Tornado Cash trial is now in the jury’s hands

The presentation portion of Roman Storm’s criminal trial came to a close Wednesday afternoon with the prosecution and defense each making their final pleas to the jury. 

Both sides spent over 90 minutes on their closing arguments. The government opted to close with an additional 45-minute rebuttal. Attorneys on both sides focused on the same essential facts of the case, but urged the jury to come to different conclusions. 

“This is a story about greed,” government attorney Benjamin Gianforti said at the beginning of his closing arguments. “It’s a story about helping criminals hide bags and bags of money.” 

“Tornado Cash made dirty money clean money, and made it impossible to tell the difference,” he added. 

The defense does not argue the truth of this second statement: they admit that criminals did use Tornado Cash for illicit activities, but this was never Storm’s intent in creating the software. 

Storm created Tornado Cash to give users the ability to keep their financial transactions private, defense attorney David Patton told the jury. 

“Did that also make it extremely useful to criminals? You bet it did,” Patton said. 

The “privacy argument,” prosecutor Nathan Rehn said during the government’s rebuttal, is simply a “cover story.” 

Storm not only knew criminals were using Tornado Cash to launder money, he supported them, Rehn argued. 

The government presented messages to the jury in which Storm calls reports of hackers using Tornado Cash “advertising.” They also submitted photos of Storm and his co-developers wearing Tornado Cash T-shirts with images of a laundry machine. 

These messages and photos are a mischaracterization, Patton later insisted. The shirts were a joke, and there are many communications that show Storm was not “celebrating hackers’ use of Tornado Cash.” 

As for the prosecution’s claims that Storm “made millions” from Tornado Cash, the defense again maintained that this was a misleading portrayal of reality. The money Storm made came from selling the TORN token, which, Patton added, lost value when reports of criminals using Tornado Cash surfaced. 

“They weren’t getting a cut” of money hackers laundered through Tornado Cash, nor did developers charge fees for using the software, Patton added. 

After two weeks of witness testimony, jurors received charge instructions late Wednesday afternoon, the final step before the group heads to the deliberation room.

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