Write Code, Go to Prison. Slaughter Children, Get a Pardon: Welcome to American “Justice”
While software developers rot in federal cages for writing private, victimless code, the same pardon pen that freed Wall Street fraudsters has already washed the blood off mercenaries who gunned down unarmed children in the street.
If you want to understand the true nature of the American justice system, look at who it pardons and who it cages. This is a regime that hands full clemency to executives who admit, in writing, to laundering money for hackers and drug cartels, while it hunts down software developers who never touched a single dollar that wasn’t theirs, who had zero victims, and then buries them under decades of federal time. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is the modus operandi of the machine: the state does not actually care about fraud, laundering, or victims. It cares about control, and control is exactly what open-source financial privacy takes away from it.
We said it after Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht in January 2025: the pardon was a great start, but the debt owed to the rest of the political prisoners rotting in federal cages was nowhere near paid. Nineteen months later, that debt has been settled only for the defendants with the most useful political connections, while the actual innovators, the ones who built tools instead of stealing from innocent people, are still being ground up by the exact same machine.
Take, for instance, Roman Storm, who is still fighting for his freedom for the “crime” of writing code. A Manhattan jury convicted him in August 2025 on a single count tied to Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol, and deadlocked on the far more serious and entirely unprovable money-laundering and sanctions charges, and rather than take that hung jury as the warning it was, federal prosecutors are pushing for an October 2026 retrial on the very counts they couldn’t get a conviction on the first time. This is happening while the Justice Department’s own March 2026 report to Congress admits that lawful Americans have every right to use mixers to protect their financial privacy. The state knows it is prosecuting a man for building something it has since conceded is legal to use. It is pursuing him anyway. Storm’s own team has called this what it is: an attempt to make writing code a crime, and this past week Storm pointed out that if prosecutors’ theory of liability were applied honestly, it would put Google and OpenAI in a federal courtroom right alongside him.
If you want to be even more angry, read about Dexter Taylor’s case. Taylor is still in a maximum-security cage for building firearms in his own apartment that he never sold, never trafficked, and never used to harm a single human being. He is three years into a ten-year sentence, parole-eligible only in 2032, still appealing a conviction his attorney says could take years and go all the way to the Supreme Court. A software engineer with zero prior criminal history is serving longer than plenty of people convicted of manslaughter, for a hobby with no victim, and the state has shown no interest in correcting that.
Ian Freeman already lost his appeal, which is what happens when the machine runs its full course, and the state simply wins by default. Freeman helped people convert cash into Bitcoin through Bitcoin ATMs and church-run kiosks, and for that he was locked in a state-run cage after a federal appellate court affirmed both his conviction and his sentence in the summer of 2025. He is still in that cage today for giving people a way to hold their own money outside the banking cartel.
Roger Ver’s case is the clearest proof yet that this system is a protection racket dressed up in legal language. Ver renounced his U.S. citizenship years ago to sever himself from the extortion apparatus of the American empire, and the empire responded by hunting him across the globe, having him arrested in Spain in 2024 and threatening him with 109 years in prison over an alleged exit-tax shortfall. Ver’s actual offense was refusing to keep funneling the wealth he built through voluntary trade back into a system he’d already walked away from. After more than a year of being backed into a corner, Ver handed over nearly $50 million to make the indictment disappear. The press calls this a “deferred prosecution agreement.” We will call it what it actually is: extortion. The cartel let him go because he paid what they demanded, not because he was innocent in their eyes.
Unfortunately, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, the developers behind Samourai Wallet, haven’t had a chance to clear their names, despite having no victims. They defrauded no one and coerced no one. They wrote open-source software, a non-custodial mixing tool, that let ordinary Bitcoin users keep their own transaction history private, and they never once held a single user’s funds in their own hands.
What makes this case so infuriating is the fact that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network itself told DOJ prosecutors in official correspondence that a service which never takes custody of user funds doesn’t meet the legal definition of a money transmitter. The Justice Department prosecuted them anyway, and last November Rodriguez and Hill were sentenced to five and four years in federal prison. Two men are locked in cages right now for the “crime” of treating code as speech, while the agency responsible for defining “money transmitter” on record said their tool didn’t qualify as one.
If you want to watch the mask slip entirely, look at what has been done to Bitcoin pioneer Joby Weeks. Weeks is currently living through the longest pretrial house arrest in United States history, more than six years confined to his own home without ever facing a jury, without ever being sentenced. In a recent interview with The Free Thought Project’s own podcast, Weeks described being seized by federal agents who pressured him for his private cryptographic keys, held for months without formal charges, and ultimately squeezed by prosecutors into signing a plea agreement so he could be allowed to see his own newborn daughter. That is not a legal process. That is a hostage negotiation carried out at the barrel of a state gun, and six years later the government still hasn’t given him a sentence, a trial, or an answer.
Now put that against the people this same government has actually pardoned, the ones who left behind real victims with real losses, and the contrast becomes impossible to explain away as anything other than horrifying corruption. Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to willfully failing to stop Binance from laundering money for North Korea’s Lazarus Group and other criminal networks, a scheme investigators say moved hundreds of millions in stolen and illicit funds through his exchange. He received a full pardon after Binance helped build the stablecoin behind Trump’s own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Trevor Milton lied directly to Nikola investors, staging a fake video of a truck rolling under its own power to inflate the stock, and walked away from nearly $700 million in restitution he owed to the shareholders he defrauded, pardoned after donating heavily to pro-Trump political groups. Todd and Julie Chrisley defrauded banks out of millions in fraudulent loans and were pardoned outright in May. A pair of siblings who rigged a grocery-relabeling scheme, sticking counterfeit labels on products and gouging real customers, owed nearly $49 million each in restitution to their victims and were fully pardoned in January 2026, wiping that debt off the books entirely.
But it’s not just financial criminals that the state protects. They love helping out actual monsters who murder children. During his first term, while claiming to drain the swamp, Donald Trump issued pardons to four Blackwater mercenaries—Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard—who slaughtered unarmed Iraqi civilians, including a 9-year-old boy, during a 2007 massacre, which prompted a UN News report on the Blackwater pardons calling the move an affront to justice. These men initiated unprovoked violence and committed literal war crimes, yet the stroke of a politician’s pen washed their sins away.
Sit with that for a second. The people with real, named, financially devastated, or murdered victims got a phone call and a clean slate. The people who harmed no one, who built open-source tools, who refused to hand the product of their labor over to the tax man, who tried to keep their own transactions private, are still in cages or still shackled to a GPS monitor waiting on a sentence that never comes. This is not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. It is what happens when a state is allowed to define crime as whatever threatens its monopoly of control, rather than whatever actually produces a victim.
We do not fix this by begging the next occupant of the White House to be marginally more merciful than the last one. The actual fix is the one these men were caged for building in the first place: decentralized, open-source, permissionless tools that make the state’s extortion racket obsolete by refusing to run through a system it can track, tax, and seize at will. Every wallet, every mixer, every peer-to-peer exchange that keeps functioning while its creators sit in a federal cage is proof that the technology already works. What’s missing is the will to use it, and to stop waiting for the cartel in Washington to grant permission for a freedom it was never theirs to give.
This is exactly why the ground is already shifting beneath the state’s feet. Zano’s Hard Fork 6 activates this week, and it isn’t a cosmetic update; it’s the removal of the last real excuse the system had for keeping privacy-first money on the margins. Gateway Addresses open a direct, non-custodial bridge between native ZANO and chains like Ethereum, Solana, and TON, so value can now move in and out of a truly private network without ever passing through a centralized choke point a regulator can freeze, or a subpoena can reach. Paired with fUSD, a confidential asset that no bureaucrat can blacklist, and a coming shift to a pure proof-of-stake model that severs miners from the industrial grid the state has always used as a pressure point, what’s being built isn’t a product; it’s an exit. Every one of the men described above was caged, extorted, or held hostage for building or using tools like this one, and every week that infrastructure like Zano keeps shipping is another week the state’s control grid gets a little less relevant to anyone who chooses to opt out of it.
Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist
