Latest / The Aaron Day Show / They Buried the Evidence He's Still in Prison
Transcript
- To the carnival goodbye. Ruskin wrote the letter. Wade and Rose. Warren lit the fire, Ackman pulled the cover. Wired showed the memo, the scholars showed the math. The Supreme Court rang the bell, six to three for the wrath. One hundred eighty billion to the people they come. But the canterboys were waiting when the deal was done. Transferred to the sons, the divestiture a sham. The house was still a house and the crowd still a scambi London! Rode it four times high London! Watched the country cry Brandon! Bought the rights on the sly Chanter! Took the payday pie Raise a glass and move your money Move your money, move your money Raise a glass and move your money To the carnival goodbye They'll tell you it was legal They'll tell you it was clean They'll tell you divestiture Was everything it seemed But the platform's still the same And the family's still the name And the terminal still clears Let the Cantor boys arrange I pulled my money from the bank last Tuesday Put it in a credit union down the bay Buying bread from the baker Where the names are owners Coffee down in Zano Where the grid ain't theirs Neighbor runs the mesh Co-op runs the bread Building parallel systems While the carnival We're off to a good start here today. Anyway, welcome to the Aaron Day Show. This is season three, episode sixteen. I cut off the intro music a little bit early because the videos weren't showing. So I thought I'd pop right in here. And we have a very important show tonight, which is, unfortunately, the continuation of a theme and a continuation of what has been happening. Actually, most of the episodes that I've had this year, frankly, have one way or another been about the war on crypto. And either it's been the war on crypto in terms of what's going on legislatively with the Clarity Act and the Genius Act, which are actually not pro-crypto, they're surveillance bills. with uh clever packaging or uh the crypto prisoners which i've been focused on for a couple of years and the list keeps on growing and so tonight we're going to have lauren rodriguez on who is the the wife of keone rodriguez and who is one of the founders of samari or excuse me samurai wallet along with william hill And so we're going to talk about this. This is another absolutely tragic case. I actually met Lauren for the first time in person at the Bitcoin conference a week or two ago. And I think we were all excited. We were actually thinking that the administration might pardon these crypto prisoners because there was a panel. And that panel was entitled Ending the War on Crypto. And so Kash Patel was there, Todd Blanche, the acting... head of the DOJ was there and so well not in person by video and so you would you would think that maybe they were going to make some announcements and unfortunately nothing happened so in any event as far as what we're going to talk about tonight and there's just relevant news even as of today so today um the united states banking committee voted fifteen to nine to advance a bill that i've talked about on probably ten different episodes called the clarity act And many in the crypto industry are calling it a win, but it's not a win. If you read what it actually does, it does not free Keone Rodriguez, who's sitting in a prison cell in West Virginia for writing software. It does not free his business partner. It does not change the law the government used to put either of them there. Not one word of it. It's a typical rug pull. And as I've been saying, this bill is actually a surveillance bill in disguise and so what no one's telling you is before they arrested keone rodriguez the treasury department's own crypto experts told the justice department in writing that what he built was legal and that conversation happened on august the twenty third twenty twenty three and so prosecutors did not tell keone's lawyers about it they did not tell the court they hid it for nineteen months and then they indicted him anyway and took him to plea and let a federal judge sentence him for five years And so, you know, for those who think that the war on crypto is over, it's not over by a long shot. And as I like to say, the war on crypto isn't over. It just changed presidents. And unfortunately, in many ways, it's actually accelerating. When we did the enemies of the state event in twenty twenty four. We were advocating for five people, three of them in the crypto realm, Ross Ulbricht, who Trump then stated the next day at that event that he was going to commute Ross's sentence, which he did, which is great. And but Ian Freeman remains in prison. And Roger Ver settled for fifty million dollars after spending a year and a half fighting extradition where he was facing a life sentence. And he has a gag order for three years. But then now beyond that, we're doing the enemies of the state event. And I think we're advocating for thirteen people. Seven of them are in the crypto domain. Some of the people that have been charged have been charged under Trump. So this isn't even entirely a case of just clearing the backlog or maybe it hasn't gotten to the top of the pile and so um so so this is the situation uh this is where we're at and it's really important i really want you to share this episode and i want you to visit the site bill and keone.org As we will discuss tonight, and as we've discussed in other episodes, these lawsuits are incredibly expensive and they're financially devastating, which is part of the leverage that the state uses. Most cases, when we had Tor Eklund on, do not get to trial because frankly, in most cases, people can't afford to defend themselves. It's millions and millions of dollars to defend yourself. And even when you spend that money, the deck is completely stacked against you. So please, please help Keone and Bill and visit this website. I know a lot of people have already put up money and I'll talk to her about this. I know We have a lot of privacy coin fans watching this. I don't know if they accept privacy coins. Maybe I can help set up a site where we can take some other cryptocurrencies. But it's critical that we support these folks. And so I'm going to bring Lauren on now. Hi, Lauren. Are you there? Hi, Aaron. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. I wish you didn't have to come on. I wish this whole situation... Um, wasn't happening, but, um, you know, I'm extremely impressed by your, your advocacy and well, certainly would love to get into this. So my audience is, is kind of a mix. So I have kind of one segment of my audience are there are hardcore privacy coin crypto people. Like these are people that are into Zeno and Monero and so on and so forth. But another segment are people that are maybe just recently kind of woke up to government overreach stemming from, from COVID. And so many are not quite as technical, but certainly I talk about technical concepts a lot. So, I mean, if you had sixty seconds to explain or a little more than that for someone who's never heard of Samurai Wallet or why your husband is in prison, what would you say? Just, you know, kind of a general framing. Sorry, I'm sorry. I'm having a lot of reverb. Just throw me off. We'll just go for it. We'll just go for it. Peony and Bill developed Samurai Wallet for over ten years. It was available on Google Play Store. You could download it. It was a non-custodial, open-source Bitcoin wallet. It had some added privacy features because for those of you listeners that do know, Bitcoin is an open ledger where anyone with an internet connection can, if they have a starting point, quite easily figure out your net worth in Bitcoin and where you're spending your Bitcoin. So there's privacy implications in that. So they had some added features, again, all non-custodial that helped users gain transactional privacy, like you would expect from the legacy banking system. If you pay for a coffee with your debit card the barista does not know how much money is in your bank account or where else you're spending your money and that's how it should be there's protections in the legacy system for that and they were just bringing those same functionality to the Bitcoin network. So that's kind of the basic ground. Again, they were operating for ten years. We never received any subpoenas, any questions from US law force or or anyone like that to say, hey, what are you doing? Or can you clarify things? Or hey, we think a criminal is using your service. How can you help? Nothing like that. No communication until a pre-dawn raid on our house and a simultaneous raid on Bill's home in Portugal. So that was our introduction to this case. So one, I want to make sure if people, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably already aware, but there are some people that are still not aware of the fact that Bitcoin is in fact not private. And so this is a big misunderstanding. I know a lot of us, I got involved in Bitcoin in twenty twelve and I originally heard about it. People were saying, hey, yeah, this is anonymous. There was a. kind of a misunderstanding that spread about Bitcoin, it is on a public ledger. And in fact, as I've been saying, you know, it's very, very trackable. And you will really not find any cases where people like to say it's censorship resistant. But when you check all of the cases that the United States government has waged against people, people have turned over their keys. I mean, when you're ultimately faced with the choice of, hey, we know who you are. Yes, you can hold on to your keys. Well, you know, so far, people give up their keys. And so I think that's an important point to know. But what motivated their creating this? And I want to say this in a way where I think there's a weird dynamic now because there's been this I would say propaganda that says, well, if you want privacy, you must be trying to hide something, which maybe made sense if you were uninformed prior to COVID. But I think once COVID happened and you saw what happened with the Canadian truckers and you saw what happened all over the world with mandates and massive government overreach, it's pretty clear now why you would value privacy. But what was the motivation? What was kind of Keone's background and Will's background to motivate even doing this? I think they have a real interest in history. And, you know, I think the U.S. Bitcoin kind of contingent, we'll say people within even the West kind of forgets that this is global technology that really has such positive implications, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for the world, specifically people in oppressive regimes where their currency is being devalued to you know we we think the dollar is being devalued theirs is going up a hundred x an hour so you know there's they i think definitely took a global look at things they also came both i think have a more of a libertarian background and and appreciate freedom and without transactional privacy you can't really have transactional freedom freedoms also are transactions who you transact with and you know what you spend your money on it's also a form of speech that was kind of a big thing to them um when they because they were in the space for a little bit together and when satoshi wrote the white paper he called out the fact that you know bitcoin should be pseudonymous and it shouldn't link real world IDs with addresses. And a lot of that kind of at the time when they started Samurai Wallet, the focus of the community had started to shift away from the kind of cypherpunk libertarian backing that started out and started moving towards Let's make Bitcoin for your grandma. Let's make it as easy and as consumer friendly as possible. And while those aren't bad objectives, it's putting aside the kind of foundation of why it's there, why maybe some people need this for potentially more important reasons. So that's why they started Samurai Wallet. I mean, I think that's important to know. I mean, although now I think we would have to say we have to worry about that here in the United States. But globally, there are real serious issues regarding using financial censorship as a weapon. And so a lot of times people will look at a technology and they'll focus on, well, in my area, this isn't an issue, but Bitcoin is a global currency. and this is a life or death situation around this privacy and particularly i've talked a lot about wrench attacks which are increasing all over the world including in the united states where because it's a public ledger this isn't a question of concealing things from government this is a matter of protecting yourself and your family from potentially being kidnapped or extorted or beaten or murdered. I mean, there are there are unfortunately a growing body of these cases. And so this this privacy is is having privacy is a life or death situation for many people around the world. um so my understanding is when uh right before uh keone went to prison i mean he basically told you that you know you didn't have to do this or kind of step out in front and be a vocal supporter what was that like what was that conversation like So I think my natural inclination is towards privacy. I didn't have a public social media presence. It just wasn't something I was interested in. So I think he saw that it was something that would be outside my norm. But he said that you don't have to... the knowledge that if someone wasn't out here speaking for him, he would, his memory, and he wasn't a person to the outside world, would slowly die. And that's something that Ross Albrecht said to him shortly when they spoke before Keone went in. So, As much as, like, obviously I wanted to do this for him because he's my husband and I love him and I know he would go a hundred and ten percent for me if the situation was reversed. Also, I feel like he was being focused on. So I'm not kind of at home wallowing in know the fact the fact that he's not here the fact that he's unjustly in prison so you know it's kind of twofold as to what motivated me to step out but you know as far as the conversation it was pretty i think pretty simple of he just said you know you people are saying you should like it would be good to have you speaking but you don't have to and um you know, that's kind of who he was. That was who he was through this whole thing is his putting, putting me first, putting his family first, you know, trying to focus on that. Um, cause there's a lot, there's a lot in a, in a court case as, as you touched on, you know, the cost and, and everything else. And it's not just the person that they're going after. It's their families, their friends. Samurai had a whole community. They had contributors across the world that were suddenly affected in a very real way. Yeah, I want to talk. I'll get to that in a second. I want to talk about the implications for this for this case, because, you know, each of these cases that we've been talking about have profound implications if they're allowed to stand. And this will even tie in a bit to the to the Clarity Act. But, you know, I met Lynn Ulbricht for the first time probably fourteen years ago, and I've I've gotten to know her. um fairly well uh over the years and and i i have no doubt that i you know lynn is lynn is the reason that that ross is free i mean she was absolutely tireless in and out for you know well over a decade and so it it really matters and you know and i i can see i've been watching um a ton of your interviews and and um and obviously your participation at events and it you know that it makes the difference it is actually you know again ross ross would still be in prison there's no doubt if it weren't for entirely what Lynn was up to. I mean, obviously, there were things that happened and circumstances, I would say, that finally made it so that, you know, circumstances became favorable for a pardon, but it required getting the awareness out there, the fact that there were six hundred thousand people that signed the petition, the fact that, you know, you had all these different people. I mean, it was such an effort, a Herculean effort over this massive period of time. Well, I was going to ask you this question, but I don't know if you are a private person, but what is your background? What was your life like before this situation, before you became one of the spokesmen for saving privacy and open source coders around the world? Well, first I do want to call out Lynn and how amazing she is. She got Ross out. She is still fighting for the rest of these crypto prisoners. And, you know, and then also trying to change the over sentencing at large within the justice system. So she is just amazing. She's come alongside me. She's offered advice. She's offered her support and just so can't thank her enough. But what my background was, I was a housewife. I would much rather be baking a cake, walking the dog, and let these kind of important topics let Keone deal with them. So it's been a transition. I always had an interest, but more a quiet interest. So yeah, that's where I come from. All right, good to know. Again, I'm very impressed with your activism and hopefully there's a good opportunity for something to happen here shortly, sooner rather than later, I think for all involved. For me, this started with Ian Freeman. I'm sure you're familiar with his case. i've known ian for a couple of decades and my wife and i sat in on his sentencing hearing and it was it was the most gut-wrenching thing just the energy in the courtroom and but just the but it was i think because of watching the tactics of the doj watching them intentionally omit information i mean kind of having knowing ian and knowing the circumstances and then watching the framing of it was was frankly disgusting even as a libertarian even as somebody's part of the free state project and it goes to court hearings and everything there was just something to me about it that was unsettling and then so then we've gone through some of these other cases but now there's a pattern and in fact from my perspective i i think if you've never dealt with The DOJ or the the federal court system at all, you may have some expectation about how it works, based on like a civics textbook or what you were what you were taught in school and it's nothing like that, and so I kind of wanted to talk about. Some of the specifics of your story, because from what I can tell, they're very similar. Let's start with the raid. So first of all, I mean, let's think about this context here. This is an open source software developer. What was your first kind of notification that there was something wrong? Our house was surrounded and, you know, being told to come out with your hands up at five in the morning. That was our first notification. interaction that they did. And yeah, you're, I mean, you're completely right. As far as kind of the way these are patterns, these are systems that the DOJ operates on and it's not even just crypto cases. Like I've, because I've been exposed to this world now, my eyes have completely opened and people have come and told me like, yes, this happened to us too. And it's just, it's really a shame. It's across the board. They're after either promotions, you know turn it into a career and say look at all these criminals i put away and run for office or go into the private sector where then they'll then be you know fighting their old department but making you know a ton more money it's it's really twisted incentives the whole system They are twisted. Once everybody gets pardoned, hopefully maybe we can do a panel discussion and kind of share notes on some of this because I think it really is important. And I do want to talk about some more of the specifics. I know when Ian was raided, there was a Bearcat, there were drones, there were five different federal departments. Could you provide a little bit more color because I think it's a similar situation because I don't think people are aware of the magnitude of the militarization of the process here. Yeah, so I watched the video that they had, you know, because they had a home security system, so we're able to share that. And just because it's so outrageous, I wish we did, but we just didn't have a, you know, have any system like that set up, but it was... know we were woken our dog was barking it was like i said about five in the morning and he doesn't bark so kind of staggered up and realized that there's this light rising up to our bedroom window and as i think they saw us and i think the reason they didn't bash in our doors or windows like they did in ian's case um is because they saw that we were we were there and and i guess i don't know so they started saying you know come out with your hands up and i was obviously worried about my dog that you know atf they have reputations i'm thinking they have the wrong house i don't know and we live on the corner of a street so it was the whole house was surrounded by bodies agents people and we come out you know at least get a leash on my dog and come out we come out the front door and hands up and you can't see because there's lights blinding you and I look down and we both have I mean I don't even know if I could count how many red laser sights on both Keone and my chest and at that point you know he's he's told to lay belly on the ground and he's just in like shorts and this is April in Pennsylvania it's quite cold still and I'm in you know shorts and slippers and They handcuff us both and then they separate us. They put him in a car and they handed me over to a local police officer who I was asked what was going on. He said, I don't know, I'm supposed to be off shift. And so I'm standing there out in the cold and I watched them fly, lift a drone up and fly it through our door. And at that point, someone yelled at the local police to turn me around that I can't watch them fly a drone through my door for some reason. and they entered the house and cleared it. And that's, um, they then brought me back in and, um, you know, there was just people all over. And I think that's when they brought the agents in to start actually searching through things. They took obviously any electronic device that was in Keone's office, but then even like things like they cut open a brand new bag of flour. Like, I don't know what they could have possibly been looking in, you know, industrial sealed bag of flour, but just like everything out of the kitchen cabinets was left strewn across the counters and in the sink. And so they really, really did a number of, on the house. And then again, this is simultaneously. So the amount of people and effort and force when we had a Samurai Wallet had an attorney, they could have contacted and said, hey, we need to speak with your clients. But they put all this effort into raiding our house in Pennsylvania and flying agents to Portugal to do a simultaneous coordinated raid there. So again, millions of dollars must have been spent just on this raid alone. It's shocking. Shocking. So I think that's another point to make, which is not only what we're dealing with in terms of the raids in the US, but it's also the long arm of the federal government. And we obviously saw this. with Roger Ver as well, and with Will Hill, this was in Portugal, the coordination required to know where somebody is going to be to be able to get law enforcement. I mean, in the US, if something happens, if somebody actually commits a crime against you, good luck actually getting a cop to address it unless it happens to be in the right jurisdiction, right? Everything is a jurisdictional problem here. But yet, when the government wants to proactively go after somebody, they seem to be pretty effective at working with other countries and with law enforcement and coordinating this on a broad scale. So I won't go to Spain, probably now not Portugal as well, but it's a frightening thing that people should be aware of. So what was the understanding? So when he was arrested, then what happened? I mean, when he was charged, what was your reaction? So they didn't tell us what the charges were until, I guess, it was still a sealed indictment. And, you know, because I asked, what's this about? And kind of initially my thought was like, oh, you know, they have the wrong house because that happens here in the States where it's it just the overwhelming force like they think we have a meth lab or something like it must just the response but realized when they actually took him away that no they were after keone and the only thing he really did with his time was work on samurai so it's like okay they That's weird. They must be confused about something. And once he was in the... Because we live north of Pittsburgh. So even though this case was brought out of the Southern District of New York, his first arraignment hearing was in Pittsburgh. So he was taken down to the Pittsburgh Federal Courthouse. There he was provided with a public defender, a local public defender, to see him through this arraignment. And she provided him... with a copy of the indictment so he could see the charges and the two charges were conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and at that point you know i believe he said in the one i heard later you know it was well they don't understand it right this is they're the government they're kind of slow they're behind the times this is innovative technology they just don't they just don't get it be able to explain it we're non-custodial we're following the regulations put up by finson so this this won't amount to anything and obviously that's clearly not not the result well i mean to me again it's interesting this happened this raid happened in twenty twenty four right is my so so this is you know my initial framing of this was that I mean, and I wrote a book about this and I ran for president around this to raise awareness around kind of the threat of CBDCs because Biden had put out an executive order authorizing the U.S. to pursue a CBDC and at the same time authorizing a whole of government crackdown on crypto because if you're going to roll out a programmable, censorable currency, people aren't going to like it and you have to get rid of the competition. Basically, that was what seemed to be the thesis, but... But in this case, this is after, right? Or I guess the election was later than that. So I guess it was right at the end. Still Biden, so right at the end. But nevertheless, certainly opportunities, there have been opportunities for this case to have been dropped. So this is a theme. So... money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. And in this case, so if you go back to Ian Freeman's case, Ian Freeman was convicted of both by a jury, but the judge actually overturned the money laundering, which is kind of a rare thing for a judge to overturn a jury conviction, but on the basis of there was no evidence, but yet they got him for conspiracy. So he's in federal prison for eight years because of the conspiracy claim. And somebody once told me that conspiracy is what they charge you with when you haven't done anything wrong and they're just looking for some kind of justification. But this is a common way to go after people that are promoting voluntary exchange or privacy is to use this. But you don't see bankers you don't see jamie dimon from jp morgan chase going to prison for conspiracy based on what jeffrey epstein or any of his clients have done and in fact uh the uh one bank is there are banks that have been involved with hundreds of billions of dollars where they've been found guilty of you know violating the bank secrecy act it was involving billions and billions of dollars and no one ever goes to jail so what is the special Carve out here for crypto people. Well, there's definitely a standard. I know within the Southern District of New York at the time under Biden, the person who was running that office was Damian Williams. And he had touted himself, gave himself the moniker, the Sheriff of Crypto. So this is a throwback to, I think, the nineties. I forget who was there at the time. Maybe Giuliani, I don't know, was the Sheriff of Wall Street. So this is kind of, I think, wanted it along with, as you said, kind of it was an administrative, the Biden administration's kind of play that they just and they still, you know, we heard Elizabeth Warren today. They just do not like any kind of freedom, money or cryptocurrencies. But. I forgot where I got distracted. I was talking about conspiracy charges. Yeah. Conspiracy should be right. There should be a high bar. And if you look at the way they originally brought in, it should be where you have to show, actually have proof that this person, person A conspired, whether writing, recording, whatever, with person B to commit an actual crime. That's not how it's applied, even though that's how every lawyer coming out of law school learns it should be applied. In reality, it's a catch-all, as you said, for thought crime that they can... And then the problem is, though, juries don't understand what it's supposed to be. So they say, well, I don't know. They said that they said these these things. And that seems that seems a little odd. So I guess the government must be right or else why would they bring charges? And that's how they get all these convictions. It's it's terrible. It is. And I actually want to say something. So I just looked this up. So you said Damian Williams. And so I just looked up. So what's the status of Damian Williams? And you had mentioned this earlier. This is the playbook. So Damian Williams is now the co-chair of the litigation department and co-chair of investigations, compliance and defense practice at a law firm called Jenner and Block. So this is how it works. You have somebody that's a prosecutor and as a prosecutor, he was the prosecutor of Sam Bankman Freed, Ghislaine Maxwell, P Diddy, Eric Adams. So the whole idea is do high profile cases get convictions and then you go and immediately flip and become the chair co-chair of the legal practice and you make like a thousand dollars an hour as a lawyer this is literally more than that more than that now i i can't keep up with inflation so so that's that's the playbook i mean we're seeing it We're seeing it play out. I assume you guys did research before working on this because this has been a common theme as well that suggested that you weren't actually... I'm sure you looked into the laws around this. Did you have a sense that what you were doing was fine and above board? Completely. In a lot of the industry, people have issues with the SEC or whatever, they weren't clearing charges when there wasn't anything there, any guidance there. But FinCEN was different. FinCEN had put out guidance in twenty thirteen and then reiterated that in twenty nineteen. This was actually pretty good and pretty like they had a good grasp on understanding the industry. And within that guidance, they had said, you know, if you are If you don't take custody of users' funds, then you do not need to have a money license, money service, business money transmitter license. And they even had a part that referenced... anonymizing software which was exactly what the whirlpool which was samurai's implementation again non-custodial implementation of a coin join so applied directly to that they were non-custodial it was anonymizing software the users were the ones doing the transacting Um, that was, you know, the whole industry was relying on this guidance. It wasn't just us. It wasn't just our interpretation of it. The whole United States crypto industry, and actually, you know, any companies that were operating and wanting to have business within the United States were also following this guidance. So, yeah, we, we definitely thought we were, we were within the laws because we were, we were as they, the laws and regulations as they were written. And. And that's something that did come up, and you said that in the intro, does come up in the case, that the prosecutors went six months before indictment to FinCEN to ask them if we were breaking these laws, and FinCEN said emphatically no. They hid that they never gave that to us, even though by the court's rules, they should have a lot sooner until they give it to our attorney, ask them directly. Hey, and this is after they've given us, I believe, a seventeen terabytes worth of discovery, which Bill's attorney said, if you would print that out and stack it, it would go to the moon in the back twenty two times. So this is just a vast amount of data. And they left out this one exculpatory piece of evidence. It's, you know, it's clearly malicious. It's clearly illegal and they do it purposefully. I wonder the fact that they had the six months before indictment, if they ever told the grand jury about it and had they told the grand jury, would they have actually gotten the indictment? I don't believe so. Yep. So something similar actually happened in Roger Ver's case, where there was information that was not presented to the grand jury. In the case of Roman Storm, Roman Storm had, I don't know if it was a formal opinion letter, but had advice from legal counsel stating that what he was doing was legal. And he actually had an investor, and the investor had legal counsel that said what he was doing was legal. So there's a common thread amongst most of these cases, which is that people actually went and did research before doing what they were doing and believed they were within the law based on kind of the reading of the law. And then in many of these cases, There was even disagreement internally within the government about whether or not what was being done was illegal. So in this case, you even have the government saying, no, this isn't a violation. And this has happened time and time again. So again, we have a legal process here that is not interested in following the rules. It's about winning, isn't it, really, more than anything else, at all costs? They don't care who they have to destroy. They don't care that they're not following their own laws because the Supreme Court ruled they can't be charged for anything. So they lie. They manipulate evidence. They hide evidence. It is all about getting that win, getting that notch in the belt so that they can advance themselves in some other way. It's I guess it shouldn't be surprising. I'm sure there's a few AUSAs who go into this because they want to get the you know, the criminals, the real, the murderers, the rapists, they want to get them off the street. But if you're in the Southern district of New York in the financial crime sector, you're looking for a payday. You're not looking, you're not looking to, to write wrongs or even, even like scams that, that they do find, they'll find the scammer and they'll take the money. They then fight the victims of these scams to get to, they don't want to give any of the money back when they recover money from like to actual victims. And that's obviously not the case here. They never even alleged there was any victims because we never held anyone's funds, but it's just, it's a corrupt system. So this is an important point. So this is a non-custodial solution. And so, again, this is somebody getting blamed for the actions of other people who may or may not have even done what they're being charged with. And this person never even had custody of the funds. But this goes to one of the tactics. involved in these legal cases, which is when you get sued like this, the first thing your lawyers tell you to do is to not say anything. And in fact, because it'll get used against you in court. But yet the prosecution has no issue with going out and issuing press releases and telling the public and trying to paint a whole picture. To me, it seems like tainting the jury pool. But how did they... So how do they try to characterize this from a PR standpoint? Because essentially what they're trying to do is they either don't understand or they're willfully ignoring the fact that there's no custody of these funds. So how are they trying to paint a picture here? What were their tactics? so the only evidence that they had was um statements made and there was posts on on x on on twitter that were clearly mean posts they're still up you can go go search them there were posts on dread which is the onion dark net version of Reddit. There was a private message, WhatsApp message. And this is years prior to the Whirlpool implementation between Keone and a high school friend that was like, just, I don't know if anyone's in the space, you get those people that constantly are asking you like questions that you've answered a hundred times and you kind of get snarky. But like all of these instances, they clip this tiny little bit out of, And that's why I tell people when they bring this stuff up, I'm like, I challenge you to go through your group threads or DMs with friends and see if there's nothing that can be taken out of context, because that's clearly not true. Whether it's a joke, whether it's, again, just completely twisted, they put up one thing and said that it was... Again, Twitter post, and it was quote tweeting an Iranian freedom fighter who had been imprisoned by the Iranian regime. Quote tweeting him, and they tried to twist that and say that it was in support of... or going against the sanctions we had at Iran at the time or something like that. It's like it's the exact opposite, but they don't care. And they the thing is, though, they have all of this. They have the full context of everything. They're aware of the intent behind it. So it is purposely lying to the court. If this had gotten to a jury and in other cases that do, it's intentionally lying to the jury to make it look like people said stuff that they didn't. But they get away, they get away with it. They get away with it. And I want people to understand how discovery works because this really is part of the process. You mentioned this with Will. If you printed out all the documents or whatever, trying to come up with some relation of how much information that is. They get everything through discovery. And it's extremely expensive to go through this discovery process and to actually accumulate all this information. I had a... Guy on named Joe wrote who is behind dragon chain and he wasn't facing criminal charges, but he was involved in a civil case and in that case it was a war of attrition because he had to spend all this money and legal fees to do the discovery and then they quote lost the discovery and And he had to go back and do it again. So they have all kinds of interesting tactics, but they have all of this information and then they could sort through it and cherry pick it. And this is what they did with, well, all of these cases, but they did this with Ian. I saw it live where they're literally will take a clip where they're trying to have some undercover person involved and they'll take, you know, thirty seconds out of a two minute clip where if you heard the whole clip, you'd get a completely different. sense of meaning out of what was actually going on. They literally are capable of doing that. Or in Roman Sterlingoff's case, they were searching for the term money laundering, and they found the term in an e-book that was downloaded. It was some kind of comic book or something. It wasn't even something that... roman sterling off said or was even said to him it was indexed out of all of his files because they took literally everything that he had and then they index it and slice it in that way and there's really not much you can do about it based on how the process works and so i i just i i want people to start to understand how this process works and how the the deck is stacked this is why when i had tor eklan on he said something like ninety plus percent of cases settle before ever going to trial because of, frankly, the costs. Almost no one can afford these lawsuits. And then when they do go, I think you're going to lose ninety five percent or more greater of the time. And it's not because these people are guilty. It's actually because the process is literally that warped. And when you're dealing with crypto, this is the other challenge, because, you know, to actually fight one of these cases, not only does it take a lot of money you have to understand you're dealing with a jury and juries are not up to speed with crypto i mean the general public if you're listening to this show you know that the general public is not knowledgeable so what happens is the prosecution brings up a whole bunch of suits and then they bring in these witnesses forensic witnesses and they basically i have no other way of saying they baffle people with and people's eyes glaze over But they're like, well, it's the government. They had a whole bunch of technical jargon. It must be true. And that's not a mischaracterization of how this goes. I would say that's a good thing, what happened with the Roman Sterlingoff case, which is... I would say Roman's source is even worse than that. It's not even that the... I mean, and the juries don't know, but the prosecution in his case, because his case was slightly ahead of ours, so we had all the transcripts, they purposefully weeded out anyone who had any understanding of cryptocurrencies because they didn't want them on the jury because the prosecution knew that those people would see through the lies. Right. So yeah, yeah, it's every time. And as you said, the call I did is as we didn't go to trial, the average cost to take a complex case to trial in the Southern District of New York per per defendant is about thirteen to sixteen. I think it's probably more like gone up now. I think it will say around thirteen million dollars per defendant. Wow, thirteen million dollars, that's the average. for a complex case wow is that specific to the southern district of new york or is that in general yes wow yeah so a lot of these cases end up in the southern district of new york even though it isn't clear why they would have jurisdiction i mean is this the natural jurisdiction for this case why would why was that why did it end up there was that strategic The way they got jurisdiction was they sent an FBI agent down to the streets of Manhattan, downloaded the samurai wallet and made a transaction. That's how they, that's how they claim jurisdiction. Yeah, so I want everybody to understand that they do tactics like this. I listened to Roman Sterlingoff, the hearing that they had earlier this week, because the jurisdiction there is Washington, D.C., and this is a weird case where Roman Sterlingoff probably isn't even behind Bitcoin Fog, and there weren't even any customers. And so it makes no sense as to... how D.C. is even the jurisdiction. But these are the kinds of tactics that that you're dealing with. And so, you know, understand there's a common theme here, right? If you if you look at the people that are still being prosecuted, they're they're pretty much they're libertarian people who are promoting freedom. There's a it's a very specific type of person that ends up facing these criminal charges and there very much seems to be a let's go out and find the evidence and and you know because we want to shut these guys down it's it's uh it's pretty actually transparent that that's the case so uh so so in the end you made the decision to um to to kind of plead this thing out right what was that what were you what were you facing like what what were the What were you looking at as being... If you went to trial and lost, what did that picture look like? So I'll say before we got there, we were... This was... I forget the date, but the judge we had at the time was Judge Berman. And his way he wanted things done was he wanted all these motions that we had been working on. This is a year into the case already. He wanted all the big motions to be presented at once. And we would have one big hearing for oral arguments. And then he would go away and decide on them. So It was three or four days before we were supposed to have this major hearing, and we had a motion to dismiss, which was, I think, really strong, had a lot of good case law for it. We had motions in place for him to rule about the Brady violation, where they hid the exculpatory evidence. There was also some motions as to whether he would allow amicus briefs from the court's from industry participants. And then there was some smaller procedural ones as well. So again, three to four days before this happened, we get notified, Judge Berman's no longer our judge. We now have Judge Denise Coates. OK, we're still ready to go. Our lawyers are prepared. They're going to do these oral arguments and we get in front of this. There's just be a different judge. So we get in front of this judge. We walk in. She says, good morning, says, OK, I'm denying all motions. Goodbye. So what we expected to be a multiple hour, day long court hearing was a few minutes. And at that point, we realized our odds completely changed. As you mentioned, bad odds to go up against the federal government anyways, they generally win. But in particular with this judge, we were told we would not be able to put on a defensive counsel defense, which is a valid defense, but judges get to determine what kind of defense you're allowed to put on. We would not be able to, you know, Judges control so much. They control what kind of evidence you can present, what kind of witnesses you can present, even down to like the language you can use in front of a jury. So they really do hold sway over a guilty or innocent verdict. At that point, I think it was a few days after that, is when The prosecution came to us and said, you know, we have a deal on the table. We were facing twenty five years. It was twenty years for the conspiracy to money launder and twenty and five years for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. So they said what they said is. We'll drop the conspiracy to money launder if you plead to the conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. But you have twenty four hours to decide and you both have to agree. One of you doesn't want to take it. Then the deal's off. We'll take it to trial. That was a really hard, tear filled by me. Twenty four hours trying to decide because they know that they didn't do this. But when you have a. Judge acting as the fifth prosecutor from the bench. You also have to realize that you're not going to get a fair trial. And then people say, well, you go to trial and then you do the you can appeal it. Well, the appeals process can sometimes take more than five years on its own. And we just, frankly, were out of money as well. So it was a lose-lose situation. And I think we took the right... I think they made the right decisions, especially at the point of sentencing when the judge... She despised Keone. If you talked to anyone else that was in that courtroom the day, you could feel her... It was just like a palpable hatred that she had towards him. And she brought up his... that she didn't think he was remorseful enough and we didn't do anything. And it was like, you know, what are you talking about? She brought up the fact that he had his libertarian ideologies and just, I mean, she just despised everything about him. She gave him the max on everything, max fine, max time. And there was actually Marshalls in the back of the room. She wanted to take him away right then and there. But the prosecution had already agreed with us on the defense that he'd be able to self surrender and wouldn't have to go to the New York prison. Or, yeah, jail. So to recap this, this is important to understand. They have discretion, and I'm not even sure what the rules are. The fact that the judge, they just switch judges. Usually there's a recusal process, but in any event, you get a last minute change in judge, and then you have a judge that's basically saying, all right, I'm not going to allow you to, I'm going to deny all these motions. And it's very clear he's set up the process, which is already stacked, that you really aren't going to have a chance at it i think this needs to be more widely understood i mean people think they have a right to a fair trial and that justice is blind and all these other things this is not how this works and this this thing about targeting libertarians this exact same thing happened to ross ulbrich this was a big part of uh his sentencing which was you know basically the judge saying well you know your ideas are dangerous and and you know you you have to be stopped for having these libertarian ideas. And so there's probably a big disconnect. So if you're listening to this, you're probably more libertarian than not. You understand that we're a minority, but understand within the judicial system, were even more of a minority like we're painted as um like being completely completely out of there I mean we're actually at the point right now where if you you know if you believe in the Constitution you're a radical that's kind of what it's like interacting with the court system so so that so this judge said that the defense was minimizing the crime is that is that what she said But they pled to unlicensed money transmitting, you know, conspiracy to unlicensed money transmitter. Why is he going to take like, yeah, she just, she just did not accept that. And that's what he said in his allocution that like, this is what I did. He can't take responsibility for things he didn't do. And he didn't commit any crimes. He had no victims. This was a paperwork violation. Yep. And this is always the tough part. I mean, when it comes down to like taking a plea or not. And I know, you know, probably, you know, in Roger's case, I have no idea what what he was facing. One hun