The U.S. Department of Justice notified staff in a four-page memo on Monday evening that, “effective immediately,” the agency was disbanding its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, which was dedicated to crypto-related investigations.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the second-ranking official in the Justice Department and Donald J. Trump’s defense attorney during the president’s criminal trial, asserted that the agency “is not a digital asset regulator” and it would no longer target “virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and offline wallets for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations.”