One tweet from Javier Milei pushed the market cap of the LIBRA token to $4.5 billion in February 2025 — and within hours it had wiped out 95% of that value. A year and a half of investigations ended Friday when Argentine federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi dismissed the criminal case against the president, his sister Karina, and nine others.
In a 60-page ruling, the judge found no "criminally relevant deception." Promoting a token from the presidency's own social media account, he wrote, doesn't by itself turn into a fraud scheme — wild price swings, in his view, are just how memecoins behave. None of the eleven defendants gave formal testimony. Investigators found a note about $5 million on a co-defendant's phone but couldn't prove the money actually moved, and deleted messages and call logs stayed out of reach.
The underlying story was explosive from day one. After Milei's post on February 14, 2025, project wallets pulled $107 million within hours, while the token was still trading near its peak. For investors who bought in on the hype of a presidential endorsement, it looked like a textbook rug pull — except the person doing the promoting ran the country.
Milei called the ruling proof that the case had been political persecution all along. Opposition lawmaker Maximiliano Ferraro called it "a planned judicial operation of cover-up and impunity." Five investors previously dropped from the case are now petitioning the Federal Criminal Cassation Court to be reinstated — the only path left to an appeal.
Behind the legal language sits a simpler question: what happens when a sitting head of state promotes an asset that collapses within hours. Argentina's answer, for now, is nothing — not without direct proof of a conspiracy. That's an uncomfortable precedent elsewhere too: a president's public endorsement of a token isn't, by itself, enough to trigger criminal liability, even when investors lose hundreds of millions.
