WBD662 - Tor Ekeland & Mike Hassard: What Bitcoin Did

Danny Knowles: Jonathan Levin.

Michael Hassard: It came in the mail right before we headed down to Miami.

Peter McCormack: It's kind of like a hip-hop, I can see it like a hip-hop rapper Bitcoin jacket; are you going to drop some bars for us? All right, listen, tell people why you're here because not everyone knows about this story yet and they should; I didn't know about it until Danny told me. Let everyone know, introduce yourselves and your different role; we'll start with you, Tor, just because I'm opposite you and then tell us what this story is and why we should care about it.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, my name's Tor Ekeland. I am a federal criminal defence lawyer who's been defending people accused of computer crime for the last decade in the United States and internationally. And along with Mike, we're representing Roman Sterlingov, somebody who in our opinion, has been unjustly accused by the United States Government of running a custodial Bitcoin mixer, called Bitcoin Fog, for roughly ten years. They've accused him of running it and they say that he's laundered about $334 million worth of illicit Bitcoin, but the main problem that they have is that there's not a single piece of evidence anywhere that he ever operated Bitcoin Fog. And what "evidence" that they have is all based on this really shoddy blockchain forensics, conducted mainly by a company that I've since found that the Bitcoin community really, really loves called Chainalysis.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we had him on, didn't we?

Danny Knowles: We did.

Peter McCormack: What's his name?

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Okay, and what are your different roles?

Michael Hassard: So, my name's Mike Hassard and I'm an attorney with Tor Ekeland Law. Tor's the senior attorney on the case and I'm the junior attorney coming onboard. So, I've been working with Tor for going on three years now.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, it's going on three, yeah.

Michael Hassard: Yeah, and I actually brought this case on; Roman is a cousin of a friend of mine from Cape Cod, and I'm out for the dinner in Bushwick with some friends and I get a call one day and it's my friend from Cape Cod and it's this crazy case, it's like, "My cousin, he got arrested and we don't know what to do". They sent us the complaint and I took a look at it and at first I'm like, "Well, this is a doozy", and we originally thought that the complaint looked so rock solid, of course, at first glance, as they always do, we thought were going to go down to visit Roman, maybe talk about making a deal.

So, we agreed to some representation, and when we went down to Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, where's he's currently being detailed pretrial, it didn't take long for us to realise that, "Holy shit, you're completely fucking innocent!" That's when it totally turned and became this huge case because we decided that we're going to go all in and fight this tooth and nail because you have an innocent person locked up facing life in prison.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and when you say you're a federal defence lawyer, you defend people, cases brought on by the federal government?

Peter McCormack: I know it might sound like a simple question, but you're private lawyers?

Peter McCormack: Do they have this in the US where you'll be assigned a lawyer even if you can't afford one?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, they do, they've got federal defenders. The issue with the federal defenders is that --

Peter McCormack: They're shit?

Tor Ekeland: They're just overwhelmed with their caseload.

Tor Ekeland: And so Roman, we're I think the third set of lawyers that he had. He had a federal defender who, like all federal defenders, was overwhelmed, and the other thing is that I just feel under computer law. About ten years ago, I repped somebody who was accused of hacking, we got the convicted vacated, and since then, people have been calling me; it requires a special set of skills, not like you have to be any super-genius, but the example I always give on this case is when we asked the United States Government for the blockchain forensics, their response was, "Wow, you're the first person to ask us for that".

Now, you think that would be common sense, but knowing to ask those kinds of questions and stuff like that is actually not easy to remember in a context of the heat of battle, so to speak. So, whereas I wouldn't front myself as any computer scientist, I've known enough over the last ten years to know what I don't know, and fortunately now I've got a rolodex of some really great people that when I realise, "Oh, I don't know anything about encryption", or whatever, "let me go call person X over at Johns Hopkins and they'll help me out".

Peter McCormack: He needs a pro on this case, he needs a pro, someone with experience on this case.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, this case is unique in the sense that it's the first time that anybody's testing or challenging these kinds of blockchain forensics that have just newly emerged over the last few years at trial. Most of these cases unfortunately in our federal criminal system, they go to a plea; like 90% of cases where there's a criminal indictment, they plea out, the other 8% get dismissed on a motion to dismiss. Only 2% go to trial, and of those 2%, less than 1% get an acquittal; to my opinion, that's a rigged system and I think it's highly problematic.

So, none of this crap that has turned Chainalysis into an $8.6 billion company has ever been really tested, and one of the interesting things to me about this case is that Chainalysis is on this case right when they start. Chainalysis comes into being around October 2014, they're working on the Mt. Gox hack, and they start on this case early, I think 2015. And at the beginning of this case, they've got a market valuation of zero, and this is one of the cases that they used to turn themselves into an $8.6 billion company. But when I look at their work, I'm kind of the opinion that they're the Theranos of blockchain forensics.

Peter McCormack: All right, bold statement. And just so people understand, because half the audience is not in the US, you can have state prosecutions and federal prosecutions, and this has fallen under federal law?

Tor Ekeland: Right, yeah, the United States' system's divided between federal and the states, and originally when America was founded, most criminal jurisdiction was supposed to be with the states, but in the 20th century there was a big switch and now federal prosecutions sort of dominate the space, particularly when it comes to computer crime.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay. And this is a particularly interesting case for two reasons, for me; firstly is that you believe he's completely and utterly innocent, so I want to know about that.

Michael Hassard: 100%.

Peter McCormack: But also, even if he had operated Bitcoin Fog, had he actually committed a crime in doing that himself anyway, which I think it's a whole separate area of discussion, but the right to privacy, I think, is an important issue, and ironically, with your name being Tor --

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, it's my real name!

Tor Ekeland: Both my parents are from Norway.

Michael Hassard: We have to go through this every time.

Peter McCormack: I'm sure you do, I'm so sorry.

Tor Ekeland: That's okay.

Peter McCormack: This is like, "Come on privacy, Tor, come on!" Okay, right, do you want to walk me through the background of the story, how Roman found himself arrested?

Michael Hassard: Yeah, it's 2003 and Roman moves from Russia to Sweden with his mum leaving his father behind. He goes to school; he's really good at technology and maths, he's very interested in this stuff. Around 2010, he first hears about Bitcoin and he decides to get into it. He starts creating wallets, figuring out how to make his own wallets. There was no common exchange, like Kraken or Coinbase that you could use to build a wallet, and he's messing around with the computer and figures out how to do it.

He then goes around to these Bitcoin meetups that are proliferating across Europe; he's going to the Baltics, to Germany, he went around Sweden, and he has people over at his house who are in this environment and in this developing Bitcoin area. One person at one of these meetups who he's teaching, he's teaching these people how to build their own wallets, and what he was doing was buying Bitcoin in bulk with his paycheque, and then when he helped somebody set up a wallet, he'd give him a little bit of Bitcoin to get started. And mind you, back at this time, Bitcoin was only worth 30 cents. If he's putting a wallet together and giving somebody $100 worth of Bitcoin, you can just imagine how much Bitcoin is going into that wallet.

He wasn't very sophisticated with it either at the time; he figured out how to build these wallets, but he didn't know much about the privacy aspect of everything. When he's at one of these Bitcoin meetups in Europe, somebody advises him to use a mixer, he says that, "When you transfer Bitcoin from your wallet to the other person's wallet who you may not trust, you just met them at this meetup, they can take a look at your wallet address and see how much you have in there. So, if you want to have any kind of privacy, you need to use a mixer when you're sending this new person, who you just met and don't totally trust, their initial Bitcoin for their wallet". So Roman takes this quite seriously, and he starts to use Bitcoin Fog when it becomes available as his mixer of choice.

In 2014, he sets up a Kraken account, and the Kraken account's a key piece of evidence here. The Kraken account was set up in 2014, right about when Kraken is coming out with public exchanges and public wallets, and he takes all of his money from his smaller wallets that he had offline and in different places, and he consolidates them all in his Kraken account. And when he puts the money into the Kraken account, he sends it through Bitcoin Fog, and this is in 2014.

Now, the government is alleging that the money that is in the Kraken account are the service fees from operating Bitcoin Fog for this entire time period, and we'll get into in a little bit why the government thinks this, but if you take a look at the Kraken account, it becomes very obvious very fast that the Bitcoin that's in there is not the product of the Bitcoin service fee collection, because you first see deposit, deposit, deposit; this is Roman consolidating his Bitcoin in the Kraken account. Then you see him living off of the appreciation of his fortuitous investment and he is withdrawing, it's withdrawal, withdrawal, withdrawal. When the account starts to get substantially lower than it originally was because he'd been living off it for a couple of years --

Tor Ekeland: Because he's quit his job at this point.

Michael Hassard: He quits his job and he's living off the appreciation of his investment, and he starts trading it. Now, he's not very sophisticated at trading it and he's not making a lot of money trading it. He does not have any new Bitcoin coming in; Bitcoin's taking off in value, and that's what's he's living on, but he's not making any more Bitcoin. So, he decides to try his hand at a couple of different ventures; he sets up a VPN business, he tries to set up a music studio in his home town of Gothenburg, Sweden, he even tries to do --

Peter McCormack: He's an entrepreneur.

Michael Hassard: He's an entrepreneur, but none of these ventures succeed. And so he gets to a point where he's like, "Look, I need to get a career, I need to grow up a little bit", and so he decides that he's going to become a commercial airline pilot. In fact, what I have on my wrist here is a prison bracelet that he made for me in prison and it has acronyms affiliated with aviation on here, you have Overshoot South, Undershoot North, you have ANOS, you have ANC. He was learning how to fly, I've also been learning how to fly, with my dad up in Canada, and so we bonded over that a little bit and he gave him this bracelet, but when he comes to the United States to begin his pilot instruction licence, he flies from Moscow.

Now, he was based in Barcelona at the time, he was a bit of a digital nomad, he was travelling all around Europe, and at the time, in 2021, the US had a restriction on arrivals from the Schengen zone, so he couldn't fly from Spain to attend his aviation training in California. And so he goes to Moscow, where Russia was not covered by this ban during COVID, he does his two-week quarantine, and then he hops on a flight to LAX. He lands at LAX, and much to his surprise, the FBI comes onboard and arrests him.

Tor Ekeland: This is 2021.

Michael Hassard: April 2021, they take him to the airport and from there on, he's in federal custody.

Peter McCormack: So, it's really interesting that seven years ago they were looking at these mixers and they've still got open, live cases looking to arrest who they think operates them, and that they also had him as a target ready for the moment he came into the US.

Tor Ekeland: That's, I think, a fascinating thing about this case.

Tor Ekeland: I think what they did is they rolled the dice; they had this like seven-year-long, multimillion-dollar investigation. At one point, I think in 2017, he was down here in Miami with his girlfriend and they put him under physical surveillance, they put him under a wiretap, and they did what's called a pen/trap where they basically capture all your internet signal traffic; there's not a single piece of evidence there of him ever operating Bitcoin Fog. And then, when they arrested him at the airport, he had, I think, three laptops, multiple Raspberry Pis, he had a bag full of all his thumb drives he's ever had in his life, handwritten notes with all his backup codes to all his accounts. What else did they have?

Michael Hassard: He had that Wi-Fi repeater.

Tor Ekeland: He had a Wi-Fi repeater, all this stuff.

Peter McCormack: He had a lot of stuff.

Tor Ekeland: A lot of stuff because he was going to this two-week intensive and he was a digital nomad.

Michael Hassard: And it was all of his stuff, this is what he was living with, and for people in the computer space, that's quite normal. And what we run into again and again with this case is the discrepancy between what the reality is with people who work with computers, and the government's perspective of what people who work with computers are like; they almost get treated like witches and they get burned at the stake.

Tor Ekeland: When they seize all that stuff, you know what they find on there of evidence of him operating Bitcoin Fog for ten years and laundering $334 million-worth of Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: I assume you're going to say nothing.

Tor Ekeland: Absolutely nothing, there's not a single piece of evidence in this case that ever shows him operating Bitcoin Fog. I think what they did there, to your point about this seven-year, multimillion-dollar investigation, is they rolled the dice and they assumed that, "When we catch him, we'll find the evidence", but they didn't, but they didn't let this go.

Mike mentioned his VPN business that Roman started, he had Romanian servers, and so you can see the government's all excited, "We're going to get these Romanian servers, we're going to seize the Romanian servers and these are going to be the servers for Bitcoin Fog". So, they seize the Romanian servers, you know what they find on the Romanian servers of evidence of him operating Bitcoin Fog? Absolutely fucking nothing.

You think that they would let go, but they don't because they've got too much staked in terms of their careers here, there's too much money involved, they've been talking to the press for years about this; there's actually a book by Andy Greenberg called Tracers in the Dark that you can look up all the prosecutors and everybody involved in this case in the index. I've never had a case in ten years where I could read about my case; my cases have been in books before but I've never read about one of my cases before it went to trial. I've never had a book that I could pick up and find out things about the case from the book that the prosecution hasn't disclosed. This case is so fucked up with weird shit like that all over the place, it blows my mind.

Peter McCormack: So, can I say as an observation of someone who's come to America a lot but my work's in America, I think the whole prosecution side of the way your judicial system works is fucked up.

Tor Ekeland: Oh yeah.

Michael Hassard: Oh, completely.

Peter McCormack: It seems to be once you have a prosecutor interested, they go for it and there's no scenario where the prosecutor might go, "You know what, we fucked up here"; once they've started, sunk costs, they're in.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, they don't care about justice.

Michael Hassard: That's because there's a profit incentive in criminal prosecutions in the United States that doesn't exist in other countries.

Peter McCormack: Right, so those are the two things I want to know about first. I want to know about that and I want to know about the incentive structure for someone in the FBI, they spent a lot of money, why can't they just turn around and say, "We can't find this person"? It feels like sometimes, having a prosecution is more important than finding the culprit.

Michael Hassard: And that's exactly what's happened here.

Tor Ekeland: I 100% agree. For instance, DOJ, the Department of Justice, they keep statistics on the number of convictions like it's some sort of baseball batting average, or something like that, or runs scored. That to me alone says you've got a problem because you're counting numbers of how many convictions you've got, which doesn't equate to justice.

Peter McCormack: Exactly, it's bullshit.

Tor Ekeland: I think this case makes me think that there should be a law where it's illegal for federal prosecutors to go work for private companies that they used for vendors on their case, because Chainalysis has hired one of the prosecutors from this case as their senior legal advisor, another criminal investigator on this case. There's so much stuff on this case that blows my mind that looks so corrupted, dirty to me.

There's an IRS criminal investigator on this case named Aaron Bice and he's on this case in 2015 and he's the main sort of point of contact with Chainalysis, and to me, he looks like one of the guys that Chainalysis, Jonathan Levin, uses to establish their contracts at DOJ, get their contacts at DOJ, and get these really lucrative contracts, which now they've got a revenue stream of about $330 million a year. So, Aaron Bice is working on this, on my taxpayer dime, working as an IRS criminal investigator. He starts a private company while he's a criminal investigator on this case, called Excygent LLC; we haven't gotten the discovery on this, we're asking for it. Somehow, this private company starts working on the case as a forensics company.

Now, when Roman is arrested in April of 2021, the government's been talking to the press now for a couple of years, mainly Andy Greenberg from Wired. Wired wants an exclusive before DOJ even issues a press release, and in that exclusive they quote our friend, Jonathan Levin.

Peter McCormack: He's not my friend.

Tor Ekeland: No, he's not my friend, I say that like highly ironically, but he's very clever, he's a very, very clever man, and I think he's the man who seems to me mainly behind the marketing and the networking and turning Chainalysis into the blockchain forensics juggernaut that it is. He's very coy, he doesn't say in his quote, he doesn't say, "Oh yeah, Chainalysis has been working on this since 2015", he doesn't even mention Chainalysis. What he says is, "This proves that this type of blockchain forensics works".

The next day, when DOJ issues its press release, now mind you, DOJ's got a budget of $44 billion, and if you're looking for investors, getting your name mentioned in a DOJ press release that your company is the one who helped nab the bad guy is huge, right; all the investors are going to look at that as proof of concept. Excygent LLC gets prominently featured at the top of all the thank yous, before all these United States attorney's office, the Swedish law enforcement, everything, they thank Excygent LLC. Five months later, Chainalysis buys Excygent for what must have been millions of dollars; they're not telling us.

Excygent now has a revenue stream of something like $10 million from the United States Government and then, what was it, two to four weeks later after this press release, Chainalysis does a Series E fundraising round, it raises $150 million.

Peter McCormack: Okay. What was that guy, Andy Byson; what was his name?

Tor Ekeland: Aaron Bice.

Peter McCormack: Aaron Bice, okay, and that was the company he set up?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah. While he working for the public, as a public servant, as an IRS criminal investigator, he actually dusted off an LLC that I think he'd started in college that had been doing nothing, and then he uses it on this investigation and then he basically cashes out. All these different places in the investigation, you see people cashing out.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but he was working as a public servant at the time of creating the company?

Tor Ekeland: Yes.

Michael Hassard: He was working for the IRS.

Tor Ekeland: On this case, he was investigating this case.

Peter McCormack: What do you think he made salary-wise?

Michael Hassard: I wish we knew.

Tor Ekeland: He made six figures, like middle six figures at best, you know.

Peter McCormack: So, anything, what $200,000 to $400,000?

Tor Ekeland: Not even, he'd probably make like $120,000 maybe, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so selling the company for millions is lifechanging for him?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Michael Hassard: But we don't see those contracts, and the government is not showing us the contract.

Tor Ekeland: They're like, "Oh no, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". They made a motion to actually try to stop us from arguing the careerism and the profiteering at trial because we're like, "That's key to the confirmation bias here".

Peter McCormack: Of course, so that's not out in discovery yet?

Tor Ekeland: No, they're sandbagging us on that. We don't have all the communications with Chainalysis.

Michael Hassard: We have barely anything from Chainalysis.

Tor Ekeland: What I think happened with these guys is they did not expect us to go to trial; there's like sloppy crap all over the place. I can't believe this case, they did something so fundamentally wrong in my opinion, it's something that you're taught in legal ethics at law school, and that is you cannot represent a party in a case that you are a material fact witness in.

Michael Hassard: That was a good one.

Tor Ekeland: And so this case starts with this FBI analyst on the Russia desk in Philadelphia DOJ named Catherine Alden Pelker, and in 2014, she writes this intelligent analyst memo on Bitcoin Fog about what a scourge and threat Bitcoin Fog is and it gets distributed on whatever, their intranet at the FBI and everything, and her name's all over this; this like her baby.

In 2016, she graduates from Georgetown Law School, which is in Washington DC, is an excellent law school, then she becomes an assistant United States attorney and then she becomes a prosecutor on this case. Well, that's a huge problem because she's a material fact witness. Every single federal criminal case I've ever had, I have cross-examined the investigative FBI agent --

Michael Hassard: You have a Sixth Amendment right to do so under the confrontation clause.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, she starts this case, she's all over it, she's the investigator for two years. So, at our first meeting, we looked at her and I said to her, I said, "You're a material fact witness in this case, you cannot be a prosecutor in this case". You know what she says to me? "No, I'm not", like what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?! So, now there's a big battle whether or not we could call her as a witness, but that they even just did that, to me just shows that they weren't thinking, "Oh, anybody's going to challenge us", they thought they just had a slam dunk.

Peter McCormack: But if he's not taking a plea and 2% go to trial, did you say?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, 2%.

Peter McCormack: And less than 1% of the 2% are successful, so 99% are prosecuted of those 2%?

Tor Ekeland: 99% convicted, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, if you're going to for a 1% of a 2%, you must think you've got a slam dunk.

Tor Ekeland: No, I never think I have a slam dunk, but I do think I've got an innocent man that I have a duty and an obligation to fight like fucking hell to keep out of jail, and I've won before, I beat them before.

Peter McCormack: What's at stake here; if he loses, what's at stake?

Tor Ekeland: What's at stake?

Tor Ekeland: Fifty to life for Roman, that's what's at stake, and then there's a lot at stake for the blockchain community because then they're just going to go even more rampant with this kind of crap. Ask yourself why are we even in Washington DC, which is a place that he's never been to, he's got no family or friends and never done any business in, and there's absolutely no evidence that he ever did anything in Washington DC?

Michael Hassard: The government, through this case, is trying to expand its jurisdiction globally through the internet just by interacting with the website.

Tor Ekeland: So what they did here is in 2019, this case is going nowhere, it's dead, they've spent all this money, and at this point in time now Pelker and these people involved in it have now risen, they've become star prosecutors, these are the star Bitcoin blockchain prosecutors at DOJ now that we're up against. They're no longer these unknowns trying to make their name writing this analyst report in 2014.

In 2019, some IRS agents, they send a message to Bitcoin Fog, whatever they think is the helpdesk or whatever, and they basically say, "Oh hi, I've just sold some Molly and some illegal drugs. Is Bitcoin Fog a good mixer to mix my illegal drug money?" No response. They take some Bitcoin, they mix it through Bitcoin Fog and they put it back in a government wallet. That is their sole basis for jurisdiction in the district of Columbia. Now, we're fighting that; that's, to me, blatantly unconstitutional, I've actually won on that issue before in other cases.

Peter McCormack: What is unconstitutional about it?

Tor Ekeland: What's unconstitutional? The United States Constitution, in two places, has something known as the Venue clause, and it's in Article Three of the United States Constitution and it's in the Sixth Amendment, and what it says is that all federal criminal jury trials must occur, must, it's not optional, must occur in the state and the district where the crime occurred. So, what crime occurred in DC?

Peter McCormack: Well, the IRS would buy Molly.

Tor Ekeland: They didn't buy Molly and it's not even clear to me that their Bitcoin that they used were the proceeds of an illicit crime, and they got no response so there's not even any evidence that's Roman's even on the other side of this thing. Now, what should scare the fuck out of everybody involved with Bitcoin here is if that's accurate, if they can get federal criminal jurisdiction by simply doing that, that means that any prosecutor in the United States can sit down at a laptop, go to your website or whatever they interact with, type out a message, you don't know about it, and then they can arrest you and try you in Wisconsin, in DC, in Boston, in Texas, in Podunk, Louisiana.

What they're essentially doing here, like Mike was saying, is they're claiming universal criminal jurisdiction over the internet based on their unilateral acts; that's fucked up and that's really dangerous.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what evidence do they have? There must be something somewhere that's put Roman -- put a target on him, something.

Michael Hassard: So, that's the very interesting question. A couple of weeks ago when we were in Mexico City talking about this, it dawned on me why this investigation gained this primacy, and it starts with Chainalysis. Chainalysis seems to be the first piece of evidence that they went after and it seems to be the main piece of evidence that they're relying upon. It appears that the government requested from Chainalysis to do some tracing from the Bitcoin Fog transactions to try to figure out, okay, where were the earliest transactions? In order to do that, they use this complicated and I think misguided approach of clustering a whole bunch of addresses that are related to a particular transaction, and from that, try to determine which transactions were going into it; it's called a clustering methodology.

When Chainalysis turns over their clustering methodological report to the government, they identify a trace of transactions, through which they accuse Roman of moving funds through several different accounts in order to pay for a registration for a clearnet website called www.bitcoinfog.com. This is the only way that the government is even trying to tie Roman to all the accounts that are indicated are the operators of Bitcoin Fog.

This transaction, I'll take it from the payment, the payment for www.bitcoinfog.com, which was hosted by this company called Hi Hosting, it was paid from an account registered for shormint@hotmail.com. shormint@hotmail.com is the email address affiliated all over the place with Bitcoin Fog; it's affiliated with a Bitcoin Talk forum post under the pseudonym Akemashite Omedetou, which means Happy New Year in Japanese, it's affiliated with the Twitter account for Bitcoin Fog, it's all over the place. Whoever has shormint@hotmail.com is probably the creator of Bitcoin Fog.

Now, the government finds a Liberty Reserve account which was using US dollars to pay Hi Hosting for the hosting services provided at www.bitcoingfog.com and they alleged that to get to the Liberty Reserve account under Shormint, it went through an exchange, and before that it went through, what was it, rambler@ru or something like that, a Russian email address, and that's the Mt. Gox account affiliated with this Russian email address.

Before that, they're alleging that it came from a very interesting email address, which I'll get to in a moment, called nfs9000@hotmail.com, and this is in the complaint, this is in the criminal complaint. They have an unidentified address that we have tried to look up, it doesn't appear to exist, and it has the big piggybank and a question mark on it; the government doesn't even know what this is.

Tor Ekeland: It's the first step in their trace.

Michael Hassard: This is the first step in their trace, and then before the piggybank, you have Roman's account at Mt. Gox with his proper email address, it's all KYCed and everything. So, there's the big break at the piggybank with a question mark on it tying Shormint and these other addresses to Roman Sterlingov.

Peter McCormack: Right, so they've gone Kraken, Bitcoin --

Michael Hassard: No, not Kraken.

Tor Ekeland: This is 2011. What they're saying he did in October 2011 is that he paid for the DNS registration for the www.bitcoinfog.com, normal internet clearnet site, which isn't illegal.

Tor Ekeland: That's their main piece of evidence, and what they're doing is they're doing a multi-layered trace through multiple Mt. Gox accounts then into the exchange, Liberty Reserve to get to the payment for this DNS registration.

Peter McCormack: So they counted all these hops.

Tor Ekeland: They counted all these hops and it's a mess.

Peter McCormack: What they've basically saying is he is the person at every stage of that hop?

Michael Hassard: That's what they're alleging.

Tor Ekeland: That's what they're saying, but the first stage of the hop and the criminal complaint, as Mike said, they've got this image of a piggybank with a big question mark.

Peter McCormack: What does that mean?

Michael Hassard: It means that they can't trace it.

Tor Ekeland: It means they're guessing, and the people we've got tracing this shit are like, "What the fuck is this? This is all over the place, this is completely arbitrary". And the key point with this, it is completely legal to register a domain name for a website. There's no evidence that he set the website up, that he ran it.

Peter McCormack: No, of course, but that would at least point towards some kind of evidence.

Tor Ekeland: If you had something more.

Tor Ekeland: If you had something more, but the problem is you don't.

Peter McCormack: Like, if you want to have a successful prosecution, you want pieces of a jigsaw, but they've reverse-engineered their way back.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Then they've got to a point where they can't make the hop and they put Roman behind it.

Michael Hassard: And then they guess.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, and then they guess, and then I'll just go through the other what they considered, I don't really consider it evidence. So, there's that October 2011 DNS registration, they say that he made, and our tracing guys don't think this matters --

Michael Hassard: Our tracing guys are able to find at least six different other outcomes that could come from a tracing analysis like that. So, rather than going back to Roman, there could be at least six other steps or results.

Tor Ekeland: And then before that DNS registration -- by the way, they ignore the reregistration of that DNS, I think, in like 2014, 2016, they completely ignore it -- they say that he made some test deposits to Bitcoin Fog before it became officially online in October 2011, it's announced on Bitcoin Talk forum that Satoshi started. Our tracing people can't match that, but again, so what? An important here, and we got the court to say this in this case, is mixing Bitcoin is legal in the United States, money laundering is not.

Michael Hassard: This is huge because this is the first time an Article Three judge in the United States has come out and said mixing is legal.

Peter McCormack: Right, go back a second, when did the judge this; what case?

Tor Ekeland: This is our case.

Danny Knowles: Larry Harmon.

Tor Ekeland: We'd actually been looking for a case law to say that and we couldn't find it, and then when they seized all his money, that's why we're going around with our tin cup, they seized all his money, which was a little under $2 million, now it's like under $1 million. Again, he doesn't have the profits he should have if he was operating this thing, so -- I just lost my train of thought!

Peter McCormack: DropBit.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I can't remember his name, the DropBit CEO.

Peter McCormack: Search up DropBit CEO; do you know about the DropBit case?

Tor Ekeland: No, I'm not sure.

Peter McCormack: So, DropBit was a wallet that sponsored us, sponsored the podcast years ago --

Michael Hassard: Oh, Larry Dean Harmon, I'm familiar with this; this is the Helix case. Now, like we were mentioning earlier, this is another example of a case where the government did use Chainalysis, it was part of the evidence against Larry Dean Harmon and Helix, and that case resulted in a plea. So, these heuristic methodologies that Chainalysis has been using to conduct their blockchain tracing never got to be challenged in federal court.

Peter McCormack: But hold on a sec, Larry took a plea?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, Larry Dean Harmon, they took a plea.

Peter McCormack: What was the plea; what did he plea?

Tor Ekeland: I know he plead guilty, I don't know what he got, what his sentencing was.

Michael Hassard: They had other evidence that he had been laundering money through his mixer and they were able to show because he took a picture, by accident, with his Google glasses, and that was a key piece of evidence in that case.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, like the admin panel on his laptop, and that's a key difference in this case than all the other cases; all the other cases have some kind of corroborating evidence.

Peter McCormack: But hold on, so Larry was accused of running a mixing service, took a plea deal?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But now mixing is legal, but is the way they prosecute to call it laundering, by virtue of you having that, if you don't know what money's coming in and going out, you could be, by virtue of having it, be laundering under their description?

Michael Hassard: I think there's a difference we need to identify here and that's operating a mixer and letting money laundering occur on your mixer is one thing, but as a user who's not laundering anything and just using the mixer, that's what we've got was determined as legal.

Danny Knowles: But this is purely custodial mixing service.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, so using a mixer is legal?

Danny Knowles: Correct.

Tor Ekeland: Yes.

Peter McCormack: So as a user.

Michael Hassard: Unless you use it to launder money.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Operating a mixer is legal?

Tor Ekeland: Yes. Now here's where it gets a little more complicated --

Peter McCormack: How do I know if someone's laundering money?

Michael Hassard: Exactly.

Tor Ekeland: And that's what the government is arguing, they're asking for it in the jury instructions, which are the instructions that get read to the jury before they go deliberate, they're asking for what's called a Wilful Blindness Instruction, in other words, you knew that this was probably going to get used for money laundering but you just turned a blind eye, and so you don't get to be cute like that, but it's not illegal to operate a mixer per se.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but on the back of the dark web, people are buying drugs that are getting --

Tor Ekeland: Oh no, drugs!

Michael Hassard: We hate that word, the dark web.

Peter McCormack: No, but hold on, but they're getting shipped through UPS.

Tor Ekeland: We call it the deep web actually.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's getting shipped through UPS, the mail service, right? Is the mail service liable for facilitating the delivery of drugs?

Tor Ekeland: Right.

Peter McCormack: What is it they're trying to do here, what do you think; do you think is part of Choke Point, fuck Bitcoin?

Michael Hassard: I think they're trying to legitimise their tracing software from Chainalysis, and that comes up, because as we were talking about earlier with the trace that they did on the www.bitcoinfog.com payment, that came first when the US Government subpoenaed these different email accounts that were affiliated with it when they subpoenaed shormint@hotmail.com and nfs9000@hotmail.com.

So, I only discovered this when I was talking to somebody who we met in Mexico City about this, and I kind of realised that the government went to Chainalysis first and they've relied on their analysis the entire time and they've turned a blind eye to all the other evidence that comes forth. If they could look at the subpoena returns that they got from Microsoft for the email addresses involved in the transaction list we were talk about earlier, shormint@hotmail.com has the recovery email of nfs9000. If you look at nfs9000@hotmail.com's recovery email address and it's the work email for a guy in California, in the Bay Area, named Andrew White.

Now, that's not the only piece of evidence that points to this character, Andrew White. We can't find anything about him online, he seems to own a bunch of properties, but we don't know what he does for work, and the government doesn't seem to have gone that way in the investigation at all.

In fact, there's one key piece of evidence that we found where they're analysing the different IP addresses that these particular email addresses were using to access their emails, and they're trying to conduct this IP analysis and Aaron Bice, who is the author of that particular document, he expresses some doubt. He says, "Oh look, the recovery email isn't Roman Sterlingov's, it's this guy, Andrew White; are we going in the right direction?" And it's kind of like, "No, I don't want to look that way".

Tor Ekeland: "I don't want to think about that".

Michael Hassard: "I don't want to think about it, I don't want to think that we have the wrong person here. Let's just continue and try to focus on Roman Sterlingov", because fundamentally what's happened here is the government's investigation has not been, "Who operated Bitcoin Fog?". As soon as they got that Chainalysis investigative report it became, "How do we prove that Roman Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog?"

Tor Ekeland: It's a classic case of confirmation bias.

Michael Hassard: It's tainted the entire investigation.

Tor Ekeland: All over the place, and there's, I think, a 40- or 50-page report that they had commissioned by, I forget the name of the organisation, it's like the National Institute for Cyber Forensics or something like that. Andrew White is all over it; Roman's name really doesn't appear in it. They just turn a blind eye to that, and they also turn a blind eye to Mark Karpelès who, this really raised my eyebrows.

Michael Hassard: And we found this out from the book; this did not come in discovery, they're relying almost completely on data that they got from Mt. Gox that has been held by the bankruptcy trustees in Japan that are dealing with the Mt. Gox payments and all this stuff affiliated with the hack.

Tor Ekeland: So, there's a story in the book, in Andy Greenberg's Tracers in the Dark, about when Michael Gronager goes over to Japan because Mt. Gox gets hacked, and mind you, they're using the Mt. Gox data here to say that Roman's IP address matches the IP address used by this shormint@hotmail.com email address.

Now, put aside for the fact that most federal courts don't recognise using IP addresses as something that you can identify a person with, put aside VPNs, put aside proxy servers or the fact that thousands of people can be using the same IP address, so they essentially are using the Mt. Gox data, which they haven't produced to us in original form, mind you there are no logs in this case, there are no communications, there are no servers, there's nothing, they say that there's this IP address match based on this Excel spreadsheet that we got from listing this Mt. Gox data.

But in the book, they talk about Michael Gronager going over to Japan and meeting with Mark Karpelès, and Mark Karpelès gives Michael Gronager a thumb drive and he says, "Oh, on this thumb drive, here is all the Mt. Gox data".

Michael Hassard: Michael Gronager was over there in Japan because he's just starting to create Chainalysis, he has this vision of creating basically a blockchain surveillance firm, to track all the different transactions on the blockchain. And he goes to Japan and he says to Mark Karpelès, "Look, I'm going to try to trace the hack and try to find out where all these missing Bitcoin went". So, that's why he's over there.

Tor Ekeland: So, he looks at the thumb drive and he's like, "There are deleted files here, the integrity of this data is corrupt", and he says to Karpelès, according to the book, "Do you have a backup of this data?" and Karpelès says, "No, we were hacked and our servers were actually physically accessed". So right there, you've got a problem with the integrity of the core piece of data that they're trying to use the IP matches, but it gets better because Karpelès is prosecuted in Japan and sentenced to four years in prison, wait for it, for falsifying Mt. Gox data. Now, he doesn't do that time because the best we can figure is that the United States Government basically hired him or started working with him, and from what we're hearing from Roman, we think he was actually on the phone with one of the arresting agents when Roman's arrested.

Michael Hassard: Roman told us a pretty interesting story about that. When he was underground at LAX and the two arresting officers who are featured prominently in the book, Tracers in the Dark, Matthew Price and Tigran Gambaryan -- these guys get treated like rockstars by the way; Chainalysis had a big conference in New York a couple of weeks ago and these guys were on stage, they're getting applause; people in that world really look up to these guys.

Roman was saying that he went in the car with one of the agents, I think it was Matthew Price, it may have been Tigran Gambaryan, and that the guy on the other end of the line who this agent had called had a French accent and Roman thought that it might be Mark Karpelès, and we didn't think anything of it until we read Andy Greenberg's book and the story comes out and we're like, "Oh man, that actually makes total sense".

Tor Ekeland: I think there's more evidence that Mark Karpelès ran Bitcoin Fog than there is that Roman did. For instance, what's the Happy New Year guy; what's the name?

Michael Hassard: Akemashite Omedetou.

Tor Ekeland: Which means Happy New Year in Japanese. That's the name that's used to register the Bitcoin Talk forum account that talks about the operation of Bitcoin Fog.

Michael Hassard: It promotes it.

Tor Ekeland: And Mt. Gox is based in Japan, so they're using a Japanese phrase for Happy New Year in Japan; you've got a guy who's a key source of data in this case who's cooperating with the government who's convicted in Japan for falsifying data. That data is the core to that trace where they say he registered the DNS, he did the DNS registration for the Bitcoin Fog clearnet site.

Now mind you, there's no evidence, there's no code, there's no server logs, there's anything of Roman ever operating Bitcoin Fog. I've never had a case where they have arrested my client, caught my client with all his computers, with his handwritten backup notes, with his diaries, with all of his thumb drives, with 3 TB of hard drives, and there's not a trace on it of him doing what you're accusing him of.

Peter McCormack: So, we're not going to try and prosecute Mark Karpelès here though, but what we're saying is this is more evidence that it isn't your client.

Tor Ekeland: I think what it is it's them, they want to get a Wilful Blindness Instruction against us. I think they've engaged in Wilful Blindness, I think they got dollar signs in their eyes, I think that they know that, "There's a big, fat, high-paying job for me when I'm done, in the government". Chainalysis has already hired one of the prosecutors from this case --

Michael Hassard: Youli Lee.

Tor Ekeland: -- Youli Lee, to work as their senior legal advisor. The arresting agents now are working for Binance. And I've seen this in multiple cases and it's a huge, huge problem with the Department of Justice, is that they curry favour with big corporations and private vendors because they know that, when they're done with their little government job --

Peter McCormack: "Hire me!"

Tor Ekeland: "Hire me!"

Michael Hassard: It's a revolving door.

Tor Ekeland: It corrupts justice, and I think that's why, like one of our main points in this case is that this is the profits distorting justice, and there's confirmation bias all over this case, there's careerism all over this case, and what disgusts me the most if that there's profiteering.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Do you remember the name Mark Karpelès? So, the first interview he went to with me, Japan, yeah, the first interview he ever sat in with me --

Danny Knowles: He is Connor.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Connor, so Connor sat here, where I had to go out to Japan, you know, he lived with me and no one to look after him, I was like, "You're coming to Japan", so we went for three days and I interviewed Mark Karpelès out there, which is just an interesting --

Michael Hassard: When was that?

Peter McCormack: That was 2018, yeah, in 2018. Okay, so there's clearly a very tiny, small loose attempt at creating a piece of evidence here. It doesn't sound like they have much to go on when they go to court, but they do have Chainalysis data and is it a jury trial?

Tor Ekeland: It's a jury trial, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Who chooses it; do they choose that or does Roman choose who it gets to be?

Tor Ekeland: There's a process called voir dire, that's law French, it's a 1,000-year-old process where it's a little harder in federal court than state but where you get to ask the juries a question; it's actually one of the most important parts of the case.

Michael Hassard: It's part of the jury selection process.

Peter McCormack: Jury selection, okay. And so they're ideally going to want a jury who does not understand much about tech, who they can bamboozle and convince them that this technology, this Chainalysis data's fully trustworthy and nails on that this is Roman, and ideally you want people with some wits around them who understand a little bit about technology who can't be bamboozled. Do you believe the fight is over this Chainalysis data?

Tor Ekeland: Yes and no.

Tor Ekeland: Yes, in the sense that we have an obligation to completely attack it, I think it's garbage, it's probabilistic, it's not deterministic.

Michael Hassard: This is the first time that Chainalysis's work is going to be challenged in a federal trial.

Peter McCormack: I fucking hope you win.

Tor Ekeland: So, this is at stake.

Michael Hassard: This is huge.

Tor Ekeland: The stakes are huge.

Peter McCormack: Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are examples where Chainalysis data, if it's accurate, could actually do really good things on certain crimes that are committed that are evil, but ultimately, I think they're a company who's built on evil incentives.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, I think what they actually could do is just basic blockchain tracing that a ton of other companies could do.

Peter McCormack: But it's probabilistic.

Michael Hassard: We don't know because they won't even give us access to their source code, their input data, they won't let us use their software, Chainalysis Reactor, anything that you expect to be able to do in order to say, "Hey, does this work; is this scientific?" we're not being provided with that.

Peter McCormack: So how do you get to challenge that?

Tor Ekeland: We subpoenaed it and we've got a big fight.

Tor Ekeland: So, there's on 16 June and 23 June about whether or not we get to see that.

Michael Hassard: It's called a Daubert hearing.

Peter McCormack: And their defence is that they will be giving you access to their IP?

Tor Ekeland: It's proprietary.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, proprietary; you're not going to steal that and fucking sell it.

Tor Ekeland: No, I'm not, and I've been doing this for like a decade and I've never, ever leaked evidence, that's ridiculous, right. What's interesting to me is that they're the ones hiding stuff, they're the ones making money. Roman's not hiding anything; we've already put him on the stand in this case.

Michael Hassard: And the judge was like, "Are you sure you're going to do that?" In the United States, you have a Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate yourself, so anybody who actually did something is not going to go up on the stand and talk freely and avail themselves to cross-examination by the prosecution. This is in the hearing to release the seized funds to try to finance the case, we're like, "Look, we're going to put Roman on the stand". The judge was like, "Are you sure you're going to do that; are you sure that's the right move?" And we're like, "Yes, because he's totally innocent". Once he's up there, the prosecution has a full opportunity to ask him --

Tor Ekeland: Two days.

Michael Hassard: -- any questions that he wants, and you can tell that the government didn't know anything about him. They're standing up there and they're saying, "Tell us who your friends are; tell us where you were working and how much you made". These are basic things that they should have found out during the course of a proper investigation that has been completely glossed over by the government because of their overreliance on Chainalysis's work.

Tor Ekeland: Basically, all they did with this case is they sat at a desk 6,000 miles away and they guessed, and they guessed wrong, and they rolled the dice when they went to go arrest him thinking that they're going to get all the evidence that proves that he did it, but it was just a fail.

Then you see them getting excited over the Romanian servers, this firm's VPN business, they're all like, "Oh, we're going to get these Romanian servers", and they seize the Romanian servers, there's nothing on them. This is the only blockchain prosecution that I'm aware of that has no server logs, that has no servers, that has no communications. Roman couldn't even code something as complicated as Bitcoin Fog, but this goes back to a point that Mike made earlier, there's a sort of provincialism.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure I agree with that. You said earlier on he was technical, he had technical abilities, he was interested in tech, he was coding wallets. Coding wallets isn't easy, I think if you can code wallet, I don't think that's a big leap to be able to code a mixing service, because a mixing service isn't that big a jump from that, and I'm not even a technical person myself, but I personally don't buy that one.

Tor Ekeland: Well, it's interesting, because first of all, he's told me that he doesn't have the technical skills to do that.

Tor Ekeland: One of the things that they seized, beyond his diaries, his handwritten notes, they seized his Google Drive for ten years, 3 TB of hard drives; there's nothing on there that shows that he's got those coding skills.

Peter McCormack: I'm just saying if you said to me earlier on, you said he was coding wallets, I've talked to Andrew Poelstra about building your own wallets. You need a certain amount of competency to do that, and so if he could do that, to me, it's not a big leap to --

Tor Ekeland: I'm not sure he was coding them.

Michael Hassard: We should definitely look at that.

Tor Ekeland: That's a great question.

Michael Hassard: That's a great point and you're helping our defence by enlightening us on this.

Peter McCormack: I thought that's what they said earlier, he was creating wallets.

Michael Hassard: Yeah, he was setting them up, but I don't know, you're bringing up -- I don't know how.

Peter McCormack: I might have misheard what you said early on.

Danny Knowles: No, that was how I took it too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I took it as that.

Tor Ekeland: It's a great question. One of the things we like about going out and doing these things is people ask us questions like that, and then we just go back to Roman. One of the reasons I'm convinced he's so innocent is that, when you work on a case, what wins the case is the story, it's not all this bullshit evidence and all this other stuff, it's the most honest, credible and true story, and that's what you're presenting to the jury. And one way you know you've got the right story is that, no matter what pops up that you didn't know about, it'll fit into the story if you've got the right story.

Michael Hassard: Because it's the truth.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the truth, it is the truth.

Tor Ekeland: It's the truth, right, and every time something has come up like that, it all fits into Roman's story and nothing works with the government's story; ultimately the government doesn't have a story, what they have is this analysis and this sort of wishful thinking from desks thousands of miles away with people who are engaging in this confirmation bias thinking, "Oh my God, we're going to be superstars, we're in Andy Greenberg's book which has been optioned by Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, look at all this press we're getting. My career's going through the ceiling".

Danny Knowles: Did Bitcoin move directly to Kraken from a Bitcoin Fog address?

Tor Ekeland: It did.

Michael Hassard: That's exactly what we dealt with in the hearing to release the seized funds, and it's part of the reason that the funds were not released to finance his defence. We were trying to explain that, look, Roman did use Bitcoin Fog, he didn't operate Bitcoin Fog.

Danny Knowles: So did funds from Bitcoin Fog to straight to Kraken?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: That makes no sense to me, because if you're a privacy-driven person running a mixing service, you're not so stupid that you will send to a fully KYCed exchange directly from that mixing service.

Tor Ekeland: Exactly.

Michael Hassard: And you're not going to keep your money, all your money in a KYC Kraken exchange account.

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Michael Hassard: And this is exactly what Roman did; he was using that as his main wallet.

Peter McCormack: Because he's a digital nomad, and for him, logically, that is a better security than going around with a hardware wallet.

Peter McCormack: There's a logic to it, I don't agree with it but there's a logic to it.

Danny Knowles: And no one running a mixing service is doing that.

Peter McCormack: No.

Tor Ekeland: Somebody else made this point to us in Europe, and when they made it I was like, "Oh wow, that's a really good point", if you're laundering $330 million-worth of illicit Bitcoin, do you then take the service fees and put it in your KYC Kraken account under your own name that you put your passport up?

Danny Knowles: It makes no sense.

Michael Hassard: It's preposterous.

Tor Ekeland: He so good, the government wants to say, he's such a supervillain that he hasn't left a trace anywhere, but he's going to go use his Kraken account for this stuff.

Peter McCormack: When Ross Ulbricht got arrested and the story that they've said -- I think Ross is innocent, by the way, but I also don't think he committed a crime, he just committed what they see as a crime, but anyway -- there was a mistake in what he did and that's how he got caught. He didn't do something totally stupid, there was a mistake in his process that allowed them to say, "Oh, you are Dread Pirate Roberts", and I don't think he is.

Danny Knowles: They found the server, didn't they?

Michael Hassard: They caught him with his computer open at the Glendale Public Library, there was this big operation.

Peter McCormack: But prior to that he was under investigation because of something to do with LinkedIn.

Peter McCormack: He made a mistake. In this story, using Bitcoin Fog and putting it in Kraken wouldn't be his mistake, that would be moronic, and so it doesn't add up.

Tor Ekeland: It doesn't add.

Michael Hassard: Nothing about this adds up.

Peter McCormack: The only way it would add up is if there was a very easy way to identify funds which were the fees that went to a separate wallet, and if that went directly to Kraken you'd have a tough case arguing that.

Peter McCormack: That would be a tough one.

Michael Hassard: Now, the government identifies a wallet that they say is the Bitcoin Fog wallet.

Tor Ekeland: This is great, I love this.

Michael Hassard: This is ridiculous. So, the government, in part of their forfeiture allegations, they said that all the money in this particular wallet is forfeitable to the government because it's the proceeds of operating Bitcoin Fog.

Tor Ekeland: Like 1,300 Bitcoins they're claiming in the indictment.

Michael Hassard: So, the first thing we do is we type that wallet address into a public blockchain review software that's on the open internet and we can see right away that that wallet has not transacted at all since 2012.

Tor Ekeland: And it has zero Bitcoin in it, but then what they go and do, and this is what they do everywhere, they're like, "Oh no, but we've got this cluster analysis that we're not going to show you and this mystical magic software and actually, that wallet address is somehow tied to this cluster and we know that the money's there". "Well then show me your maths", but they don't.

Peter McCormack: "Show me the money!"

Tor Ekeland: "Show me the money, show me the maths", and they won't do that; they're constantly appealing to this sort of magic and like, "Trust us", but I'm sorry, the philosophy of the Bill of Rights is not trust the government, it's quite the opposite.

Michael Hassard: Chainalysis is acting like the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain.

Tor Ekeland: Because they've got so much money at stake.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So, what's the status of the case, where you're at; are you still in discovery? I'm in an ongoing lawsuit that's been going on for a long time, I know how long these things take, I know all these different stages happen and challenges and tests in the discovery.

Michael Hassard: Civil is a bit different than criminal.

Peter McCormack: Mine's civil.

Michael Hassard: This is a criminal case.

Peter McCormack: Oh okay, sorry, yes.

Michael Hassard: But the next step is to have this Daubert hearing, and this is a very important hearing, because at this hearing we get to challenge the scientific legitimacy of Chainalysis's techniques, and they haven't showed us anything. We have a whole bunch of motions in limine that are outstanding that we're going to be dealing with in these two hearings, well it's one hearing spread over two days in June. The trial's set right now for 14 September, and we think that trial date is a go, and we expect that trial to last one to two months.

Tor Ekeland: No, about a month I would guess.

Michael Hassard: About a month, yeah.

Tor Ekeland: It's hard to tell.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and what's the best outcome of that?

Tor Ekeland: An acquittal.

Peter McCormack: So you could get an acquittal?

Tor Ekeland: We're going for an acquittal, and then after that, there's something called a Rule 29 motion, and what that is is you can make a motion to the trial judge and say, "You say there's a guilty verdict", you can argue this, and no reasonable jury based on the facts, the evidence in this case, could conclude that Roman was guilty. If you get an acquittal, it's like inviolate, it's almost impossible to overturn unless there's jury tampering and bribing; but if you get a guilty verdict, the judge can reverse the guilty verdict, so that would be the next step.

Tor Ekeland: Then the step after that is to take it up to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and there are so many constitutional issues in this case.

Michael Hassard: From the venue to the --

Tor Ekeland: Prosecutor being a material fact witness, to the profiteer.

Peter McCormack: There were constitutional issues in Ross Ulbricht's case, Fourth Amendment issues.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Illegal wiretapping, I think was one of the issues. I think potentially Sixth Amendment as well.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I've interviewed Ross's mum, Lyn, a couple of times, it was a while back now, but I remember there being constitutional issues there, but it still didn't stop the prosecution.

Tor Ekeland: One of the reasons that the prosecution never stops is because they've got no accountability.

Tor Ekeland: Like even if we get an acquittal and they had engaged in all this kind of really fucked-up, corrupt behaviour, it's almost impossible to sue a prosecutor because of prosecutorial immunity. So, that lack of accountability drives a lot of this crap that's going on.

Peter McCormack: Why does prosecutor immunity exist?

Tor Ekeland: That's a great fucking question.

Peter McCormack: Because actually, it's just the incentives.

Tor Ekeland: I don't think it should. I think really what you have is you've got a federal judiciary that basically 80% of it is former federal prosecutors. There's this law and order mentality and there's this I call it the fallacy of the virtuous prosecutor, and that's this assumption that all prosecutors are always acting justly and virtuously all the time, and after ten years of doing federal criminal defence, I can tell you that that's a crock of shit.

Before I started, I bought into all that crap because when you're in law school they're like, "DOJ, DOJ", and everyone's always running to DOJ like it's mummy and daddy or the principal. The left is particularly terrible with this in the United States, they complain about mass incarceration, they want to defund the cops, but anytime anything happens that they don't like, they run to DOJ.

DOJ's just like any other fucking human institution, it's full of self-interested people trying to advance their careers, which is fine in other realms, but when you put it in the realm of law enforcement and justice, it's a huge problem, particularly when you have these multibillion-dollar corporations ready to hire you as soon as you decide, "I no longer want to be at DOJ".

The only people making money and hiding things in this case are the government and Chainalysis. Roman's been upfront with everything, we've put him up on the stand, we've said, "Go ahead, ask him any fucking question you want", and they just floundered, they floundered. And what came out, what Michael was pointing out, is they did not know the first thing about Roman Sterlingov, the human being. They didn't know what his job was, he worked for an internet marketing company in Sweden for years; they didn't know what his salary was, and that's important because that's the money that he actually took and ran through Bitcoin Fog and bought Bitcoin with and put into Kraken; he just used his paycheque. He's an early adopter who lucked out when Bitcoin appreciated, and for whatever crazy reason, they latched onto him and could not let go.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so people listening, what do you need? You clearly need support and help and I imagine it's financial.

Tor Ekeland: Absolutely. First of all, the community's been great.

Michael Hassard: Fantastic.

Tor Ekeland: I want to give a shoutout to the community and say thank you.

Michael Hassard: Thank you to Lucas Betschart in Switzerland.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Michael Hassard: He really put this on everyone's mind and invited us out to Europe in the first place, and also to Doug Tuman from the Monero Talk podcast because that was the first podcast that we did on this case and it was what got the ball rolling on the support from the community.

Tor Ekeland: We were on the verge of eviction from our apartments, no joke.

Michael Hassard: Both of us.

Tor Ekeland: Because we really believe in this case, like you know whatever, it's not the first case we've done with no money and it's a righteous cause and I feel a little guilty because I enjoy and I love what I do, but Roman right now is sitting in a fucking jail cell. So, the community's been great, we need financial support; it costs about $2 million to $3 million to really go up against the government.

We were, at one point, Mike and I were facing eviction and somebody in Europe just gave us enough money to pay our bills to get down here to talk about this case. But even if people can't contribute money, just looking at the case and asking us questions about it like you asked, because every time we go around we learn something, because we're like the government a little bit, you're down in your hole and then somebody points out the obvious, "Well, if you're really operating this sophisticated criminal enterprise, why would you put your proceeds in a KYC Kraken account?"

Michael Hassard: And these aha moments have happened regularly as we're going around talking to all the different communities. We had this happen at Bitcoin im Ländle, we had this happen in Berlin, we had this happen in Mexico, and every time this happens it helps us finetune our story and make the defence stronger.

Tor Ekeland: And also, the other thing we would love help on, I don't know how to do this, is people coming to the trial in DC on 14 September. One thing you see DOJ always does, so the courtrooms are kind of split, it's almost like a wedding, like the prosecution's people will sit on the right side of the courtroom and the defence's people sit on the left side. They always bring in all their interns and legal assistants to fill this side and you're always up there and there are like two people on your side.

Just raising awareness, coming to the trial, battling this publicity juggernaut that is Chainalysis -- they just did this huge conference in New York, was $600 a ticket and Andy Greenberg's up there with, who is it, Michael Gronager, Jonathan Levin and the arresting agents in this case --

Michael Hassard: The entire case of characters at our discovery is at this conference.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah. I think Chainalysis is more hype than substance and I think the reason that they're fighting us so hard is that they're worried about their market valuation. If we get a win here, and that's no guarantee, the only thing we can guarantee is we're going to fight like fucking hell and I fight to the death, that's about it, I've done this long enough to know that all sorts of shit can happen in litigation; but if all of a sudden it comes out that their software that is being used as compliant software for SEC, Treasury, the Serious Crimes Office in the UK, turns out to the run-of-the-mill crap that's not really reliable and that you could do the same job with basic stuff off the internet, they've got a problem with their market valuation.

Michael Hassard: And so do their private equity companies that have invested in them.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah. If you look at DOJ press releases on cases that Chainalysis works on, you can see them fundraising right after the press releases. What they're really bringing at is not so much their Chainalysis Reactor, they're a brilliant marketing company, but their software, I'm not impressed.

Michael Hassard: It doesn't add up, it just doesn't add up.

Tor Ekeland: Not impressed at all.

Peter McCormack: So, how do people find out more about this; where do you want them to go; do you have a website?

Tor Ekeland: You can go to our website, www.torekeland.com; there's a big button right on the home page, it says "Donate to Roman Sterlingov's case", there's a bunch of information on it. Mike and I are at Twitter talking about it a lot.

Michael Hassard: You can find both of our Twitters; mine's my name, @mikehassard.

Tor Ekeland: And I think I'm just, what am I, @TorEkelandPLLC, I think.

Danny Knowles: Can people donate in Bitcoin?

Michael Hassard: Of course, Bitcoin, Lightning, we have a Monero link for people who really value their privacy.

Tor Ekeland: Fiat, somebody actually gave us fiat the other day.

Peter McCormack: Weirdo!

Tor Ekeland: I know, I was like, "Holy crap, what the hell?!"

Peter McCormack: Is there anything I've not asked you about that you wish I had; is there any bit we've not covered that you wish we had?

Tor Ekeland: No, this is a really important case.

Michael Hassard: We could talk about the jail.

Tor Ekeland: What?

Michael Hassard: We could talk about the jail that appears to be owned by two state judges in Virginia, is a state jail, but Roman --

Peter McCormack: Judges can own jails?

Michael Hassard: Welcome to America!

Peter McCormack: Hold on!

Michael Hassard: Profit motive all over the place.

Peter McCormack: "Got another one, send them to jail!"

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: "Got another one!" Hold on, what the fuck; a judge can send people to the jail they own?!

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Tor Ekeland: The results of that case was in Pennsylvania where those two judges, these judges were sending I think it was like juvenile "delinquents" or whatever to a jail system that they were running and they were making a lot of money.

Michael Hassard: Kids, they sent kids to prison.

Tor Ekeland: That's the core conflict at the heart of this case.

Peter McCormack: This whole country has conflict issues.

Tor Ekeland: Yeah.

Michael Hassard: Well, you have this in other areas, like you could have a military contractor working with the Department of Defence, but that's not someone's liberty, that's not justice. And when you introduce the profit motive to the justice system, it completely distorts all the great things that justice system is intended to do.

Peter McCormack: Judges owning jails though, just what?!

Tor Ekeland: And it's a shithole jail in rural Virginia that takes us six hours to drive to. It's about $2,000 every time we've got to go down there with hotels; you stay at the kind of hotel you dump a body in, kind of thing. And what they've done now, and I think this is utter bullshit and now we've got a big fight with them about this, but this gives you a little flavour of what it's like to work on a case like this because they're constantly trying to put up obstacles to you just working on the case; so if they stick him in this rural jail in Warsaw, Virginia, out in the middle of fucking nowhere, that takes you six hours to drive to, the last time we were there we have a pack of cigarettes with us and so we take it out and we put it in the locker.

That Monday, the next Monday, we get this letter saying, "You guys were trying to smuggle contraband into the jail. We're restricting access to your client", so basically we can't meet with him in private anymore; total fricking lie. Now we've got to go raise all sorts of hell with the court, I'm now going to ask the Office of the Inspector General to investigate this federal contract. And we were talking to Roman about this and Roman tells us there's a guy in there who's facing trial right now, like in a week, and they have stopped letting that guy see his lawyers. And the reason I think that they're doing it is the guy who's running the jail, they make so much money off their federal contract, what they do is they're just trying to curry favour with the Federal Government.

Michael Hassard: Now Roman is a federal prisoner, he's supposed to be in a federal jail in DC, the district where the trial's going to be held. Now, those jails are overrun with everybody who's waiting to have a trial for the 6 January events and the insurrection against the United States Government when everybody stormed the Capitol, so those jails are filled with those people. So the Federal Government has made a contract with state jails in Virginia and Maryland, and the state jail in Virginia where Roman is, that is owned by two judges down there allegedly, that's what we've heard and to our knowledge we haven't proven anything otherwise, they're getting a lot of money from this federal contract to store federal prisoners. Even the way they're keeping these federal prisoners is not up to the standards of the federal contract.

For example, federal prisoners are supposed to be stored in an isolated pod separate from the state prisoners, and that isn't happening; Roman is in there, just everyone's all mixed together. He's in one room with 60 other people, that's how they do the prisons in the United States, not like you have your own cell like you see on TV; it is mayhem in there. You hear on the phone all the loud noises. When I asked him, "Is there anything we can bring you, legally bring you?" because we would never smuggle in contraband, the only thing he asked me for were earplugs.

Peter McCormack: Is he doing okay?

Tor Ekeland: I'm amazed that he's holding up because I would probably try to kill myself in that situation, honestly.

Michael Hassard: He's been in there since April 2021.

Tor Ekeland: He's pale, you can see the fact that the food is so crappy affecting him, but he's keeping his hopes up.

Michael Hassard: He was feeling pretty low a couple of weeks ago before we started the tour after Lucas invited us to speak in Switzerland, and when we told him about the support and how the community was starting to rally around him, how you guys reached out to us, that lifted his spirits. He's intent on fighting this and intent on proving his innocence, not that he has to prove his innocence, you know the government --

Tor Ekeland: This is a great story.

Michael Hassard: We've got to share this one with you.

Tor Ekeland: You tell the story, go ahead.

Michael Hassard: Yeah, so we're at a pretrial hearing, this is right after we hopped on the case, wasn't it?

Tor Ekeland: Yeah, right when we got on the case, and we're throwing everything at the wall, you're just like trying to attack --

Michael Hassard: There are two prosecutors, as I say, you have Catherine Pelker and you have Chris Brown, who seems to the be more junior attorney on this case, and he kind of says to us, "You have to prove Roman's innocence".

Tor Ekeland: And we're like in an open fucking court!