The Justice Department has directed prosecutors to limit their pursuit of certain cryptocurrency crimes, the latest example of the Trump administration pulling back on white-collar criminal enforcement.

In a memo sent to staff members Monday night, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department will no longer pursue cases that he described as better left to financial regulatory agencies. Instead, prosecutors should focus on investigating people who commit crimes using cryptocurrency, such as defrauding investors, dealing narcotics and enabling human trafficking, Blanche said.

Blanche also announced the disbandment of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, a group of cryptocurrency, cybercrime and money-laundering experts established in 2022 to “address the challenge posed by the criminal misuse of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.” The team played a leading role in some of the government’s largest investigations of players in the crypto sector.

“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche wrote.

The Trump administration has taken multiple steps to legitimize and loosen regulation of the relatively nascent cryptocurrency industry, a sector in which the president and his family have expanded their own financial interests within the past year.

President Donald Trump vowed as a candidate to ease restrictions on crypto companies, shoring up his support and donations from tech investors and digital assets executives who said they had been persecuted by Biden administration efforts to regulate the market.

The Biden administration ramped up scrutiny of the industry after a series of collapses that harmed consumers — including the implosion of the fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022, which resulted in the loss of more than $8 billion in customer deposits.

At the first-ever White House crypto summit in March — co-hosted by the president’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, tech investor David Sacks — Trump pledged to end the Biden administration’s “war on crypto.”

Since then, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped more than a dozen cases against crypto firms. Last month, both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pledged to stop evaluating banks based on “reputational risk” — a practice that some venture capitalists have claimed unfairly “de-banked” founders of cryptocurrency start-ups.

Meanwhile, the president and first lady Melania Trump have begun selling meme coins, a speculative venture that some industry insiders see as a conflict of interest.

And in September, Trump and his sons announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture. The business plans to sell a stablecoin, even as the White House works with lawmakers to develop legislation that would regulate these forms of cryptocurrencies that are backed by the dollar.

In his memo to the Justice Department, Blanche sharply criticized crypto regulatory efforts under President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland. “The prior Administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution,” Blanche wrote, calling that push “ill conceived and poorly executed.”

Blanche said the Justice Department would largely move away from pursuing litigation against crypto companies accused of violating securities, commodities or banking secrecy laws. Those statutes were used to secure the convictions of three founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX in 2022. Trump has issued pardons to all three.

It was in 2022 that the Justice Department launched the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team with a goal of dismantling cryptocurrency exchanges and “mixers” that were used by criminals to hide the ownership and source of their ill-gotten funds.

As he disbanded the team Monday, Blanche said that rather than target those platforms for “the acts of their end users,” prosecutors should now prioritize the criminals themselves.

Officials had already transferred the founding head of the enforcement team — national security prosecutor Eun Young Choi — to a newly created “sanctuary cities” division of the Justice Department in the first days of the Trump administration.

Choi’s team played a leading role in some of the department’s most significant crypto cases, including against the owners of Tornado Cash — a cryptocurrency “mixer” alleged to have scrambled funds to obscure their true owners — and the prosecution of Avraham Eisenberg, who was convicted last year in a $110 million market-manipulation case in Manhattan.

“It’s hard to underestimate the importance this task force has had … in pursuing some really huge crypto hacks and cases,” said Yesha Yadav, a Vanderbilt University law professor who closely follows cryptocurrency and financial markets.

Without this team in place, Yadav said, intelligence regarding potential cryptocurrency crimes could become “more diffuse,” making it more difficult for the government to pursue “incredibly nimble, very opportunistic actors in this space.”

The Eisenberg case was the Justice Department’s first prosecution involving an open-market cryptocurrency manipulation scheme. It was prosecuted with attorneys from the department’s Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit. Blanche’s memo ordered that unit to cease enforcement of digital currency cases and focus instead on immigration-related crimes and procurement fraud.

The case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm is set for trial later this year. Prosecutors have accused Storm of knowingly profiting from criminals, including North Korean hackers. But Storm has drawn support from cryptocurrency advocates who say he is being unfairly targeted for crimes committed by others using the platform he developed.

Storm’s attorney, Brian Klein, said he read Blanche’s memo Tuesday “as supporting the dismissal of the case.”

“As we’ve said all along,” Klein said in an email. “It should never have been brought.”

Justin D. Weitz, a Morgan Lewis partner and former Justice Department lawyer who oversaw cryptocurrency cases, called Blanche’s announcement an abandonment of cases in the digital asset space.

“What I see them doing here is recentering focus to be about victims and fraud instead of these technical violations,” Weitz said. “The overall goal should have always been: How are we protecting consumers who are getting ripped off in this Wild West? If DOJ devotes resources to protect victims of cryptocurrency-related fraud and manipulation, that’s going to be a good thing that will make the industry better.”

Aaron Schaffer, Nitasha Tiku and Lisa Bonos contributed to this report.