File a claim US attorney knows Samulai’s wallet doesn’t require permission and sues anyway
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crime Enforcement Network (“Fincen”) now faces serious doubts after a new filing filed by the court suggests it accused Samourai Wallet’s developers of operating unlicensed currency transmitters, although regulators were told that no license is required.
On May 5, 2025, Samourai Walle’s lawyer founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill submitted a letter to Richard Berman in the southern New York area, in which he revealed that Fincen explicitly told the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney that in August 2023, Samourai did not have a currency service that meets its currency services because of its currency services that are not part of the currency. In any case, the Justice Department filed an indictment and suppressed more than a year of deprivation of evidence.
“Fincen’s guidance is often focused on custody of cryptocurrencies…because Samourai does not accept ‘custody’…it strongly suggests that Samourai is not an MSB,” the chief prosecutor wrote in an internal 2023 email just revealed by the defense.
Still, Rodriguez and Hill were arrested in April 2024 and charged with laundering money through the Samourai Wallet, which allegedly facilitated $2 billion in illegal Bitcoin transactions. The Justice Department press release at the time portrayed the service as a hub for dark web money laundering, and our prosecutor Damian Williams noted that the defendants “intentionally promoted money laundering with more than $100 million in criminal proceeds.”
But defense lawyers now believe that the government’s communication with Fincen has weakened the central charges of operating without permission. The May 5 document said: “Relevant regulators told prosecutors that the Samori wallet was not a currency transmitter…prosecutors continued to prosecute.”
The timing of this disclosure is particularly inconvenient as the Justice Department issued new internal guidance (called “Ending the Regulation by Prosecution” (“Blanche Memo”) (a non-client software tool that explicitly prohibits prosecutors from charging prosecutors for unauthorized currency transfers). The defense added: “It is hard to imagine a clearer example of a prosecution regulation.” 
Zack Shapiro of the Bitcoin Policy Institute summed it up in a viral tweet: “Just revealed: Fincen explicitly told prosecutor Samourai Wallet is not a currency transmitter because of its non-habitual design; anyway, developers at DOJ development have suppressed a year of mining evidence anyway.”
The developer’s trial is scheduled to begin on November 3, 2025. Meanwhile, their lawyers asked the hearing to consider the government’s violations and the possibility of dismissal.
To learn more about the court application, see the full PDF below.
