In a series of filings submitted just before the scheduled July 14 trial of Roman Storm, co-founder of the Tornado Cash mixing protocol, Storm’s defense has raised objections that prosecutors from the Southern District of New York utilized a wrongly attributed quote to demonstrate the Tornado team’s alleged ‘consciousness of guilt.’
The contention revolves around Telegram messages obtained from Dutch authorities consequent to their prosecution of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, who was sentenced to 64 months in prison by a Dutch court for enabling money laundering via Tornado Cash.
A specific message states, “Heya, anyone around to chat about axie? Would like to ask a few general questions about how one goes about cashing out 600 mil.” This message was referenced by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Arad during a July 8 hearing as an indication of the co-founders’ alleged guilt, as per the hearing’s transcript.
However, Storm’s legal team has presented filings indicating that the message was initially penned by Andrew Thurman, a senior tech reporter at CoinDesk, and later forwarded to a separate Tornado Cash chat by Pertsev.
The defense’s filing suggests that the government mistakenly credited the reporter’s Telegram message to Pertsev at the pretrial conference, implying that the government was also oblivious to this issue until the defense brought it up.
In response, the prosecutors acknowledged their initial extraction of the text messages, provided to the defense in September 2023, lacked the “forwarded” tag on forwarded messages, which resulted in the confusion. However, they asserted that they furnished the corrected version to the defense in December 2024, which is the version they plan to use at the trial.
Storm’s defense countered the accusation that they strategically delayed their motion until the last moment. They cited the misattributed quote as part of their argument for dismissing all Telegram chat evidence from Pertsev’s phone from the trial, and requested to examine grand jury transcripts, voicing “grave concerns about the integrity of the grand jury proceedings” due to the possibility of the government providing false information to the grand jury.
The prosecutors, in their reply, expressed regret for initially producing the messages without the forwarding information, but asked the judge to reject the defense’s motion to exclude the evidence.
