The president Donald Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine the appeal, mere days before the creator of the privacy application is scheduled to report to a correctional facility.
President Donald Trump stated on Monday that he was receptive to examining an official forgiveness for the convicted Samourai Wallet developer, Keonne Rodriguez, and pointed out that he was already acquainted with the particulars of the legal matter.
“I’ve learned about this, I’ll review the matter,” Trump commented concerning Rodriguez’s legal issue, in answer to an inquiry from during an afternoon gathering where the president was present in the Oval Office.
“We’ll examine that, Pam,” the president then remarked to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was also present in the chamber.
Bondi then seemed to record a notation.
Rodriguez was handed down a five-year federal incarceration penalty last month for his involvement in developing Samourai Wallet, an application that enabled Bitcoin users to preserve the confidentiality of their transactions without ever conveying assets to an external entity. He is slated to report to a federal correctional facility to commence his term on Friday.
The Department of Justice, during the Joe Biden administration last year, asserted that the software developer and his associate, William Longeran Hill, were conducting an unlicensed funds transfer service and facilitating unlawful operations.
Trump DOJ Keeps Samourai Wallet Case Alive Despite Dropping Other Biden-Era Prosecutions
Following President Trump’s re-election this year, his Department of Justice discontinued multiple criminal proceedings from the Biden era—but the legal action against Rodriguez and Hill was kept active.
Confronting potential 25-year incarcerations if they pursued a court hearing, the software developers elected to formally acknowledge culpability this summer for a singular count of managing an unlicensed funds transfer service. Rodriguez was given the most severe possible custodial sentence of five years for that violation; Hill was handed four years.
The legal matter has garnered significant focus from proponents of privacy and veteran cryptocurrency users, who are apprehensive that the proceeding—in conjunction with the conviction of Roman Storm, the creator of a comparable application on Ethereum—has produced a clear inhibitory consequence on the advancement of blockchain anonymity utilities.
These supporters assert that the capacity to transmit digital transactions confidentially was the fundamental purpose for which Bitcoin was initially conceived—and they are concerned that the federal government, even presently under the crypto-favorable Trump administration, is actively engaged in undermining that essential feature.
Digital asset software creators have maintained that the core principle of cryptocurrency is endangered when it relates to preserving the capability of software developers to devise privacy utilities similar to Samourai. Prominent crypto policy organizations have also thrown their influence behind the case, underscoring its importance.
The Trump Department of Justice does appear to possess an understanding of the significance of the matter of privacy software to the digital currency sector. In April, deputy attorney Todd Blanche instructed federal prosecutors to withdraw from action against crypto privacy applications. Several months afterward, a senior DOJ official informed a gathering of crypto policy leaders that the department would, moving ahead, abstain from pursuing legal action against decentralized software engineers.
And still, the Department of Justice kept up its legal action against Rodriguez and Hill throughout that period—strongly encouraging a federal judge to impose the most severe possible custodial sentences on the developers.
Rodriguez recently conveyed to that he is skeptical the president will award him leniency, pointing to his scarcity of means compared to the influential cryptocurrency executives Trump has officially forgiven this year.
“We’re not CZ,” Rodriguez stated, referring to Binance originator Changpeng Zhao, who was granted clemency by Trump in October. Earlier this year, Zhao’s crypto exchange received a $2 billion capital infusion from an Emirati state-owned enterprise in the structure of USD1, the stablecoin created by the Trump family’s digital currency platform World Liberty Financial.
“We are not in possession of billions of dollars,” Rodriguez articulated. “The same degree of sway that individuals like that have is not held by us.”
