How “Bitcoin Jesus” Avoided Jail Thanks to One of Trump’s “Friends”

Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please, Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a crooked flag pin and sitting awkwardly in a chair. “I’m American. …Help me come home.”

The speaker, Roger Ver, 46, was in fact no longer an American citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelists for the digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time his video was released, Ver was charged with millions of dollars in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His high-powered legal defense team failed half a dozen times to convince the Justice Department to reverse course. The United States, considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he likely faced prison.

Prosecutors once hoped to make Ver a prominent example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight diligent years working on this case. However, just nine months after his on-camera call, Ver and Trump’s new Justice Department leadership reached a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver would not have to plead guilty or spend a day in jail. Instead, the government agreed to a payment of $49.9 million — roughly the amount of the tax bill that prosecutors said he had dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.

Ver pulled off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic within Trump’s Justice Department. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has emerged to help individuals and businesses seek clemency, often by arguing that they were victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump pardoned or granted clemency to dozens of people convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors And political allies. The investigations were stopped. The cases were abandoned.

Inside the Justice Department, a select club of former Trump personal lawyers has ready access to key appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as “Trump friends.”

The Worm episode, reported here in detail for the first time, reveals the extent to which enforcement of white-collar crime has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, records and conversations with people familiar with his case.

The Trump administration has particularly shaken up the way tax law violators are treated. At the end of last year, the administration essentially dissolved the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, distributing responsibility among a number of other bureaus and divisions. Tax lawsuits fell by more than a quarterAnd more than a third of 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases resigned.

But even amid this turmoil, Ver’s case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team — most prominently, former Trump lawyer Chris Kise — Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. A new Justice Department chief, who previously represented Trump’s family, grilled his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver’s team exercised unusual control over the final agreement, going so far as to dictate that the agreement would not include the word “fraud.”

This is the only tax prosecution that the administration has stopped altogether.

Ver did not respond to a long list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had consistently denied intentionally avoiding his tax bill — a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax offense — and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.

“Roger Ver has taken full responsibility for his serious financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Justice Department has not hesitated to expose those who cheat the system. The idea that any defendant can buy their way out of liability under this administration has no basis in reality,” said Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre.

In response to a detailed list of questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department. “I don’t know of any cases like this,” said Scott Schumacher, a former tax attorney and director of the graduate tax program at the University of Washington. It is almost rare for the department to drop a criminal case that has been indicted for years. “Basically, they’re saying you can get out of a tax evasion lawsuit by buying your money. »

Roger Ver is not a longtime Trump ally or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his American citizenship in 2014, one day he called once “the happiest day of my entire life.” In the early days of Bitcoin, it controlled about 1% of the world’s supply.

Ver is clean and fit – he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He often characterizes this first contact with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the United States for Japan.

Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the burgeoning cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he took pleasure in goading government authority and asserting that crypto was the cornerstone of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Worm announced he had raised $100 million and was looking for a place to create a new “non-country” without a central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy individuals consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, which has no personal income tax.

“Bitcoin completely undermines the power of every government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people’s income to control them in any way,” he said. said at a rally of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. “This makes it incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes. More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do it: they “said, ‘Roger, I need your help. How can I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on them?'”

Renouncing U.S. citizenship is not a magical technique to get out of tax exemption. Since 2008, the United States has required expats with assets exceeding $2 million to pay a high “exit tax” on the appreciation of all their assets.

In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS on two occasions. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally owned no bitcoin. He would later admit in his agreement with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoins, worth about $73.7 million at the time. Then, in 2017, the government alleged, Ver attempted to conceal the transfer of approximately $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In total, the government said he evaded nearly $50 million in taxes.

Ver’s defense was that his non-payment of taxes resulted from a lack of clarity about how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrencies, good faith accounting errors, and reliance on advice from his advisors. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his company’s holdings and determine the true value of bitcoin.

The Biden administration’s Justice Department rejected this legal argument. Prosecutors had a trove of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own lawyers and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver’s team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset search in the case was “rock solid,” according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury was unlikely, prosecutors said, to approve Ver’s defense that he made an honest mistake.

At the time of Trump’s election, Ver had been arrested in Spain and was fighting extradition. He was also the new owner of a sleek $70 million yacht that some law enforcement officials feared he could use to escape onto the high seas.

In Trump, Ver saw a possible outcome. After the 2024 election, he was “barking on all the trees,” said his friend Brock Pierce, another ultra-wealthy crypto investor who has tried to drum up sympathy for Ver in Trump’s orbit.

Ver had initially chosen the orthodox route of hiring tax lawyers from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver also launched a media campaign to ask the new president for forgiveness. “If anyone knows what it’s like to be the victim of a legal war, it’s Trump, so I think he’ll be able to see that in this case as well,” Ver said during a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carls’ show we. On Charlie Kirk’s show, Ver appeared with duct tape over his mouth with the word “censored” written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the pro-Trump influencer, began posting that Ver’s prosecution was unfair. Worm paid Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to pressure Congress to end tax provision he was accused of violating.

Ver’s pardon campaign failed. His public pressure campaign – in which he constantly compared himself to Trump – was not working, according to Pierce. “You’re not doing yourself any favors, shut up,” his friend recalled.

One objection at the White House, according to a person who works on the pardons, may have been Ver’s flamboyant rejection of his U.S. citizenship. Less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X: “Roger Ver renounced his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges.”

But within the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The key turned out to be one of “Trump’s friends,” a veteran defense attorney named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican who served as the state’s solicitor general and argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He carved out a place in Trump’s inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defense attorneys willing to represent the president after his 2020 election defeat. Kise defended Trump as part of the Justice Department’s investigation following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and the U.S. metropolitan area. against accusations that Trump mishandled classified documents while leaving the White House.

Kise had worked side-by-side on Trump’s cases with two lawyers who were now leaders of the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs the department’s day-to-day operations as deputy attorney general, and his deputy assistant attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise would have helped select Blanche to join Trump’s legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump’s family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022.

On Ver’s legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressuring his former colleagues to rethink their cases against Ver.

Kise scored the legal team’s first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that eliminated the career lawyers most familiar with the merits of the case.

At that meeting, however, it was not clear that the Justice Department’s new leadership would be willing to interfere with the progress of the Ver case. While the Trump administration had backed away from aggressively implementing crackdowns on white-collar crimes broadly, the administration said it was still pursuing most of the criminal cases that had already gone to trial. charge.

Bhirud initially expressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was “hard to believe” that a man calling himself “Bitcoin Jesus” would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.

The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime or the case would go to trial.

But Kise would continue to pressure his former colleagues to reconsider their decision. Blanche and Bhirud had already repeatedly demanded that career officials justify their case. Over the summer, Kise weakened the zeal of Trump appointees to pursue Ver on criminal charges.

Kise and the Steptoe Law Firm did not respond to questions.

“While there were meetings and conversations with the DOJ, this is not uncommon. The line’s attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence,” said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver’s tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.

It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had repeatedly accused of being “a weapon” against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was inundated with requests to reconsider the prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had also targeted them for political persecution.

Although many cases failed to attract the attention of the administration, Kise got results. Last week, Kise’s client, Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian billionaire accused of trying to bribe the former governor of Puerto Rico, received a pardon of Trump.

“All the defense attorneys are running the ‘weaponization’ play. This guy has an audience because of who he is, because his name is Chris Kise,” said one person who recently attended a high-level meeting organized by Kise to dissuade the Justice Department from prosecuting a client.

As Kise increased the pressure, Ver’s case took up a significant portion of Bhirud’s time, despite his work supervising more than 1,000 Justice Department lawyers, according to people familiar with the matter. Normally, it would be rare for a political person to be so involved, especially excluding career prosecutors who could weigh in on the merits.

Bhirud began to debate with his colleagues whether non-payment of taxes should really be considered a crime. Wasn’t it more of a civil matter? It seemed to a colleague that Bhirud was aware that Ver’s supporters might try to take the matter to the White House.

The government gave ground and proposed abolishing prison sentences. Ultimately, Ver and Bhirud’s team struck a deal that would baffle criminal tax experts. They agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement that would allow Ver to avoid criminal charges and prison in exchange for compensation and an agreement not to break any laws again. The government generally reserves such a deal for companies that break the law to avoid putting big employers out of business – not billionaires on the run.

As autumn approached, Kise and Bhirud, with Blanche’s blessing, negotiated Ver’s extraordinary agreement line by line. Once again, career prosecutors were excluded from negotiations.

Ver’s team enjoyed a remarkable ability to dictate terms. They rejected the text of the government’s so-called final offer because it required it to admit its “fraud,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations. Ultimately, Ver agreed to only admit his “willful” failure to report and pay taxes on all of his bitcoins and returned the $50 million.

The government arrived at this figure in a roundabout way. He dropped his claim that Ver lied on his 2017 tax return. The $50 million figure was based on the amount of his tax frauds in 2014 alone, plus what the government claimed was interest and penalties. In the end, the settlement amounted to the amount he was supposedly owed in the first place. He never even had to leave Mallorca to appear in a US court.

Under any previous administration, convincing the Tax Division’s leadership to drop a criminal case and accept a monetary penalty instead would be a failure. While the Justice Department resolves most civil tax cases through fines, when prosecutors charge criminal fraud, their conviction rate exceeds 90 percent..

People “always ask you, ‘Can’t I just pay the taxes and it will go away?’ ” said Jack Townsend, a former federal tax prosecutor. “The common answer that everyone gave – all the way up to the Trump administration – was that no, you can’t do that.”

When the Justice Department announced the resolution in October, it presented it as a victory.

“We are pleased that Mr. Ver has taken responsibility for his past misconduct and fulfilled his obligations to the American public,” Bhirud said in the Justice Department statement. press release announcing the agreement to suspend proceedings. “This resolution sends a clear message that whether you trade in dollars or digital assets, you must file accurate tax returns and pay what you owe.”

At the Justice Department, the resolution was demoralizing: “He admitted he owed money, and we’re getting money, but everything else stinks like hell,” said a current DOJ official familiar with the matter. “We should not negotiate with fugitives, as if they have power over us.”

Among wealthy targets of white-collar crime investigations, the Ver case sent a different message. Lawyers who specialize in this type of work told ProPublica that more and more clients are wondering which of the “Trump friends” they should hire. A prominent criminal tax defense attorney said he would give his clients a copy of Ver’s agreement and tell them, “These are the guys who did this.” »

The only one of Ver’s many lawyers to sign it was Christopher Kise.