After federal prosecutors appeared to out the Trump-supporting victims of an alleged Nigerian cryptocurrency scam in a complaint, regional interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro blamed court clerks for temporarily sealing the entire court file from the public.
“The court made a ministerial, clerical error that as soon as we realized it, within hours, the whole docket was unsealed,” Pirro told NOTUS in an interview. “They admitted we never asked for the docket to be sealed.” (The court did not respond to questions from NOTUS.)
What prosecutors did ask for, however, according to Pirro, was for the original complaint to be sealed and an amended version be made public instead in order to shield the identity of a “company,” she said in an interview Tuesday.
As NOTUS first reported, the now-hidden first names, Ivan and Mouna, are the same first names as the CEO and CFO of the crypto exchange platform MoonPay. Both the original and amended complaint include an unredacted link to a payment transaction that lists the payer as a crypto wallet address that was linked to MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright in a separate 2023 case.
“We filed an amended complaint, the purpose of which was to remove the name of one of the companies,” Pirro told NOTUS. “This is the type of case where victims — including individuals, employees of a company, as well as a victim company — have a right to not have their names included in a complaint.”
There is no specific company name that was in the original complaint but not in the amended version.
MoonPay, which has boasted about a sharp uptick in customers and profits as an exclusive trading partner for President Donald Trump’s memecoin, did not respond to a request for comment.
Pirro is a longtime Trump ally, former Fox News commentator and Westchester County district attorney who is currently awaiting Senate confirmation to the U.S. attorney post for Washington, D.C., on a permanent basis.
Mark Hays, a crypto regulation advocate with Americans for Financial Reform, has previously said the Department of Justice’s attempt to recoup funds from a crypto scammer for one of the Trump family’s business partners while rolling back enforcement against crypto companies “smacks of favoritism or selective enforcement.”