Tornado Cash case prosecutor cites erroneous message to prove 'guilty conscience' causing controversy

On July 14th, during the pre-trial hearing of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, the US Attorney for the Southern District mistakenly attributed a Telegram message asking "how to cash out $600 million" to the development team to prove their "criminal consciousness". The defense documents show that the message was actually written by CoinDesk journalists and forwarded to the Tornado Cash group by Alexey Pertsev. The prosecution acknowledges that the original provided chat records did not display the "forward" tag, which led to a misunderstanding, but stated that a revised version was provided in December 2024. The Storm defense team requests the exclusion of all Telegram evidence from Pertsev's phone and questions the integrity of the grand jury proceedings. Pertsev has been sentenced to 64 months in prison by a Dutch court for assisting in money laundering.