Prosecutors in the Samurai Wallet case denied charges that they have suppressed critical evidence in their criminal case against the two co -founders of the crypto mixture, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan.
In a letter to the court filed on Friday, prosecutors urged Judge Richard Berman from the South District of New York (SDNY) to reject Hill’s recent request for a hearing to plead the late disclosure by the government of a conversation between prosecutors and the financial services network (Fincen). In this conversation, which took place six months before the accusation, Fincen officials told prosecutors that Samurai Wallet did not respond to their definition of a money transmission company and therefore did not need a license to operate.
Despite the advice of Fincen, the prosecutors continued their case, invoicing both Rodriguez and Hill with a single chief of conspiracy to commit a money laundering and a conspiracy to exploit a silver transmission company without license. Thanks to Samurai Wallet, the prosecutors alleged that the two men “intentionally and managed to whiten more than $ 100 million in crime of all types” and explicitly marketed their services to “dark / gray market players”, including pirates and fraudsters.
By not speaking to the defense of their communication with Fincen until last month, the lawyers of Rodriguez and Hill say that the government had violated the regular procedure – a so -called Brady violation, named after the Supreme Court case. timely way.
However, prosecutors denied having committed Brady violations in the Samurai Wallet case. In their letter to the judge, they set up a multitude of reasons for which the time of their disclosure of the Fincen conversation was a fair game. Firstly, they argued that their conversation with the employees of Fincen represented their “individual, informal and warning opinions” on the question of whether Samurai Wallet would have been required to register as a transmission of money transmission, rather than a formal observation by the regulator itself.
“The courts have repeatedly concluded that these types of legal opinions – or opinions of any kind – are not Brady materials; The facts are brady material, ”wrote the prosecutors.
Prosecutors also said that even if the equipment was relevant to the defense case, they had given it to the defense seven months before the trial, writing: “There is no need for judicial intervention when the defendants received enough discovery documents before the trial to effectively use the information.”
In their own letter to the court earlier this week, the lawyers for Samurai Wallet declared that their customers had been unfairly detrimental by the lack of disclosure of the government, arguing that it could have had an impact on the decision to release the magistrate judge or the court’s decision on an early request to completely reject the case.
The prosecutors rejected this argument, saying that most of the case against the Samurai portfolio was not linked to the accusation of transmission of money and was rather linked to Rodriguez and the alleged Hill money laundering system – the most serious of the two accusations against them, bearing a strong sentence of 20 years.
The back and forth on Brady’s potential violation of Brady intervene after the defense asked prosecutors to drop their case under the auspices of the so-called white memo, a recent assistant prosecutor general memo, ordering the staff of the US justice ministry (DOJ) to reduce their priorities in terms of application of cryptography. As part of the Memo de Blanche, prosecutors were ordered to stop pursuing disputes against crypto exchanges or mixing services for the actions of their end users.
Following the request, the prosecutors met to examine the request on April 10. Almost a month later, the government has still not made a decision in both cases, which some former SDNY prosecutors qualified as unusual conversations with Coindesk.
