For years, President Donald Trump complained that his predecessor had weaponized the judicial system against him on what he claimed were trumped-up charges, including election interference, mishandling classified documents, hush-money payments, and fraudulent tax and property dealings. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the president seems wholly uninterested in stopping the very weaponization he once railed against.

This week, Keonne Rodriguez, the co-creator of the bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai, was sentenced to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine—the maximum sentence under the charge for which he pleaded guilty earlier this year. "In July, Rodriguez and his cofounder William Hill plead[ed] guilty [to] the known transmission of illicit proceeds," The Rage reported on Thursday.

This is honestly the worst:

In the TD Bank money-laundering scandal in 2024, the Justice Department collected the largest penalty ever imposed under the Bank Secrecy Act for poor compliance practices that allowed far more illicit funds to flow through its dollar-based system than the amount of bitcoin that ever ran through Samourai. Notably, nobody went to jail for that crime, even though bank employees were bribed tens of thousands of dollars to look the other way while criminal networks laundered more than a billion dollars of illicit funds through a top-10 bank in America.

It's time for the Trump administration to get its legal house in order—that should start with a pardon for Rodriguez. Then again, unlike C.Z., Rodriguez doesn't have a billion-dollar investment to make in a Trump family–related business, nor a bunch of bitcoin votes to sway a critical election. Right now, leniency in crypto cases seems reserved for those with billions to invest or political leverage to trade.