U.S. DOJ To Retry Tornado Cash Co-Founder Roman Storm This Fall

• The U.S. DOJ is pushing to retry the Tornado Cash developer on two major charges.
• Roman Storm has already been convicted of one count, and the next two are in the pipeline.
• Senator Lummis has already sponsored a bill to protect software developers from third-party crimes.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking to retry Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer. On March 9, 2026, the DOJ, in a formal letter, requested that the court set a retrial date.

“The government intends to retry the defendant on counts one and three and expects that the retrial will last approximately three weeks,” the DOJ’s submission reads.

U.S. Government Seeks to Corner Tornado Cash Cofounder  

The U.S. DOJ, through its prosecutors, filed a letter with Judge Katherine Polk Failla requesting a retrial date. The retrial of Storm stems from the fact that the jury in the initial trial failed to reach a consensus on the two contradictory charges.

“A jury of 12 Americans heard 4 weeks of evidence and deadlocked: no verdict on money laundering, and no verdict on sanctions violations. The government’s response? Try again to make writing code a crime,” Storm noted on X

According to Amanda Tuminelli, the Chief Legal Officer at DeFi Education Fund, the DOJ is seeking to corner Storm on a failed conviction. Moreover, Tuminelli believes that the prosecutor in this case made obvious mistakes like calling irrelevant witnesses.

Most importantly, Tuminelli highlighted that the prosecutor in this case failed to understand the basic forensic analysis of their blockchain evidence. 

“Despite multiple legal and logical fallacies to their allegations of third-party dev liability, the SDNY will retry Roman,” Tuminelli stated.

According to Storm, the request to have a retrial later this year is a direct conflict with what President Donald Trump declared. Furthermore, Storm and his defense team argued that the DOJ is not a digital assets regulatory agency similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

As such, Storm has requested financial help from the crypto community. He stated that the retrial is not against one person but against the entire Web3 industry, which relies on software developers to build privacy-enhancing and scalable products.

“This isn’t abstract. If I can’t fund a defense, they win by default. If you care about financial privacy, if you write code and believe that code is speech,” Storm concluded.

Earlier this year, Senator Cynthia Lummis, together with Senator Ron Wyden, introduced a bill to protect software developers from third-party crimes. Lummis argued that software developers should not be treated like banks because they wrote code.

Related: DOJ Rejects Roman Storm’s Plea as Tornado Cash Verdict Will Stand