By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
The question of the day: What do Floridians Brian Ballard, Roger Stone, Chris Kise, Justin Sayfie, Leonard Curry, Sylvester Lukis – lobbyists all – have in common?
They’re all cashing in on Roger Ver, 46, an immensely rich client and early crypto proselytizer nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus.”
Ver, facing federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges, hired them because they’ve got the connections he needed.
Ver paid Fort Lauderdale’s Stone – President Trump’s longtime political advisor –$600,000 in January via Stone’s corporate shop, Drake Ventures LLC. Stone’s assignment, according to lobbying reports he filed with Congress: lobby the “US government” about Ver’s prosecution and its regulation and tax policy regarding cryptocurrency.
Lobbying reports filed by Ballard Partners show, too, that on Sept. 8 it received $300,000 via Chris Kise and Associates, the Tallahassee law firm defending Ver, to lobby the White House and Justice Department on Ver’s behalf. The lobbyists for the job: name partner Brian Ballard, a Tallahassee resident, Fort Lauderdale government relations lawyer Sayfie, ex-Jacksonville mayor and Republican Party of Florida chairman Curry – and Lukis, of counsel to the Fort Lauderdale law firm Panza Maurer.
Kise’s fee for representing Ver isn’t public.
It didn’t take long for Stone, Kise, Ballard and the gang to at least appear to get some results. On Oct. 14, the Justice Department dropped Ver’s indictment.A federal grand jury in Los Angeles had charged “Bitcoin Jesus” in February 2024 with evading at least $48 million in taxes. The indictment was unsealed two months later after Ver, who renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, was arrested in Spain. He faced decades in jail.
The Justice Department announced this month that Ver had entered into what’s known as a deferred prosecution agreement in which he admitted to misconduct and paid the IRS nearly $50 million in back taxes, penalties and interest for “his willful failure” to properly report his bitcoin holdings on tax returns when he quit the U.S. and obtained citizenship in the Caribbean nation Saint Kitts and Nevis.
VER’S DESPERATION
Why Ver paid Stone $600,000 when he ultimately settled the case by paying the nearly $50 million the government said he owed is a lingering question. Another question: Why did Ver pay Ballard Partners $300,000 when he already has direct access to President Trump via Kise, who represented Trump in his New York civil fraud case and the federal Mar-a-Lago documents case?
Likely, it’s because Ver looked desperate to obtain a pardon. On Jan. 26, the former California resident posted a slick, fawning video on X in which he addressed Trump personally, informing him of his crypto credentials and desire to return to the U.S.
“Mr. President, I am an American, and I need your help. Only you, with your commitment to justice, can save me @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote.
Since declaring during his first term that he was “not a fan” of crypto, Trump has developed a soft spot for crypto kingpins that appears to bode well for Ver. The change happened as Trump and his family have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars through their high-profile cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.
Among the first acts of his second term, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2015 of money laundering and conspiracy to commit drug trafficking as the operator of the early dark web marketplace Silk Road, where drugs and other illicit items were bought and sold using Bitcoin.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation [sic] of government against me,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site at the time. “He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
Last week, Trump pardoned multi-billionaire Changpeng Zhao, his business partner in World Liberty Financial and the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance who pleaded guilty in November 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program in violation of the Bank Security Act. Zhao served four months in a low security federal correctional facility, and Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines.
In between the pardons of Ulbricht and Zhao, another crypto billionaire, Justin Sun, saw the Securities and Exchange Commission abandon its 2023 fraud lawsuit against him. According to a Sept. 17 letter to SEC Chair Paul Atkins from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-OR, and Rep. Sean Casten, D-IL, following Trump’s election victory a year ago, Sun “made sizeable investments in two cryptocurrency projects that directly enriched the President and his family.” They include $75 million in World Liberty Financial and “multi-million-dollar investments” in the $TRUMP meme coin that have “generated an estimated $400 million for the President and his family,” the letter says.
VER APPEARS TO BREACH PLEA DEAL
Getting back to Ver, the bitcoin maven has also employed a passel of other criminal defense lawyers, at least two of whom are wired in to Trump.
Jeffrey Neiman, of Fort Lauderdale’s Neiman Mays Floch & Almeida, represented Paul Manafort, Trump’s longtime pal, former lobbyist and briefly his campaign manager in 2016, when the Justice Department sued him in 2022 seeking about $3 million in civil penalties for allegedly failing to file required reports about more than 20 foreign bank accounts he controlled in 2013 and 2014. The case was settled in March 2023 when Manafort agreed to pay the government $3.15 million.
[Neiman’s former colleague, Kathryn Meyers, of Miami’s Marcus Rashbaum Pineiro & Meyers was also on Ver’s legal team.]
Attorney David Schoen, of Montgomery, AL, helped defend Trump during his second impeachment for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The House impeached Trump on Jan. 13, one week before his term ended and Joe Biden was sworn in as president. The Senate acquitted him after a five-day trial in the Senate in February 2021.
Schoen’s other clients have included Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in the days leading up to his death in a New York City jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019.
If the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles that prosecuted Ver, led by acting boss Bilal Essayli, actually cares about justice, they might want to check on whether Ver has already breached the terms of his deferred prosecution agreement – which would allow the government to reinstate the tax and mail fraud charges.
Paragraph 17 of the agreement says, “Defendant agrees that neither he, nor any of his agents, will make any public statements contradicting any of the admissions he has made as part of this Agreement.”
But on Ver’s social media platforms, including X, Facebook, You Tube, Instagram, Telegram – where he appears to be back in business pumping crypto – and his personal website, rogerver.com, where he continues to tout his innocence in an avalanche of videos and quotes, he often accomplishes that that by not taking down public posts he wrote before the agreement.
For example, his website says up front (emphasis by Ver), “Roger Ver, a visionary in the world of cryptocurrency, is facing unjust legal prosecution stemming from his efforts to innovate in a legally uncertain landscape. Sign this petition to help secure justice for Roger and ensure pioneers like him can continue driving financial freedom and innovation. Together, we can make a difference.”
Clicking through to the petition, intended to be sent to Trump, it stated on Sunday that “97,928 / 100,000” people had signed and that “5 people signed this week.”
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