The Trump government dissolves a unit at the Ministry of Justice responsible for investigating cryptocurrency crimes and criticized the BIDEN administration as too aggressive against the fast-growing industry.
In a memo published on Monday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney General, denounced his predecessors for investigating cryptocurrency operators in a way that he called 'poorly and poorly executed'. Instead, he instructed the department to limit the focus of cryptocurrency investigations to crimes such as fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism.
The directive is in accordance with the broad embrace of President Trump of the Crypto industry during his campaign and in function while moving to relax enforcement.
The Trump family has expanded its business interests in the industry, also by establishing a crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Shortly before he took office, Mr. Trump published his own memecoin. And Trump Media & Technology Group, the social media company in which he is the majority shareholder, has said that this year it is planning to introduce a number of digital investment products for assets.
The Directive of the Ministry of Justice follows similar steps in the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has rejected lawsuits and ongoing investigations with cases in which crypto companies had not registered as exchanges. A number of sec lawyers in those cases have left the regulatory body.
The SEC also drastically cut the staff of a crypto enforcement unit. As a matter of policy, the SEC has said that it is not going to try to regulate memecoins because the digital assets of the novelty are not effects.
In its memo, the Ministry of Justice accused the Biden administration of a “reckless strategy of regulations through persecution” in relation to the world of digital currencies.
In the future, Mr Blanche wrote, prosecutors may only pursue cryptocurrency -cases in which victims of investors are performed “, scams, hacking and use of crypto to finance other crimes such as fentanyl or human trafficking. Such persecutions, the memo said, “are important for repairing stolen funds for customers, building investor confidence in the security of digital asset markets and the growth of the digital assets industry.”
He ordered a group of prosecutors who investigate market integrity and great fraud to stop pursuing the enforcement of cryptocurrency and focus instead for immigration times and contractor fraud.
He also dissolved the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, a group within the headquarters of the Ministry of Justice that has been established in recent years to cope with such things. Individual American law firms can still pursue cases with regard to cryptocurrency-related investigations, Mr Blanche wrote.
The new approach seems to be intended to prevent things such as those against the Binance founder Changpeng ZHAO for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires financial institutions to verify the identity of their customers and report suspicious activities that can be proof of money laundering. The company agreed to pay a fine of $ 4.3 billion as part of his guilty plea.
In the first days of the administration, Trump officials indicated their displeasure to such cases when she effectively degraded the public prosecutor who had founded the cryptocurrency enforcement team, Eun Young Choi.
That team was founded in 2022 to help officers of justice penetrate the often dark world of cryptocurrency, because transnational criminals began to use more and more digital money to facilitate crimes.
Matthew Goldstein Contribute to reporting from New York.
