Donald Trump’s executive orders told his Justice Department to stop prosecuting software developers for the actions of their users. His Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, issued a memo directing prosecutors accordingly.
But according to Samourai Wallet co-founder Kione Rodriguez, speaking from prison, ground-level career prosecutors are defying the directive. Rodriguez claims line prosecutors are swapping charge codes and tweaking legal language to maintain their cases. The bureaucratic insurgency creates a functional divide: executive policy wants a ceasefire, but unelected lifers continue a ‘civil war’ against crypto.
“Prosecutors are reportedly swapping charge codes and tweaking legal language to maintain their cases despite explicit orders to rein in rogue prosecutions.”
- Samourai Wallet co-founder Kione Rodriguez, Ungovernable Misfits
The victories for crypto are hollow, Rodriguez argues, as long as ‘combatants’ like himself and Roman Storm remain in federal prison. He says the community’s initial failure to fund legal defense allowed the government to set a dangerous precedent. True victory requires physical extrication from prison camps.
Parallel dynamics of selective enforcement appear elsewhere in the administration’s tech policy. On Breaking Points, Krystal Ball detailed how Anthropic’s flagship Fable 5 model was abruptly killed by a national security directive days after its release. She argued the trigger was Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who reportedly complained to the Treasury Secretary that his researchers had jailbroken the model for cyberattacks.
Ball and co-host Saagar Enjeti suggested this reflects political favoritism: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a disfavored outlier, while OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk operate with relative freedom. The order creates a precedent where private corporate red-teaming by a competitor can immediately de-platform a rival’s product via the White House Situation Room.
“Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is viewed as a disfavored outlier who refused to ‘bend the knee.’”
- Krystal Ball, Breaking Points
The administrative state’s resistance, coupled with the administration’s pattern of rewarding loyalty and punishing dissent, means executive directives only go as far as the bureaucrats willing to execute them. For crypto, the memo from Blanche is just paper until the prosecutors who ignored it are replaced.
