On the eve of the Tornado Cash co-founder trial, allegations were made against the prosecution for submitting "misleading evidence," with missing key chat record metadata causing controversy.
The legal team of Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm has accused the U.S. prosecutors of using misleading evidence on the eve of the trial. The core controversy lies in the lack of forwarding source metadata for key messages extracted from Telegram chat records, which could mislead the grand jury. The prosecution admitted that the format of the chat records provided earlier (plain text) did not indicate forwarding information, but insisted that the later provided HTML version (with annotations) is authentic and valid. Legal experts pointed out that this evidence verification issue could weaken the prosecution's position due to a violation of the "Brady Rule" (which requires prosecutors to continuously correct errors), potentially affecting the credibility of the core charges in the case and raising concerns within the crypto community about the legal responsibilities of DeFi protocols and the fairness of judicial procedures. This case involves allegations of cryptocurrency Money Laundering and unlicensed remittance businesses, and its outcome will have far-reaching implications for the legal compliance of on-chain privacy tools (such as crypto mixers).