Lawyers for Roman Storm, co-founder of the crypto mixer Twister Cash, accused U.S. prosecutors of presenting misleading proof, unbiased appropriate days sooner than his prison trial.
In a court docket filing gradual Friday, Storm’s protection crew stated prosecutors misrepresented key Telegram messages taken from co-defendant Alexey Pertsev’s phone. The messages, they convey, lacked unbiased appropriate attribution and should always maintain influenced a colossal jury with misguided records.
The dispute centers on chat logs extracted by U.S. agent Peter Dickerman from a tool seized by Dutch authorities. The authorities before the entirety urged the court docket it produced the relevant chats in September 2023.
Soundless, it corrected that narrate Friday, acknowledging it handiest shared the closing version of the chats, clearly marking forwarded messages, in December 2024.
Storm’s counsel called the error emblematic of broader evidentiary failures, announcing the unfinished extraction omits key metadata and that U.S. prosecutors maintain “compounded the unheard of errors” by insisting the proof is unswerving.
The authorities’s thought appears to be like to be “absurd,” Storm’s lawyers wrote, arguing that forwarding the reporter’s message “does no longer remotely indicate that he is basically asking easy the formula to launder prison proceeds.”
“It’d be like announcing that, when the sufferer of a threat forwards to the police a message he bought that says, ‘I’m going to burn your standing down,’ that the sufferer is now announcing he is going to burn the police officer’s home down,” the lawyers wrote.
Storm is charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmission industry via the protocol.
A query of authenticity
In a letter filed Saturday in Unusual York, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ben Arad, Thane Rehn, and Benjamin Gianforti, signing as line prosecutors on the case, acknowledged that earlier versions of the chats, produced in September 2023, had been shared as plaintext files.
These, like the HTML files before the entirety bought from Dutch authorities, “construct no longer identify when a message became forwarded,” the prosecutors wrote, at the side of that the “Bablo chat” where the disputed message looked “became no longer integrated in that production.”
Per the prosecution, the version it intends to mumble at trial became extracted instantly by IRS Particular Agent Dickerman and shared with the protection in December 2024.
Prosecutors argue that the sooner formatting “has no concerning the authenticity” of the proof and that the protection had these successfully formatted messages for over seven months sooner than they raised the problem, three days sooner than trial.
Tips and errors
Nonetheless the energy of the protection’s objection is reckoning on “the diploma of prosecutorial error,” whether the authentic speaker can check the commentary, and if other proof helps the prices, Andrew Rossow, digital media attorney and CEO of AR Media, urged Decrypt.
The flaw surfaced as Storm’s crew reviewed hundreds of authorities shows disclosed gradual last month. Unlike usual Telegram messages that conceal where a message became forwarded from, the authorities’s version omits that metadata.
“With out the writer metadata, reliability and admissibility are actually placed below a elevated stage of scrutiny because it be essential to handle authentication complications and hearsay concerns,” Rossow outlined, citing federal suggestions of proof, which require the authorities to conceal that any proof is what it claims to be.
Requested whether the gradual correction bolsters the protection’s space, Rossow agreed.
“Prosecution can’t maintain the serve of their properly timed conceal of their maintain mistakes,” he stated, at the side of that “the attribution error carries elephantine weight.”
Rossow points to Brady v. Maryland (1963), a landmark case that established what’s now identified as the “Brady rule.” Under this, prosecutors maintain a persevering with accountability to factual cloth misrepresentations all the plan in which via court docket cases.
This make of gradual discovery, Rossow stated, “would possibly per chance per chance perhaps perhaps actually toughen the protection argument,” would possibly per chance per chance perhaps perhaps even toughen the protection, “relying upon whether prosecutors knew about this earlier on but didn’t reveal or any patterns of mishandling,” or if parts of the case are obvious to leisure on unsuitable proof.
Decrypt reached out for disclose to the DOJ and Storm’s appropriate counsel from Waymaker LLP and Hecker Fink LLP.
