President Donald Trump has granted a “full and unconditional” pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the illegal online drug market Silk Road.
Ulbricht has been in prison since 2013 and was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running an underground market in which drug traffickers made more than $200 million in illegal transactions using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. . President Trump said he called Ulbricht’s mother and told her he was pardoning her son “in honor of her and the libertarian movement that has supported me so strongly.”
“The scumbags who worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the weaponization of modern government against me. He received two life sentences and 40 years in prison. This is ridiculous,” the president said in a post on Truth Social.
The move drew praise from the Libertarian Party, which advocates drug legalization and has long called for Ulbricht’s release, citing the incident as an example of government overreach. President Trump announced plans to commute Ulbricht’s sentence during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention in May.
“Ross Ulbricht was a Liberal political prisoner for more than a decade. Saving his life was one of our top priorities, and we are proud that it has finally paid off.” said Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian National Committee.
Ulbricht was released from a federal prison in Arizona late Tuesday following President Trump’s announcement, according to Federal Bureau of Prisons records.
His attorney, Joshua Dratel, said in an email that he is “very satisfied that the wrong was righted.” He said the pardon gives him confidence that Ulbricht “will be able to live out the rest of his life as the productive person he has been for all these years.”
The decision comes as the Trump administration is expected to significantly reorient its regulatory crackdown on the crypto sector during Joe Biden’s tenure.
President Trump has taken a completely lax approach to regulating digital currencies, promising to turn the United States into the crypto capital of the world. Since his election victory last November, the value of major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, has soared.
Ulbricht’s arrest in 2013 meant the supply of drugs was virtually limitless, with nearly 4,000 drug dealers connected from sidewalks to cyberspace in what prosecutors described as an unprecedented one-stop online shopping mall. A mall described as expanding its market and allowing drugs to be sold in a way never seen before has been shut down. It has grown to more than 100,000 buyers in markets from Argentina and Australia to the United States and Ukraine.
Prosecutors say that during the three years that Mr. Ulbricht ran Silk Road, Mr. Ulbricht made over 1,800 sales through commissions on a website that listed thousands of products in categories such as “marijuana,” “psychedelics,” and “stimulants.” announced that they had collected $10,000 in Bitcoin. The suspect brokered more than 1 million drug transactions worth more than $183 million while operating the website under the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” named after the adventurer character in “The Princess Bride.” It is said that he did. Prosecutors said some people died from drugs purchased on the Silk Road.
The government said in court papers that Ulbricht left behind a blueprint for establishing a new “black market” in the sophisticated spaces of the Internet that was difficult to trace, and others followed suit, where the Silk Road He said there is a wider range of illegal products being sold than what is available in the US. .
