Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm’s trial to proceed as DOJ drops part of one charge

U.S. prosecutors will move forward with charges against Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm, but have decided to leave part of an allegation of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business off the table.

The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said on Thursday it would not move forward with a part of Storm’s charges ahead of a July 14 trial, but said they plan to proceed with charges related to money laundering, some related to unlicensed money transmitting and another on a conspiracy to violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, according to a court filing.

Last month, the Department of Justice took a different approach under the current Trump administration than in years past and released a memo that declared that the agency would not go after litigation or charges that would superimpose “regulatory frameworks on digital assets while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”

Instead, the DOJ said it planned to pursue cases involving harm done to investors or those using crypto in crimes, including terrorism and hacks, among others. That also meant the DOJ won’t pursue cases involving market intermediaries, and instead will go after bad actors using the platform.

“While this was consistent with an April 2025 DOJ Memo, calling for the end to ‘regulation by prosecution’ and for the DOJ to stop indicting registration violations, it is not a total fix to the errors made by the DOJ in this case,” the DeFi Education Fund said on Thursday in a post on X.

Storm was charged in 2023 with conspiracy to commit money laundering and sanctions violations in operating Tornado Cash. Storm has tried to dismiss the charges, citing First Amendment violations, and his trial was later delayed, though it is now set to start this summer.  The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Tornado Cash in 2022, which was later removed in March of this year.

Peter Van Valkenburgh, executive director at Coin Center, said he was disappointed the DOJ plans to pursue the other charges involving unlicensed money transmissions and money laundering.

“That part of the criminal code is ambiguous in its relationship to the BSA [Bank Secrecy Act] (I would say they overlap entirely unless you perversely interpret what money transmission as different from transport),” Van Valkenburgh said on Thursday in a post on X. “The rule of lenity says that when an America’s liberty is on the line, the court must resolve that ambiguity in favor of the defendant. That charge too should be dropped.”

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