Lauren Rodriguez joined the show to talk about her husband Keonne's five-year sentence for building Samourai Wallet, the August 2023 FinCEN call that prosecutors hid for fourteen months, and what every Bitcoiner can do this week to help.
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Lauren Rodriguez joined me to talk about what it's like to wake up every morning and not have her husband next to her. Keonne is serving five years at FPC Morgantown in West Virginia for writing the code that became Samourai Wallet. Bill Lonergan Hill, his co-founder, is serving four. Both pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count in July 2025 after the Department of Justice dropped the money-laundering count. Both were sentenced in November. Both are now in federal prison.
The case is one of the worst injustices in the modern Bitcoin space. Six months before the sealed indictment was filed in February 2024, FinCEN officials told SDNY prosecutors that Samourai Wallet was not a money transmitting business under the agency's own guidance. The prosecutors filed charges anyway. They sat on the FinCEN call disclosure for fourteen months before the defense forced it out through a Brady request. In April 2025, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States issued a memo telling federal prosecutors to stop targeting non-custodial wallets like Samourai. The Samourai prosecution went forward anyway.
Lauren has become the public face of the family's fight. She set up billandkeonne.org as the central hub for the pardon campaign. She's the one keeping the story alive while Keonne is locked up and Bill is preparing to surrender. She'd rather not be doing any of this. Her first words on the show: "I'd rather not be here. I'd rather not be in this position. It's hard to wake up and not have my husband here."
I wrote a separate piece walking through the documented record of the case, the FinCEN call, the Brady disclosure, the judge reassignment, the Blanche Memo contradiction, the sentencing facts, and the precedent now on the books for every Bitcoin developer. This is the conversation behind it.
Federal inmates have a fixed number of phone minutes per month. Keonne and Lauren budget the minutes carefully. Six minutes a day, every morning at six, so they can speak before Lauren's day starts.
One morning this spring, the six o'clock call didn't come. Lauren waited until ten-thirty before calling the prison herself. The duty officer gave her what she described as a "nondescript BOP answer." He was there. He was well. They couldn't tell her anything beyond that. Hours later Keonne finally called. The phone system had gone down across the facility.
"My mind obviously goes to the worst case," Lauren told me. "Is he injured? Do they not know he's injured? Did something happen?"
That morning the outage was technical. The position Lauren is in is not.
This is the documented injustice at the center of the case, and Lauren stated it cleanly:
"Six months prior to indictment, they asked the regulator whether Samourai is in violation of these regulations and laws, and they said no. They brought charges anyways. They're not supposed to just be able to change the law or interpretation of the law and charge people without any kind of notice. But that's exactly what they did in this case."
The legal name for this is a Fifth Amendment fair-notice problem. The principle is that citizens have the right to know what conduct is criminal before being prosecuted for it. If FinCEN, the agency Congress charged with implementing the money-transmitter rules, says your software is not covered, and the Justice Department then prosecutes you for the same conduct under the same statutory framework, you have not been given fair notice.
The deeper problem is procedural. DOJ knew about the FinCEN call from the beginning. They had been told, by the regulator, that the conduct they wanted to prosecute was not a regulated activity. They filed the sealed indictment anyway in February 2024. Then they sat on the FinCEN disclosure for over a year. The defense did not learn about the August 2023 call until April 1, 2025, when they made a specific Brady request for any FinCEN communications.
Lauren's framing was direct: "We no longer live in a free society. If they can on a prosecutor's whim just decide that the law that you've been operating under for 10 years doesn't matter anymore, and they're going to charge you and ruin your life anyways and ruin your loved ones' lives."
April 24, 2024. FBI agents raided Keonne and Lauren's home in Pennsylvania. At the same hour, Portuguese police arrested Bill in Lisbon. The indictment was unsealed the same day. The Whirlpool servers were seized.
What stood out to Lauren about the way the raid was conducted was everything that didn't happen first. The DOJ had never sent letters, never requested information through counsel, never asked Samourai's lawyers what evidence the company could provide, never even given the procedural notice they would normally extend to a regulated entity like a bank. The first interaction with the government was an FBI team at her door at dawn. The millions of dollars it must have cost to coordinate a simultaneous international raid with Portuguese authorities was, in her telling, money spent to send a message that didn't have to be spent at all.
The disproportionate force was the message. Bill spent approximately eleven weeks in Portuguese pretrial detention before being transferred to US custody. The Samourai infrastructure was offline within hours. The chilling effect on the rest of the freedom-tech community was immediate.
The phrase Lauren came back to repeatedly. It's worth unpacking what she means.
Without privacy features, Bitcoin is the most surveillable monetary system ever invented. Every transaction is permanent and public. Every UTXO can be traced from its first appearance on the chain through every subsequent movement. Knowing one of someone's addresses lets you derive their entire balance, their transaction history, who they pay, who pays them, what they own. The companies that sell blockchain analysis to law enforcement (Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Elliptic) are profitable because the surveillance is technically trivial.
Privacy tools like CoinJoin (Whirlpool), PayJoin (Stowaway), and Lightning channel obfuscation (Ricochet's broadcast hops) are how a Bitcoin user reclaims even basic transactional privacy. None of them anonymize you to the bank-account-equivalent privacy that ordinary people take for granted in fiat. They just raise the cost of mass surveillance high enough that you're not transparent to a stranger who happens to receive one of your UTXOs.
Lauren framed it via the analogy of her own house:
"If you come over my house, I might invite you into my living room, but I might not have you upstairs into the bedrooms. And you're definitely not looking through my underwear drawer. That's privacy. I don't have anything to hide in there, but I'd rather not have people that I don't know that well in those private spaces. So this is our finances. Who you transact with, who you donate money to, what organizations you support, what causes, it's all indicative to speech, and it's a freedom. If you don't have financial privacy, you can't have financial freedom."
The Samourai prosecution is the test case for whether the government can criminalize publishing the software that gives people their underwear-drawer back.
Lauren is clear-eyed about the actual point of the prosecution. It wasn't to stop Samourai, Samourai was already small relative to the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. It was to make every other developer in the space afraid to build privacy tools. She named the categories of builders now at risk under the precedent: layer-two protocol developers, Bitcoin miners, Lightning node channel operators, eCash mint operators. Every coder writing software that other people use is, by the theory of the case, potentially liable for what those users do.
The legal theory does not stop at mixers. It extends to anyone whose published code could be used by someone else to do something the government does not like. Open-source wallet developers. Bitcoin Core contributors. Encrypted messaging app developers. The infrastructure of the freedom-tech ecosystem is operating in the same legal posture Samourai was operating in.
The bright spot: the Trump administration's stated posture, in both the April 2025 Blanche Memo and the President's own statements at Bitcoin conferences, is that this kind of prosecution should not happen. Whether that stated posture translates into actual restraint by US Attorneys around the country is the open question. The Samourai prosecution went forward under this administration. So did the pursuit of a Tornado Cash retrial against Roman Storm. The gap between the headline policy and the prosecutorial reality is currently the size of the federal prison sentence Keonne Rodriguez is serving.
Lauren has been organizing for a pardon since before Keonne surrendered in December. She's clear about why she thinks it's possible: the Bitcoin voting bloc, somewhere between 35 and 70 million Americans of voting age, mobilized for Ross Ulbricht's pardon and got it. The same coalition is now organizing for Keonne and Bill. Politicians are showing up at the conferences and on the floor of Congress because they want something from Bitcoiners. The job is to make freeing Keonne and Bill another cause the bloc demands action on.
The political mechanics are straightforward. The pardon is a presidential power, one person, one decision. The path is making the cost of not granting the pardon larger than the cost of granting it. That cost gets raised by petition signatures, by donations to the legal fund, by congressional statements of support, by sustained public attention, by reporting that doesn't let the story die.
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), the sponsor of the Keep Your Coins Act, has been the most consistent congressional voice on the case. His framing: "blaming Microsoft for drug cartels downloading and using Excel." Coin Center, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, the Cato Institute, and the Libertarian Party of Oregon have all formally supported the pardon ask.
Lauren's call to action on the show was direct: go to billandkeonne.org, sign the petition, donate to the legal fund, contact your representatives. The family is millions of dollars in legal debt. The midterms are coming. Bitcoin-aware politicians are asking for your votes and your donations, and Lauren's argument is that it's okay to ask them for something back.
The actionable list:
The interview is the human story. The full procedural record, the FinCEN call, the Brady disclosure timeline, the judge reassignment, the Blanche Memo contradiction, the sentencing facts, the related-case context (Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Fog, Helix), the code-as-speech precedents from Bernstein and Cox v. Sony, and the precedent now binding on every developer in the space, is documented in a separate piece: The DOJ Sent Samourai's Developers to Prison After FinCEN Said They Weren't Money Transmitters.
Lauren is Keonne Rodriguez's wife and has become the public voice of the family's pardon campaign. She runs billandkeonne.org and is reachable on X at @leamuirleyn.
