Bitcoin Magazine

Trump Says He Will Consider A Pardon for Samourai Bitcoin Wallet Co-Founder

President Donald Trump said he’ll review the case of Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of Samourai Wallet, as questions mount over the federal conviction of the Bitcoin privacy software developer. 

When asked about Rodriguez’s upcoming prison sentence, Trump said, “I’ve heard about it. I’ll look at it.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” President Trump said. “But we’ll take a look.” 

Rodriguez publicly acknowledged Trump’s sentiment, tweeting “Your continued noise is working. Thank you to everyone pushing @realDonaldTrump to pardon Bill and me. Let’s get this over the line. #pardonsamourai”

Rodriguez, along with co-founder William “Bill” Hill, was convicted of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, a charge stemming from Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin privacy tool that allowed users to mix coins and maintain financial anonymity without giving up custody of their funds.

JUST IN: President Trump says he will consider a pardon for the CEO of privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Samourai.

"I've heard about it, I'll look at it. Let's take a look at it." pic.twitter.com/WfpLPYOlfj

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) December 15, 2025

Details of the Samourai Wallet case

The case, which began under the Biden administration and continued through the Trump Justice Department, culminated in Rodriguez receiving a five-year sentence and Hill four years, though Hill’s age and recent autism diagnosis led to a reduced sentence.

Critics of the prosecution argue the case represents a dangerous precedent for the cryptocurrency industry. The U.S. Department of Justice claimed that Samourai Wallet facilitated over $2 billion in unlawful transactions and laundered more than $100 million from criminal sources. However, only the “unlicensed money transmission” charge survived a high-profile trial, raising questions about the strength of the case. 

Samourai Wallet’s mixing services, Whirlpool and Ricochet, were designed to obscure the origin of criminal proceeds from activities including drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, fraud, cybercrime, and murder-for-hire operations. 

Court documents reveal the developers actively encouraged criminal use, describing the service as “money laundering for bitcoin” and promoting its tools on darknet forums.

The Department of Justice framed the case as part of a broader crackdown on crypto mixing services. Rodriguez had requested a light sentence, but the court imposed the statutory five-year maximum.

Trump’s comments come amid his campaign promises to defend the right to self-custody and financial privacy. During the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, he pledged to end what he described as the “anti-crypto crusade” of the prior administration.

A pardon for Rodriguez and Hill would signal a clear commitment to those promises, protecting developers from legal exposure for building tools that enhance privacy and security for everyday Americans.

With Rodriguez set to report to prison on December 18 and Hill already sentenced, the Trump administration faces a high-profile decision that could shape the future of financial privacy, software development, and cryptocurrency regulation in the United States.

This post Trump Says He Will Consider A Pardon for Samourai Bitcoin Wallet Co-Founder first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Why Trump Should Pardon The Developers of Bitcoins Non Custodial Samourai Wallet

On December 18th, days before Christmas, Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of the Bitcoin Samourai Wallet, will have to surrender to prison. His crime? Creating a software tool that gave Bitcoin users comparable privacy to that which banks are expected to provide. Samourai Wallet, the brand and technology stack built by Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, was shut down by the U.S. Government in April 2024 on a variety of charges, including money laundering, but only one charge stuck after a high-profile trial, the weakest charge of all, “unlicensed money transmission”.

What does it mean to transmit money? According to prosecutors, custodial control over user funds is no longer a requirement to need an MSB license; “a USB cable transfers data from one device to another, and a frying pan transfers heat from a stove to the contents of the pan, although neither situation involves exercising ‘control’ over what is being transferred.” If the DoJ can indict a frying pan, then USB manufacturers better lawyer up! 

While I’m no genius, the Supreme Court has emphasized that laws should be clear enough for an AVERAGE PERSON to understand

Let’s get into the minutiae of the specific subsection of the charge they pled to

What Keonne and Bill pled to was a violation 18 U.S. Code § 1960(b)(1)(C) pic.twitter.com/yGoDpZf8Eg

— lauren emily (@leamuirleyn) December 11, 2025

Remarkably, even FinCEN disagrees with the DoJ’s novel legal interpretation of what constitutes a money transmitter, as guidance at the time said non-custodial services could not be money transmitters because they do not exert control over money flows. FinCEN reasserted this fact to the DoJ prosecutors in a written statement, but they went forward with the charges anyway. This critical fact was withheld from the defense for almost a year, when it was finally revealed, “the judge denied the motion to present this evidence in the hearings, without even any argument,” according to Rodriguez. Critics argue this misconduct by the DoJ prosecutors is a violation of Brady v. Maryland, denying access to material that could have undermined the unlicensed money transmission charges, or, as Donald J. Trump would put it, this prosecution was rigged.  

Zack Shapiro, head of policy at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, warns the Trump administration and American software industry about the potential ramifications of this legal case, arguing that “collapsing the distinction between developing a tool and operating a service would introduce an untenable level of risk for anyone building privacy-enhancing or security-critical software.”

“Rodriguez and Hill ultimately accepted plea agreements in the face of substantial sentencing exposure, even though government records undermined the central regulatory theory of the case,” Shapiro added in a letter published on the BPI website, asking the Trump admin to pardon the Samourai Wallet devs. 

Fundamentally, the prosecutorial approach in the Samourai Wallet case risks establishing an influential precedent that threatens the financial privacy of American citizens and stifles innovation in the U.S. crypto industry. It could shape future prosecutions and regulatory developments, potentially reclassifying non-custodial services as money transmitters under federal law—requiring national MSB registration with FinCEN—and prompting stricter state-level licensing in jurisdictions like New York or California.

Echoing the trial against Ross Ulbricht a decade earlier, this rigged case against Samourai Wallet was set up during the Biden administration with support from anti-crypto politicians whom Trump defeated in the 2025 elections with the popular mandate. During his campaign at the 2024 Bitcoin Nashville speech, Trump said, “I will always defend the right to self-custody,” and got major support from the Bitcoin and crypto industries through the shared vision of making the United States the crypto capital of the world.

“I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ anti-crypto crusade will be over,” – Donald J. Trump, Nashville 2024. 

Many libertarians in the broader crypto industry see entrepreneurs like Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, in the same category as Roman Storm and Roman Sterlingov of Tornado Cash and radio host Ian Freeman, as nothing more than political prisoners of an entrenched banking cartel. 

David Sacks, the venture capitalist and White House A.I. & Crypto Czar, should also pay attention to this issue; otherwise, what does it even mean to be the Crypto Czar? If Bitcoin wallets end up regulated the same as banks, despite having no counterparty risk, then whose interests are really being served, Mainstreet’s or Wallstreet’s?

While the Trump admin has been very conservative during the DoJ’s prosecution and trial of the Samourai Wallet devs — and perhaps, understandably so — that stage of the legal battle is over. 

It is time for the Trump administration to meet its promise to the American public and defend self-custody and the crypto industry in America. It is time for Trump to set the record straight and pardon Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, as well as the Tornado Cash devs, while we are at it, lest we have another Ross Ulbricht-style miscarriage of justice. 

The Bitcoin and crypto industry is well behind this effort and has begun gathering signatures at Change.org, totaling over 5000 so far and growing, with the only official fundraising campaign at GiveSendGo.

Should Trump pardon the Samourai Wallet devs, he would be sending a clear signal to those who want surveillance-based, central bank digital currency systems to enslave Americans and the world that Americans will not stand for it. That the United States stands with the fundamental human right to privacy, dignity, due process, and the presumption of innocence, and not the tactics of intimidation developed by the likes of Joseph Gorbles, where privacy is a crime. Mass, indiscriminate surveillance, without a warrant, without due process, that is the real crime. 

This post Why Trump Should Pardon The Developers of Bitcoins Non Custodial Samourai Wallet first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Pardoning the Samourai Developers Would Restore Legal Clarity and Protect Non-Custodial Code

The Samourai Wallet matter raises a fundamental question about how the United States treats non-custodial software and the developers who create it. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill did not operate a financial service or handle customer assets. They wrote and maintained software that allowed users to construct collaborative Bitcoin transactions in a privacy-preserving way. Throughout the tool’s entire lifecycle, users controlled their own keys, initiated their own transactions, and never relied on Samourai or its developers to transmit or safeguard value. The distinction between a custodial service and a non-custodial tool is not a technicality; it is the core boundary that the Bank Secrecy Act, FinCEN guidance, and decades of regulatory practice use to distinguish software authors from regulated financial intermediaries.

This point was reinforced by FinCEN itself. In an internal analysis, the agency concluded that Samourai’s architecture did not constitute money transmission because no third party took possession or control of user funds. That conclusion was never disclosed to the defense while the prosecution advanced a theory that required the opposite: that building software which users employ for privacy is functionally equivalent to operating a financial institution. When that analysis finally surfaced, it confirmed what has long been understood across the industry and within the regulatory community—that non-custodial tools fall outside the BSA’s money-transmitter framework because there is no transfer of value by a third party. The case ultimately treated the developers as if they were responsible for the independent actions of users, even though they had no role in executing, intermediating, or approving any transaction. Some individuals did misuse the tool, as happens with any privacy or security technology, but the law has never equated misuse with liability for the creators. We do not treat the authors of encryption libraries, VPN protocols, or email clients as participants in unlawful activity simply because bad actors rely on those tools. Collapsing the distinction between developing a tool and operating a service would introduce an untenable level of risk for anyone building privacy-enhancing or security-critical software.

There is also an important speech component. Courts have consistently recognized that code is expressive, and publishing open-source software is an act of communication. When publication is treated as evidence of “operation,” the legal boundary between authorship and conduct becomes blurred in a way that threatens a wide range of legitimate technologies. Any precedent suggesting that developers are responsible for unforeseeable downstream use would have immediate consequences for cryptography, cybersecurity research, and open-source work more broadly.

Rodriguez and Hill ultimately accepted plea agreements in the face of substantial sentencing exposure, even though government records undermined the central regulatory theory of the case. Their convictions now rest on a framework that is at odds with established guidance and with the direction in which federal policy has since moved. A pardon would bring the legal outcome back into alignment with the underlying facts: this was software development, not money transmission, and the individuals involved should not bear criminal liability for writing code that users executed independently.

This case has already had a measurable chilling effect on developers working on privacy and security tools in the United States. Leaving the convictions in place would discourage responsible innovation and push critical work to jurisdictions that do not share our commitment to open research and transparent development. A pardon would correct a clear misapplication of federal law, protect the integrity of long-standing distinctions in financial regulation, and reaffirm that publishing non-custodial software is not—and should not become—a criminal act.

Disclaimer – This is a guest contribution by Zack Shapiro, originally published by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI). The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Pardoning the Samourai Developers Would Restore Legal Clarity and Protect Non-Custodial Code first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Zack Shapiro.

Samourai Wallet founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill were sentenced to 4 and 5 years for laundering $237M via their crypto mixer.