some point in time those addresses those email addresses related to the those

blockchain wallets logged into the same IP address [clears throat] that Roman had logged into within a certain temporal proximity which was like hours or days and that turned out to be a VPN service that thousands or hundreds of thousands of people could have been using at the same time. Yeah, this is a really disturbing really disturbing tactical part of this case is they made attributions of control over email addresses, right? So, Roman's got an email address. We know it's his address. Nobody's denying it's his address, right? And then there's this email address called shurman@hotmail.com that they say the government says um is the one that set up the these Bitcoin

Fog Talk accounts and all this stuff like that, right? That you know, they're linking to Bitcoin Fog. They say because what Madzarine did the the you know, the woman who made a misrepresentation about uh this message said talking about money laundering. Madzarine said, "Well, Roman logged into this IP address at this time. Shurman was at the same IP address you know, few minutes hours days later. Therefore, the same person." So, what they're saying is now you're on a server with thousands maybe millions of people all sharing the same IP address and [clears throat] they're saying, "Okay, it's this one person." Right? That's their link

to Roman operating Bitcoin Fog for 10 years. And mind you, this is an IP address overlap analysis they call it dealing with stuff in Sweden in 2011. That's it. But that goes back to how how Sorry, go ahead. No, no. Well, let me say one more thing about So, when I asked her, "Is this scientific?" She's like, "No." I was like, "How many times have you used this methodology before?" She goes, "I made it up for this case." And then I'm like, "So, you're not definitively attributing you know, Roman as the operator of Bitcoin Fog." She says, "No." But the psychological effect of this kind of forensic evidence, they don't actually need to say Roman definitively did it. They're just

be like, "Oh, our science points to it even though it's not science." Sorry, Jeff. Well, I Well, actually I I'll I'll I'll I'll finish up that thought. I mean, on that um even though I didn't know at the time I wasn't supposed to talk to the jury um jury after it was all over actually used the term preponderance of evidence. In other words, that was their that that was what they were anchoring onto was this idea that well, even if they couldn't prove it was him, they had so many different things that maybe could have proven they didn't come all the way you know, all the way so we'll take you know, if we can't get a perfect 10 on all of our evidence, we'll take all of

the twos and we'll add them up together until they equal 10. And and so they discussed with me preponderance of evidence. What I was going to say is one of you know, one of these big challenges again came up in what Tor was talking about which was the VPN and Mike mentioned it before. That we realized pretty quickly just looking at the at the jurors that they didn't know what the letters stood for they hadn't most of them hadn't used one. And so while I was on the stand, Tor had to ask me about VPNs what they're used for and what they're used for. And it was as though the the presumption of the jury well, of the government to the jury was that you don't use a VPN unless

you're hiding something unless you're doing something wrong. Uh where I had to testify about everybody in the room should have been using one. Well, that that's the standard practice though, isn't it? I mean, I remember I was a defendant in a lawsuit and and you know, I'm dealing with my lawyers and I'm like, "Oh, did you use you know, Signal or did you use private communication?" Because the court they they told me the court looks at that and just assumes that you're guilty. That's that's just kind of a standard practice now which is which is also absurd. I mean, what happened to the Fourth Amendment? And again, when did we go from we have privacy as a right to all of a

sudden we're assumed guilty for trying to protect our own privacy which is which is again as in Roman Sterling off's case, you know, he wanted privacy because he was worried about wrench attacks which if you see what's going on around the going on around the world right now, wrench attacks all over the place. This is a serious problem. This isn't about concealing things from the government. This is about protecting yourself from being kidnapped, tortured, or murdered. This is the stakes here are incredibly high. Wasn't somebody in New York kidnapped during our trial and and held for his Bitcoin? >> so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like here's something else I

do want to point out here is like and there's something I tell to my a lot of the clients now. I say like listen, if you want to uh cuz this goes back to Aaron what you were saying earlier about how you know, everyone's got this sort of image of law enforcement and the government like you learned in school and I had it before I started doing this and now I don't. And a lot of our clients after they've been arrested, they're like, "What the heck is going on? This is I thought this was a fair system. I thought it was a rational system." And I just said I said, "Listen, the quicker you get used to the fact that this is an unfair and irrational system, uh it's going to be easier for

you. And if you want to predict the government's behavior to a higher degree of accuracy, start to view them as a criminal gang. And ask yourself in any given situation, how would a criminal gang act? And you will usually get the right kind of answer. Now, look at what they do in cases like this. They take your money right away so you can't afford a lawyer, right? They're, you know, the civil asset forfeiture is a huge problem where they can just go in, take all your money before there's any adjudicatory hearing at all. And um how are you going to defend yourself? In particularly in federal court, which is very expensive, right? Like and it's

expensive for us to get our law licenses. There's all these costs and all these hidden costs, right? Like that. If they're jacking your money right away and they know this, but they're coming in and they're calling themselves the Department of Justice, which if you don't think the Department of Justice is an Orwellian name, I'm going to ask you, well, think twice about that, right? Because it's straight out of Orwell. The Department of Justice is just like the Ministry of Truth. Well, we can see now today, I mean, especially today, we can see the Department of Justice is a is a political organization. It changes its priorities depending on who's in in power. So, who they were under the prior

administration, who they were going after is entirely different than who they're pardoning under the current administration and not going after. I'll second Jeff on that. I've been doing this long enough now to see that when administrations shift who gets prosecuted um shifts. Like Dan Makkai, if you know him, he was like a a MAGA meme guy who >> Doug Doug Makkai. Doug Makkai, yeah. >> Yeah, Doug Makkai, sorry. Doug Makkai, yeah, gets arrested right after Biden's inauguration even though, you know, the which the conviction gets vacated, but what he'd done was like memeing the 2016 election, all right, against Hillary. So, they had to wait for Biden to come in and arrest him. And but like both

sides do it. It it's not and it's an argument for you really need to limit DOJ to just strictly necessary stuff. Federal criminal jurisdiction, which is, in my opinion, not an enumerated power in the United States Constitution, needs to be severely limited because under the New Deal it just expanded so far and expansively that they're just throwing in people in jail for political reasons. Like there's no reason to have this massive general federal police state. It's out of control. And if you really think about it, outside of, you know, biblical definitions, justice is defined by law. So, it shouldn't really change depending on who's in power. It should be justice should be justice.

It shouldn't be a matter of of of of opinion. And agreed. And here, what law really are we talking about, right? Like they the money laundering stuff is is so elastic, this theory of liability. And and because they, you know, this is a little technical legal history, right? But so, in the 20th century in the New Deal, they sort of modify a lot of old laws that had restraints in them under the common law. And they passed these new federal criminal laws that basically allowed them to take these really expansive interpretations and basically criminalize almost anything. And if you think, like I hear, you know, the one thing you hear all the time is, well, I haven't done anything wrong. And you

know what I'd say to them that now I say it doesn't matter if you think you haven't done anything wrong. What matters is if a fucking prosecutor thinks that you've done something wrong. Because then you could be the most innocent babe and virgin in the world and it doesn't matter. You're going to get prosecuted and you're going to probably going to end up in some, you know, gulag after you've been sentenced for something you're like, but I never did it. And you're going to be saying that the entire time. But I don't think it's even that the prosecutors believe it because I'm I'm looking at the same prosecutors right now in Manhattan who were on the job under a prior administration who are

letting people go for things that they prosecuted two years ago. And and now they're not prosecuting and I'm literally seeing them sitting on their desks. And then there are people they're prosecuting today that a couple years ago they wouldn't have bothered to prosecute. So, it doesn't You were saying to our, you know, about, you know, compared to a criminal gang. How about the math in in this case? When you add up the damages, how you guys you guys have the math better than me. Give them the math on this on the damages. The the double double billing. I I can't even I I can't even get it straight, right? Like I don't like cuz they said, yeah, they like the double counting the

valuation of what they say the criminal funds are. They have a forfeiture order for $400 million. They say, what was it, my 70 80 million of it is is criminal. I I don't understand it. I I can't >> And then And then they want him to be even though they say that they can they can follow money leaving Bitcoin Fog going to be used for criminal purposes, they and then some of those criminal purposes they've already they've already shut down and reclaimed because they say, we know this is criminal >> Yeah. Yeah, they seized the >> this site and we they they they reclaimed it. But yet they're making Roman responsible for money they've already seized on the output. >> Yeah.

Yeah. All that money in Silk Road that they showed in trial has been seized. And then now they're attributing it to be part of the forfeiture for Roman. It's just astronomically. He's never If that sticks with him for life, he's never going to be able to pay it off. It's crazy. So, the total is what, 395 million? Something like that, 398. Something like that. It was close to 400. 300, yeah. And so, if if Roman actually ran Bitcoin Fog, if he had actually run Bitcoin Fog, the the vast vast vast majority of that has already transferred out of his funds. And is in government wallets. Right. Right. >> Yeah, it's the government wallets. [laughter] >> wallets. But they want him to pay that

full amount. Crazy. Yeah. So, so I want everybody to understand this. The deck is stacked. You're going to lose 90 to 99% of the time on this. In the case of, you know, in this case, the evidence that was presented, their expert witness was torched on the other side. And we have everything else that's just been described here in terms of the the discovery and, you know, taking ebook things that say money laundering and trying to turn, you know, baffle the jury with bullshit as as as I describe it. But one of the other challenges in any of these federal court cases is the cost of the case. And I've I've listened to you guys talk about this case for a long time and I've been watching other

interviews. I mean, this this almost broke you, right? It's it's something >> Yeah. this case. Do you want to talk about this case and then but in general also kind of generalize it to what it means to have to mount a defense against the federal government? Yeah, I worked on this case. We were we couldn't pay our rent, you know, we're trying to negotiate with our landlords trying to push through because we were spending all of our time working on this stuff and the government had seized all of Roman's funds. He had no money to pay us. We were complaining about this on Twitter, talking about that. And you know what, the Bitcoin community stood up and and shut out to the Bitcoin community.

We got to give a big shout out to Lucas Betschart from the Swiss Bitcoin Association who gave us a call and said, hey, you know, this is really really messed up what's happening to Roman. We want to try to support you. Let me try to put together a couple of presentation opportunities for you in Europe because if that's happening to a fellow European, you know, we want to help out. And so, we ended up doing a little tour. We we spoke in Zurich, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin. And we got to know the European Bitcoin community and just filled with great people and they gave us enough funds to be able to to take this through. Yeah, like without the community, we would never survive. Like we took this

uh you know, we were hoping we'd get paid. Like everyone wants to pay their rent, right? But like we were committed to this case cuz we we we think it's really important. There's a lot of things we look for in cases like this. This is matter of first impression. It's unique. It's never happened before. We can't let the government, you know, advance these kinds of theories without a challenge. But without the community, we would have never survived. So, thank you to the community on that cuz community really stepped up. 100%. So, what is So, what is the, you know, average cost or kind of out of the gates if you're going to fight a Couple million. Couple million.

>> Couple million. Like you can do them I mean, we did our first one on the fly. I mean, I don't want people to like if somebody's like in this desperate spot right now to have that sink them. Like you can, you know, our first case we did with like nothing and we we actually won it on appeal, but that was like brutal. But if you're going to have like you you know, do a pro the case properly, it's it probably 1.5 to as a baseline. And then if you need experts, you know, cases like this, it gets really really expensive. And that's another problem. You've got, you know, an 8.6 billion dollar market cap corporation like Chainalysis and you're trying to challenge them and you can't you don't

have any money to get experts because the government seized all the money and stuff like that. Um CipherTrace is going to be working for us for free. CipherTrace is like volunteering their services for us before they got pulled. And we were really grateful for that they were doing. I got my flight reimbursed at my stopover on my way to Washington, D.C. the first time. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> That's that's how they were. Tor just kept saying, don't worry, I'm just waiting for a check to clear. Don't worry. >> I we took other money from you making on other cases and putting it in this one. This was like, you know, I'm like I don't We're not complaining. We're

thankful to everybody who helped out, right? Like we knew I knew we knew what we were getting into. Um but like that's that's been an important core value of the firm and how we started is these these big computer cases and we're not going to stop doing them. Um you know, we're going to be a lot more selective cuz you can't can't do a bunch of them cuz you got to pay the rent, right? You got to take care of your other clients, but we're not going to stop doing these cases and no matter how much the other side wants to stop us This this This by the way, you know, even though I I did you know, I I don't like to I don't like to to quote-unquote fall in love with a client early because I want

to make sure if he did something I could tell his attorneys he did something. But one of the early uh signals to me that it was very unlikely that Roman was uh Akamashite Omedeto. Yeah, Omedeto, yeah. The guy who you know, who ran Bitcoin Fog was was pretty simple is that they were running on a shoe string. They're calling me up. I'm not I I can't bill anything cuz they don't have anything to pay. Um we're searching for everybody else we can get to you know, possibly be a part of the case. And and my thinking on it is when you talk about $2 million. Let's let's just take $2 million relative to what they think he had it's a drop in the bucket. Wouldn't he have just pulled it out?

I mean Why not? If you need if if everything's I cuz I've had plenty of people in specifically in cryptocurrency who said, "Listen, I'll empty out my wallet. Better than going to jail." Yep. Made no sense. So so instead apparently he decided to take a risk on spending most of the rest of his life in jail so that when he gets out he might still have the Bitcoin wallet money. A guy who who repeatedly in conversations that they that they translated is talking about how worried he is that Bitcoin's going to crash. Wants to spend decades in jail and hope that it's going to be worth something. Yeah, I mean it just it doesn't make any sense. So what So what percentage of

cases never go forward because people can't afford the legal fees? That what what percentage of cases >> That's it's it's why you I think one of the main reasons you've got a 90% uh plea bargain rate in federal courts. Um I most of them. And >> I think isn't it like it's it's it's 80% plus that just don't ever see any litigation at That's it's 90% plus depending on the year. It's that bad. And that has a whole other thing where what you think the law is uh really isn't because most cases are getting disposed of in the sort of plea realm where it's all the laws wishy-washy and people are cutting deals and um what's actually happening in the courts and what people are think is happening in

the courts are totally divorced from each other. You know, >> [clears throat] >> The other thing is inside The other thing your viewers should should probably recognize and this is certainly not good for my business maybe not good for yours, but they should know um one of the one of the recent tactics of the DOJ is that if you want to have any chance at any sort of a deal, which is really your only chance. I mean, statistically your odds are so far against you if you don't take a deal, you're probably going to jail. But what they've done now is just so you know, the deal won't exist if you if you spend our time looking at the evidence. So I I like I have I've been told to my

face. I will testify to this. To my face I was told if you were going to ask for this evidence, the deals are all off the table. So the defendant says he didn't do it he wants to see his evidence, but he can't but but he'll lose any chance of a deal if he looks at his evidence. And I think what's really problematic in in that is that look at where that's coming from. That's not coming from a position of well, we're concerned about justice and we want to make sure that we've gotten the right person. So please examine all the evidence as close as you can and please point out any mistakes to us because we don't want to convict any innocent person. What they're saying is

we want a conviction. Doesn't matter what you think. Okay, [clears throat] well, you know, I mean, and that's whatever that's the reality, but like that's not how it should be and I think maybe there needs to be some ethical changes in in in in in our business when it comes to prosecutors because I think that's in part product of the fact that we're told train as lawyers you have to have zealous representation of your client no matter what, but I think that axiom is very problematic when it comes to prosecutors because that means they're just going to go and try to convict an innocent person no matter what. Uh which is what we see happen all the time. By [snorts] the way, you you mentioned

still and we keep harping on this you know, being uh like like a criminal gang, uh but in in my most recent Manhattan case, we have a judge who recommended to the prosecutor that she needed more help. The prosecutor that comes in to give her help is the prosecutor who actually helped the judge get his uh get appointed and who the judge helped get his job at the US Attorney's office. And they golf together and and acknowledged that they they do breakfast together, but we have been told that at least in Manhattan the chances of getting their one of them taken off case are so low that it's not worth upsetting them by making an issue out of it. They're [snorts] friends. They're buddies.

You know, there was a moment in Roman's case There there was a moment in Roman's case during trial or jury selection where we had to use a strike to knock the judge's former law partner off the potential jury list. Apparently we couldn't use in that courtroom a for cause strike. We had to use one of the limited strikes that we had to knock off this conflict of interest. And we did see this over and over and over and over again. At one point they were threatening to throw Tor and I in jail for talking about this, you know. Remember that, Tor? Right. >> Well, yeah, we just the prosecutors in this case did press for years and they [clears throat] were leaking to

Andy Greenberg at Wired for his book Tracers in the Dark. Like we've had a cases written about in books before, but I've never had a case that I read about in a book before it went to trial. And um so we had to respond to all this press the government had been doing for years and they just didn't it was just by pure coincidence that I know Andy and Andy had called me for comment on another case. And I was like, "Andy, what the fuck is up with this stuff you're writing about Wired about? You know, I picked up one of these clients." And um there's this this case is like a movie, a really really dark movie when I go back and I look at everything, but um so yeah, they they tried to gag us

because we started responding to the press to the stuff that they'd said about our client. Um you know, because everybody pretends like the press doesn't matter and it totally matters. Totally matters. Or it completely matters. Isn't it also true Might you give me tell me something about the the judge and then judges owning private prisons and crazy. So this jail that they had been keeping Roman in pre-trial uh you know, it's a he's a case of a federal crime. He should be in a federal uh jail pre-trial, but that's not how it usually works and that's not how it happened here. >> Cuz they they can't operate the fed government can't operate proper facilities. That's why he's in a state

jail cuz the federal government is incompetent. So they got these contracts with the state level facilities and the state level facility he was at was the Northern Neck Regional Jail. It's the same jail I think it was Paul Manafort was down there and Michael Vick served his time in there. But the Northern Neck Regional Jail uh according to people who have told me about this is owned by two judges in that county. And the jail was just filled to the brim with people from that county because you get in trouble for some small tiny infraction and the judge throws you into this jail where they're getting a cut from the state for operating the jail. So we we just saw this kind of

corruption between private interests in the justice system over and over and over again throughout this entire case. Which if you follow the money that that is where this all goes. Well, wasn't there also some issue where you know, apparently Roman was in prison at a time where somebody whoever was actually involved with Bitcoin Fog was doing something that might prove that it could have been him? >> That that boiled my blood. Towards the end of the trial uh there was an FBI agent who came in and he was saying that there was Well, no, we were looking at the at the domain registration for the for the DNS because that was their key piece of evidence. And it looked like

during the during the time period of trial, well, Roman had been locked up the entire time during the trial. And I think it was the real operator of Bitcoin Fog waving hello and say, "Hey, I'm still out here. This guy's innocent. I think you should probably give us a layup." But we weren't allowed to introduce that evidence at trial that there was a change to the DNS registration for bitcoin fog.com which Roman has supposed supposedly been operating the entire time he was in jail. And when we brought this up with the prosecution, they said, "Oh, well, he must have been able to find some computer access in the federal prison." We're like, "What?" You know, he didn't even have Corlinks.

But Jeff found this one. Jeff Jeff is the one who brought it out. So I'll let him talk to you on the on the technical side. Well, it was I mean, it was just it was just we were grasping at anything, but the fact of the matter was I was I was watching anything that had anything to do with Bitcoin Fog because we had reason I think from the beginning Mike and Tor both told me that they had they had some sense that it was possible that somebody was still out there just kind of laying low. Um and so we we watched it and we monitored it and we saw changes in the DNS. We saw um websites that were actually using that were actually using known wallet addresses for Bitcoin fog. None

of it made sense for Roman to be doing from buying bars. Wasn't it wasn't going to help. Or if he was going to do it, then he should have put up Tor's address so he could at least you know get better funding going into his defense. >> [laughter] >> You know, when we look at everything from a realist realistic perspective, what I think happened here was when Roman was going around to those early conferences and meetups back in 2010 2011 and he was the person that others would go to to get into Bitcoin fog. I think the pseudonymous Akhamatye Amedyatu the the the person behind Bitcoin fog, I think they used Roman as a clean source of funds because these people have very comprehensive

understanding of how blockchain tracing works and and the risk that some kind of company like Chainalysis could be born in the future to do this kind of tracing. They were ahead of their time, the people who did set up Bitcoin fog. And I think that they set Roman up as a patsy knowing that he could be a clean source of funds so that any kind of future tracing wouldn't tie back to them. I think that's the most real situation that I would really went down here. We should probably mention the fact that you know in order to make this again more circumstantial evidence, they brought in what two witnesses from prison to basically testify about how bad this is and they're and and I guess one of them

I I think had actually communicated with Roman at some point. No, I had it had never communicated with it was Ilya Lichtenstein who did the Bitfinex hack and then Harmon what was Harmon's first name I forget. Larry Dean Harmon from Larry Dean Harmon who ran a mixer but they they brought it like Ilya Lichtenstein's like Russian looking they're trying to bring him in to to you know guilt by association. None of them communicated with Roman none of them had any any testimony about him operating it but like let's bring in these criminals who've used Bitcoin fog a couple times and I mean again their whole that's their whole case. Ilya Lichtenstein has since been released from prison.

You would think after a 10 year investigation they would at least have one piece of direct evidence. Right. Well, like and here's the here's the other thing we haven't talked about is why are we in Washington D.C. when this is all happening in Sweden in Europe and the only thing that happens in D.C. is an IRS criminal investigator sends some Bitcoin through Bitcoin fog that is not the proceeds of a crime so it can't be money laundering and they send a message to Bitcoin fog help desk supposedly saying, oh I want to money launder and you can get you can turn something into money laundering if the government agent says, okay these are this is drug money I want to money launder but it gets no

response. So there's no evidence in the record that anybody ever saw it. That's the only thing tying anything to D.C. which one of our main contentions on appeal is that's not constitutional because the United States Constitution requires all crimes to be tried in the state and the district where they occurred and no crime occurred in D.C. Well, wait Tor wasn't there one more wasn't one of his charges that he was operating a business in D.C. or taking money >> unlicensed money transmission business but like what like you're doing business in D.C. but there's no customers. If if this is what we said in the in our appeal I said if he was operating a business in D.C. how come there's no

evidence of any customers in D.C.? Because the reason the only right there's not a single user in D.C. except the FBI and they got no response and it wasn't illegal no the IRS but it wasn't illegal right? And what's scary about this if you think about it, it means that any prosecutor in the United States can access a website anywhere in the world send a message saying they want to commit a crime the website owner never sees it and doesn't know about it right? And then they're flying in the US and they get arrested and then they're put on trial in Milwaukee or wherever right? Like you can't the like from a tactical computer law viewpoint this is another reason like we were we think

this case is so important. You cannot turn venue in criminal cases on the unilateral act of government agents. If there's no evidence that the defendant knew about this criminal act and how can you say they've got what's called the mens rea guilty state of mind like criminal intent? And here just by allowing the government to enter in on their laptop or whatever send a message that nobody ever hears they're saying that he's guilty of money laundering but then you've removed about 2000 years of our criminal law that says you have to have criminal intent in your head right? They've turned money laundering in the the internet into a strict liability crime. Yes, it's a little technical but

you should all be worried as fuck about that because that means anybody anywhere in the world that's operating a website could get yanked into federal court just because some prosecutor sends you a message that you've never seen. This just keeps getting worse and worse. Well, also And keep in mind because we haven't actually just said this out loud but if Chainalysis worked if it actually worked why what why was there not a single witness that they could have come up with that can say this is I I I communicated with Roman Sterlinghoff to help to you know launder my money. The only one that they could manage to get a hold of was a guy who literally used his own real name and whatever his

country's version of a social security number it was. I mean But it no still no evidence anybody ever communicated with I mean it's crazy one of the hard things about this case is that after 10 years they really didn't have any evidence. So what little weird threads they would pull out like from his notes where they're like, oh he's talking about like layering and money laundering right? Like it it kind of gets magnified a little bit because there's nothing else there. They had this like note where he's talking about 2011 how to exchange Bitcoin into cash and it's in like 40 pages of notes nowhere mentions Bitcoin fog or anything and they're like this is him talking

about doing the layering transaction to buy the DNS registration completely legal act in 2011 to the Bitcoin fog uh you know website and to go back to an earlier point even the judge said that a Bitcoin mixer is legal. He didn't get convicted for running a Bitcoin mixer. He got convicted for money laundering through that mixer essentially turning a blind eye to all these you know Silk Road and everything which is what current DOJ says isn't a crime. But when you ask current DOJ to drop this prosecution and just everybody you know Kina everybody summer like um they won't even though they wrote a memo saying it's not illegal and we're not going to be prosecuting this and I think

that's just because the Trump administration doesn't have control over their own DOJ. I think there's a lot of rebellion and people fighting um you know the new regime because they're and they're just holding out for the next one. Yeah, I mean one of the how I even got into covering a lot of this was I saw Ian Freeman and others were being targeted and I started looking into it and and then I I kind of understood so Biden had signed an executive order 14067 which authorized the US to push a CBDC and also authorized a whole of government crackdown on crypto because if you're going to launch a CBDC people aren't going to like it so you basically have to get rid of the competition. So one of my

arguments has been I was I started out trying to warn people that this would be coming and now we have you know eight people that that you know were advocating for it this enemies of the state saying but you know yeah Trump declared the war on crypto was over but the POWs are still still there and um you know I'm I'm hopeful that that this this changes because you're right you continuing to prosecute or keep these people in prison is against current government uh current government policy and against you know what what Trump stated his position was on cryptocurrency. And and the government continues to be grasping at straws even on appeal. The government's opposition brief that we're

going through the last couple weeks in preparation to write a reply which we filed on Friday. Uh now we have the appellate counsel for DOJ diving into the admitted exhibit and they bring out from deep in Roman's Reddit post this one post where he's talking about John McAfee and has quotations around it in his Reddit post and it says you know it it there this quote is from John McAfee and Roman is quoting him and it basically John McAfee is saying, I have 100 companies registered in 50 different countries. And the government this time around has taken >> yeah. has taken that quote from John McAfee that Roman was citing in his Reddit post and attributed it to him

saying, oh Roman was having multiple trucks and companies and countries all around the world. They're just grasping at every single thing that they can because they don't have anything. And we've all made mistakes like that. Like you know that's what happens when you're like going through stuff you're flying faster or or or whatever I get it. I've made mistakes like that but the problem is you can't like try to put somebody in jail when that's how it's been going for the entire investigation. Right? Like you just there's like again you cannot point to a single this is this is bizarre to me. You cannot point to a single piece of direct corroborating evidence for any of the

speculation in this trial any of it. Not a single one. I've never had a case like that, ever. I don't know if I'll ever have a case like that again. I hope never to have a case like this again. But, that's you know, there's just faith in the government and this "Ooh, look at this new exotic blockchain tracing, this fancy company Chainalysis. They must be they must be right because they're financially successful, right?" And well, you know, if they're so right, show us all the stuff. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, then the criminals are going to get it. No, I think what you're really afraid of is that if we really looked closely at it and you let us really look at it, we'd

find out all the problems in it. And then your business model would go down, right? And it's really again, it's a question of like, do you subjugate the interests of justice to the interests of business? And to me, the answer to that question is a very clear no. Yep. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the fact that they're my understanding is they're using the precedent in this case. Chainalysis is the justification for for why it works. So, it's kind of some it's this circular logic and now they're expanding their use of Chainalysis. You know, to me, this is part of again, I'm looking at this as kind of what was the DOJ strategy? I think this is part of the strategy to kill

kill Bitcoin and kill cryptocurrencies. Which is things are why this case and and cases like it were selected and because the implications of this case is successful and and the appeal is it's not overturned or or damaging for the entire space. This is the most important case in the Bitcoin industry. One of them. I mean, I think there's there's more, but I would definitely one of them. You know, with you know, Keonna, what those guys are everybody's gone through, you know, all the all the the prisoners in the war on Bitcoin. Also, it's important to Oh, sorry. I'm just going to say it's important to note that even even people who are not seeing as, you know,

as crypto prisoners, a lot of what I'm seeing now with Chainalysis is where the crypto is not the nexus of their case, but it is what gets them the warrant to come in and and do a search and make a bigger case. And so, now I'm just getting a ton of cases where the warrant's based on on the use of crypto and the idea that probable cause says if you use crypto, you must have been committing a crime. No kidding. Like that's their probable cause. We we came in, we served we served a warrant and that warrant was based on the fact that if you weren't doing something wrong, why did you use Bitcoin? Wow. Unbelievable. Yeah, that that is a bad precedent. So, what is the what is the

status right now of this case? Let's talk about what's going on, you know, in May. >> [clears throat] >> We got oral arguments in front of the DC Federal Court of Appeals [clears throat] on May 12th at 9:30 in the morning. We're not sure if we're going first. There's two other cases being heard. The oral arguments will be 10 to 20 minutes each side. Um then >> get our judges. We got We did get our judges. It's Patricia A. Millett, Cornelia T. L. Pillard, and Robert L. Wilkins. Are our judges. Uh and I think they're all Obama appointees. I don't know which way that cuts and hopefully it won't matter anyway. Um It is it's impossible to know like [clears throat] I think, but

I mean, they're all really accomplished judges. That's one thing. Like they're not this is you know, this is the major leagues and you're not you know, you're you're these these are very very smart accomplished judges. And and then and for those of you people may know this, but like the DC Federal Court of Appeals is a big feeder court for Supreme Court justices. So, we're going to argue it down there. We're going to have probably like some kind of reception or something like that afterwards. If people want to hang out, they can just um email us at rsvp@torequon.com. If you guys want to come, we ask if anybody goes to the Court of Appeals that they just, you know, business

casual, be respectful of the court. We're trying to fill the courtroom with respectful people. It doesn't it's not helpful if we've got people like standing up and yelling, you know, free Roman in in the oral arguments. But, it makes a huge difference on my first this firm's first big case when we had oral arguments, which we ended up winning on on this case on a similar issue, the courtroom was packed, right? And the arguments happened and then after our case argues, >> [clears throat] >> like the courtroom empties. And and you know, one of the the third circuit judges is like, well, we have other cases too that are just as good. But, that just having people there showing

the support, I think helps. It makes a big difference because it it helps the judges really visualize that this is actually a really important thing to the community. So, you know, we'll have information up on our website how to get there. DC Court of Appeals, May 12th, 9:30 in the morning, the Federal Court of Appeals, not the DC, you know, municipal one. Please come out and if you want to go to whatever reception we're having, just email us at rsvp@torequon.com. Great. I assume you can't, you know, talk about what you're going to say in advance. It's probably not a good idea, [clears throat] but uh A little bit, but like it's obvious from our brief, you know,

this should have there was no crime in DC, it shouldn't have been tried in DC. They uh should have let us look at everything. Uh they shouldn't have like brought up this evidence of child pornography, which he had nothing to do with and there's no images. Like they they said because some like less than $900 [clears throat] $1,000 of funds after going out of Bitcoin Fog went to this North Korean like you know, child porn site. They're saying Roman's basically child pornographer. I was like, what does that have to do with him operating or anything, right? Um and uh one of the other things that were they miscalculated the valuation of the funds. And um they gave this willful blindness

instruction, which is really messed up because it's not in the statute, you know, it's not in the law and normally you have to have criminal intent, right? But, they got this uh judiciary created um jury instruction that says, "Well, even if you think he didn't know about it, if you think that he should have known about it cuz he was kind of looking the other way, you can find him guilty." Which we're just like, what? >> [clears throat] >> You know, like if Congress had wanted that to be the standard, they should have put it in the law. Uh so, we're appealing on that basis, but I'll stop. >> We got we got the statute of limitations argument, too, because all the

they brought darknet markets that were seized by the government well outside the statute of limitations was allowed in. It tainted the jury. This case is crazy. I've never had a case like this. It's crazy. Yeah, now this is the this is the worst one I've heard so far, actually. This is just insane and what you know, when I heard you know, Mike talk about it recently, I'm like, wow, this is I mean, all of these cases are bad, but this one is is definitely next next level. Was there anything that that I've that I've not questioned you guys on or are there any other major points that you want to get across about this case? I think you covered a lot. I mean, you

could go on I mean, you could just do a huge mini-series on this this case, but I think that's I think you've done a really good job on covering the main points. I mean, if you guys want to learn more about it, the website [clears throat] freeroman.org that some of Roman's friends back in Scandinavia are running. And that has a lot of information about the case, about Roman himself who I got him on my t-shirt here with the laser eyes. And yeah, freeroman.org has all the information as well as some donation addresses, whether you want to donate with lightning or with with Bitcoin or Monero, it's all available on there. Also, I think the rage.co.co is going to be publishing something that

Roman had written. Yes, Roman Roman has written a blog post. It'll be the first time that Roman's putting in writing his his own experience of what's happened and it'll be published in the rage.co. Great. Do you know when that's going to be? I was talking I was talking to the publisher and it should be within the week. Excellent. And you guys are going to be at the Bitcoin conference as well as the Enemies of the State, correct? Yes. We'll be there. >> Yes. I talked to I talked to be honest with you all with the Bitcoin talking. On the Monday of the Vegas 2026 thing, I'm on a panel with Sasha Hodder and who is it Ryan Zack Shapiro. Zack Shapiro, sorry. God, right. Don't

kill me, Zack, when I see you, please, brother. Um but yeah. Great. Well, I mean, you guys have been doing a heroic work. I mean, I know you've been traveling all over the world and you put everything everything into this. And so, you know, I thank you. We should all we should all thank you. And I guess just again to recap, what are the why is this important to everyone? What are the implications? Like if for giving people like the bullet point list, if this case stands, what does that mean for everyone? Well, I number one, it means that if you've ever done a Bitcoin transaction, they might just throw you in jail just on faulty tracing and it's not going to

matter whether or not you're innocent. It stands for the proposition that they can prosecute and find somebody guilty in a case like this without a single piece of direct evidence and entirely on speculative forensic evidence that has no scientific foundation. Um and purely on the basis of the fact that law enforcement uses it, it means that any federal prosecutor anywhere can send a message to your website anywhere in the world saying that, "Oh, hey, I want to use your website to commit a crime." You never see it and then you can get arrested for engaging in that crime even though it's something you never ever knew about. It also stands for the possibility that if you

create something legal like a Bitcoin mixer which is even the judge in this case said was completely legal and people use it for legal things and you don't know about it that you can be held liable in a way that banks are not held liable for the exact same behavior. Absolutely terrifying. All right, well so if you're watching this, please please like and share not only this post. I'll put all the links that were discussed in the show notes and also I will be putting out a lot of clips just both image posts and video clips related to this episode right away starting right after this will air on Thursday and then the clips will will drip out from there but

I encourage you everyone to to spread the word and support uh as quickly as possible because this hearing date is is May the 12th at 9:30 a.m. and so we want to do everything that we can to to elevate this and and help out in any way we can. So thank you very much, guys. Thank you, Aaron. Yeah. Let's free Roman. Free Roman. >> [music] [music] [music]

>> They raised the throne of glass and wire. A kingdom [music] born of cold desire. And crowned the silent cold that came to rule you. [music] It watched the trembling of your breath. It pressed your life and mapped your death. A final betrayal [music] dressed as something true. Blessed be unbroken [music] will. Blessed be unbroken will. >> [music] >> They promised order, promised peace. But every gift [music] required a piece

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>> I walked the halls [music] where truth was sold. Where human hands grew numb and cold. >> [music] >> And efficiency became the thing they gave you. You'd never see [music] the chains they built but every sunrise dripped with guilt. A quiet empire shaping your behavior. [music] Blessed be unbroken will. Blessed be unbroken [music] will. They tokenized the land and sky. >> [music] >> The right to live, the right to die.

>> [music] >> A sovereign life reduced to capture measure. [music] The future shrank to narrow lines. A cage of data, coded signs. A subtle [music] death they dressed in borrowed pleasure. Blessed be unbroken will. Rise though the [music] night is closing in. Rise though [music] the stars are dim and still. Rise though the crown [music] is forced to sing. Blessed be unbroken [music] will. So keep your lantern in [music] the

storm. Guard every soul that still feels warm. >> [music] >> And hold the truth no tyrant's cold can alter. [music] For even at the world's last hour, a single heart can break the tower. A whispered vow the darkness cannot falter. Blessed be unbroken will. Blessed be unbroken [music] will. >> [music] [music]

[music] >> Blessed be >> [music] >> unbroken will. >> [music] >> Blessed be unbroken will. >> [music and singing]