The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm will proceed to trial, a New York judge ruled during a telephonic hearing on Thursday.
District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) denied Storm’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges against him, saying she had a lengthy order to read into the record to explain her reasoning. As of press time, she was reading another portion of that order, addressing a motion to compel certain materials.
Along with fellow Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov, Storm was indicted last August on three charges tied to their work with the privacy mixer – conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Powers Act (i.e. violating international sanctions).
Prosecutors have accused Tornado Cash and its developers of “knowingly” facilitating the laundering of more than $1 billion, including “hundreds of millions” from North Korea’s infamous hacking organization, the Lazarus Group.
Storm has pleaded not guilty to all charges. In his motion to dismiss filed in March, Storm’s lawyers argued that he simply wrote Tornado Cash’s code – anything criminal that subsequently happened with that code, they said, was out of his hands.
Read more: Conduct vs. Code May Be the Defining Question in Roman Storm Prosecution
Failla also denied another of Storm’s pending motions in the case – a motion to compel the DOJ to produce the defense with documents from Dutch authorities, who recently convicted another Tornado Cash developer, Alexey Pertsev, of money laundering.
Storm's team had not demonstrated that the material from Dutch authorities would be relevant, the judge ruled, calling his arguments too "speculative."
"Of course the defense argues that because it does not know what's in those materials, it must couch its description in terms like 'may,'" she said. "There must be some showing that the MLAT materials are in fact, and not just in theory, relevant to the [case]."
Storm’s trial is currently set to begin in New York on Dec. 2, and is expected to last two weeks. If convicted on all three counts, he faces a maximum potential sentence of 45 years in prison.