Treasury cited only three examples of illicit Tornado Cash use, says judge
During oral arguments this week related to an appeal of the US Treasury’s designation of Tornado Cash as a sanctioned entity, a US circuit judge revealed an embarrassing detail. On Tuesday, in a live proceeding of the appeal of that designation, Van Loon et al. v. U.S. Department of the Treasury et al., Judge Kurt Engelhardt asked lawyers why the US Treasury was only able to cite three examples of illicit use out of the millions of Tornado Cash transactions . As reported by Law360, these three examples are not just small in the context of Tornado Cash’s enormous volume. Worse, these three justifications for the US Treasury’s designation of Tornado Cash might be even more embarrassing for another reason: A separate, pre-existing sanction might have prevented them. All three transactions involved North Korea laundering financial assets in violation of pre-existing US Treasury sanctions. Indeed, North Korea has been a sanctioned entity since 2006 — formally, a Specially Designate...
