Roman Storm's defense team has publicly pushed back after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested at Bitcoin 2026 that the Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet cases could be "elevated" within the Department of Justice. The response, first reported by journalist Eleanor Terrett and surfaced via Cointelegraph on April 28, 2026, lands weeks ahead of Storm's October retrial and sharpens an already politicized fight over whether writing privacy-preserving code is a federal crime.
Blanche took the Bitcoin 2026 stage earlier this week and used the platform to address both prosecutions head on. His remark that the matters could be elevated inside DOJ was read by many in the room as a sign that Main Justice intends to take a more visible role in shaping the cases, rather than leaving them with the Southern District of New York alone. For a defendant whose first trial ended in a hung jury on the most serious counts, that signal is not neutral.
The defense's case against escalation
According to Storm's team, escalating the matter is the wrong response to a jury that already declined to convict on the conspiracy to commit money laundering count. Their pushback frames the DOJ position as political pressure rather than a legal recalibration. The defense has consistently argued that Storm published open-source code, did not operate the smart contracts after deployment, and cannot be held criminally liable under Section 1960 for the conduct of users he never interacted with.
That argument now carries policy weight. Earlier this year, a bipartisan group on Capitol Hill introduced legislation that would carve protocol developers out of the Section 1960 unlicensed money transmitter framework, citing the Tornado Cash and Samourai cases by name. Layering an internal DOJ elevation onto an active retrial cuts directly across that legislative work.
Why the timing matters
Storm's retrial is currently scheduled for October 2026 after the DOJ formally rejected his bid to take the case to the Supreme Court and pressed forward with a second trial on the deadlocked counts. The defense has been preparing under the assumption that prosecutorial discretion would narrow, not widen, given the change in administration and Blanche's earlier crypto enforcement memo that paused several pending matters.
A public push to elevate the case undercuts that assumption. It also adds reputational stakes for Blanche personally. He is the same official who issued the April 2025 memo curtailing certain crypto prosecutions, and any move now to formally pull Storm's case up to Main Justice will be parsed as either a reversal or a clarification of where his line actually sits.
The Samourai parallel
The Tornado Cash case does not exist in a vacuum. Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill are facing parallel charges out of the Southern District of New York on substantially the same legal theory. Blanche's comment paired the two matters explicitly, which is why the defense response references both. If DOJ does formalize a higher-level posture, it will most likely apply to both prosecutions in tandem, since splitting them would create messy precedent inside the same district.
For non-custodial wallet builders, that pairing is the part worth tracking. The legal question at the center of both cases, whether a developer can be held liable as a money transmitter for software that other people choose to use, is the same question that hangs over every team building open-source crypto infrastructure. Self-custody products that let users spend from their own wallet lean on the same Section 1960 reading the defense is now fighting to preserve.
What to watch next
The next concrete events on the calendar are the October retrial and any new filings out of either case in the meantime. A DOJ motion that explicitly references Main Justice involvement, a superseding indictment, or a change in the lead prosecutor would be the formal markers that elevation has occurred. Absent any of those, Blanche's stage remarks remain rhetorical and the defense's pushback is a preemptive shot.
The bigger structural question is whether the bipartisan effort to amend Section 1960 picks up speed before the retrial begins. If Congress moves first, the elevation conversation becomes moot. If DOJ moves first, the defense will have a much harder week.
Overview
Roman Storm's defense team is publicly contesting Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's suggestion that the Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet cases could be elevated inside DOJ. The pushback, reported by Eleanor Terrett and amplified by Cointelegraph on April 28, 2026, comes ahead of Storm's October retrial and intersects with active congressional work to carve protocol developers out of Section 1960 liability. The next signal will come from a DOJ filing or a markup on Capitol Hill, whichever lands first.
