\u201cNever willingly cooperate with a government investigation, it\u2019s like inviting a murderer into your house who says they just want to chat.\u201d Roger Ver on X, April 2019<\/p>\n
Who is Roger Ver?<\/p>\n
Roger Ver, the man once called \u201cBitcoin Jesus\u201d because of his early advocacy and investment in Bitcoin nearly 15 years ago, was born in San Jose in 1979, attended Valley Christian High School and studied at De Anza College before transferring to Stanford University.<\/p>\n
At the age of 19, Ver founded MemoryDealers in Santa Clara, making millions selling memory modules and networking hardware to Silicon Valley companies. MemoryDealers is known as one of the first businesses to accept bitcoin as payment in 2011, but it also became central to a recent U.S. tax fraud case against Ver, who was indicted in 2024 for allegedly failing to report large bitcoin distributions from the company. MemoryDealers also operated Bitcoinstore.com, an early cryptocurrency services company.<\/p>\n
In 2001, Ver was charged with selling explosives on eBay in 1999 and 2000. Ver pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2002 to 10 months in prison.<\/p>\n
In 2014, he renounced his U.S. citizenship after obtaining citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean. He reportedly also acquired citizenship in Antigua and Barbuda. He also has lived in Japan, and claims to be fluent in Japanese. In 2012, Ver founded Ripple.com and Blockchain.com. He also founded Agilestar in 2005, which sells Cisco-related memory and accessories.<\/p>\n
In April 2024, Ver was arrested in Spain on a U.S. indictment for alleged tax evasion. His attorneys argued that the case violated constitutional protections and contested his extradition to face charges in the U.S.<\/p>\n
Last October, Ver reached a resolution with the Justice Department in a \u201cdeferred prosecution agreement\u201d to settle the federal tax charges. After Ver agreed to pay approximately $49.9 million in back taxes, penalties and interest, the government dismissed the indictment. ProPublica takes a look at the deal.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Barry Holtzclaw, San Jose Inside<\/p>\n
‘Donald Trump, I need your help’<\/p>\n
Days into President Donald Trump\u2019s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X<\/a> to his hundreds of thousands of followers. \u201cPlease Donald Trump, I need your help,\u201d he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. \u201cI am an American. \u2026 Help me come home.\u201d<\/p>\n The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed \u201cBitcoin Jesus\u201d for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.<\/p>\n Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump\u2019s new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn\u2019t have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million \u2014 roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place \u2014 and allowed him to walk away.<\/p>\n Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump\u2019s Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors<\/a> and political allies<\/a>. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped.<\/a><\/p>\n Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump\u2019s former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the \u201cFriends of Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ver episode, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals the extent to which white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, case records and conversations with people familiar with his case.<\/p>\n Trump changes tax crime enforcement<\/p>\n he Trump administration has particularly upended the way tax law violators are handled. Late last year, the administration essentially dissolved<\/a> the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, dividing responsibility among a number of other offices and divisions. Tax prosecutions fell by more than a quarter<\/a>, and more than a third<\/a> of the 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases have quit.<\/p>\n But even amid this turmoil, Ver\u2019s case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team \u2014 most importantly, former Trump attorney Chris Kise \u2014 Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. One newly installed Justice Department leader who had previously represented Trump\u2019s family questioned his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver\u2019s team wielded unusual control over the final deal, down to dictating that the agreement would not include the word \u201cfraud.\u201d<\/p>\n It remains the only tax prosecution the administration has killed outright.<\/p>\n Ver did not reply to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had always denied dodging his tax bill intentionally \u2014 a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax violation \u2014 and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.<\/p>\n \u201cRoger Ver took full responsibility for his gross financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Department of Justice did not shy away from exposing those who cheat the system. The notion that any defendant can buy their way out of accountability under this administration is not founded in reality,\u201d said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson.<\/p>\n In response to a list of detailed questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department.\u201cI know of no cases like this,\u201d said Scott Schumacher, a former tax prosecutor and the director of the graduate program in taxation at the University of Washington. It is nearly unheard of for the department to abandon an indicted criminal case years in the making. \u201cThey\u2019re basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution.\u201d<\/p>\n Ver is no MAGA loyalist<\/p>\n Roger Ver is not a longtime ally of Trump\u2019s or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, a day he once called<\/a> \u201cthe happiest day of my entire life.\u201d In the early days of bitcoin, he controlled about 1% of the world\u2019s supply.<\/p>\n Ver is clean-cut and fit \u2014 he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while he was a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He\u2019s often characterized that first brush with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the U.S. for Japan.<\/p>\n Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the budding cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he got a kick out of needling government authority and arguing that crypto was the building block of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Ver announced<\/a> he had raised $100 million and was seeking a location to create a new \u201cnon-country\u201d without any central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy people consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has no individual income tax.<\/p>\n \u201cBitcoin completely undermines the power of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people\u2019s income to control them in any way,\u201d he told a gathering <\/a>of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. \u201cIt makes it so incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes.\u201d More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do so: They \u201csay, \u2018Roger, I need your help. How do I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Renouncing U.S. citizenship isn\u2019t a magic get-out-of-tax-free technique. Since 2008, the U.S. has required expatriates with assets above $2 million pay a steep \u201cexit tax\u201d on the appreciation of all their property.<\/p>\n In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS twice. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally did not own any bitcoin. He would later admit in his deal with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoin worth approximately $73.7 million at the time. Then in 2017, the government alleged, Ver tried to conceal the transfer of roughly $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In all, the government said he had evaded nearly $50 million in taxes.<\/p>\n Ver\u2019s defense was that his failure to pay taxes arose from a lack of clarity as to how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrency, good-faith accounting errors and reliance on his advisors\u2019 advice. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his companies\u2019 holdings and pinpoint what the bitcoin was actually worth.<\/p>\n The Biden administration\u2019s Justice Department dismissed this legal argument. Prosecutors had troves of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own attorneys and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver\u2019s team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset tracing in the case was \u201crock solid,\u201d according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury, prosecutors maintained, was unlikely to buy Ver\u2019s defense that he made a good-faith error.<\/p>\n The arrest in Spain<\/p>\n By the time of Trump\u2019s 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 worried he might use to escape on the high seas.<\/p>\n In Trump, Ver saw a possible way out. After the 2024 election, he was \u201cbarking up every tree,\u201d said his friend Brock Pierce, a fellow ultrawealthy crypto investor who tried to gin up sympathy for Ver in Trump\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n Ver had initially gone the orthodox route of hiring tax attorneys from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver now also launched a media blitz seeking a pardon from the incoming president.\u201cIf anybody knows what it\u2019s like to be the victim of lawfare it\u2019s Trump, so I think he\u2019ll be able to see it in this case as well,\u201d Ver said in a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carlson\u2019s show. On Charlie Kirk\u2019s show, Ver appeared with tape over his mouth with the word \u201ccensored\u201d written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the Trump-friendly influencer, began posting that Ver\u2019s prosecution was unfair. Ver paid<\/a> Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby Congress for an end to the tax provision he was accused of violating.<\/p>\n Ver\u2019s pardon campaign fizzled. His public pressure campaign \u2014 in which he kept comparing himself to Trump \u2014 was not landing, according to Pierce. \u201cYou aren\u2019t doing yourself any favors \u2014 shut up,\u201d his friend recalled saying.<\/p>\n One objection in the White House, according to a person who works on pardons, may have been Ver\u2019s flamboyant rejection of his American citizenship. Less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X, \u201cRoger Ver gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges.\u201d<\/p>\n But inside the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The skeleton key proved to be one of the \u201cFriends of Trump,\u201d a seasoned defense lawyer named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican power player who served as the state\u2019s solicitor general and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a place in Trump\u2019s inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defenders willing to represent the president after his 2020 election loss. Kise defended Trump in the Justice Department investigation stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and against charges that Trump mishandled classified documents when leaving the White House.<\/p>\n Kise had worked shoulder-to-shoulder on Trump\u2019s cases with two lawyers who were now leaders in the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs day-to-day operations at the department as deputy attorney general, and his associate deputy attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise reportedly helped select Blanche<\/a> to join Trump\u2019s legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump\u2019s family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022.<\/p>\n On Ver\u2019s legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressing his old colleagues to rethink their prosecution against Ver.<\/p>\n Kise scored the legal team\u2019s first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that cut out the career attorneys most familiar with the merits of the case.<\/p>\n In that meeting, however, it wasn\u2019t clear that the new Justice Department leadership would be willing to interfere with the trajectory of Ver\u2019s case. While the Trump administration had backed off aggressive enforcement of white-collar crimes writ large, the administration said it was still pursuing most criminal cases that had already been charged<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bhirud initially expressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was \u201chard to believe\u201d that a man going by \u201cBitcoin Jesus\u201d would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the case.<\/p>\n Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.<\/p>\n The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime, or the case would go to trial.<\/p>\n But Kise would not stop lobbying his former colleagues to reconsider. Blanche and Bhirud had already demanded that career officials justify the case again and again. Over the course of the summer, Kise wore down the Trump appointees\u2019 zeal for pursuing Ver on criminal charges.<\/p>\n Kise and the law firm of Steptoe did not respond to questions.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile there were meetings and conversations with DOJ, that is not uncommon. The line attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence,\u201d said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver\u2019s tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.<\/p>\n It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had incessantly accused of being \u201cweaponized\u201d against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was flooded with requests to reconsider prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had singled them out for political persecution, too.<\/p>\n