US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence after being convicted of running an underground online marketplace used by thousands of drug dealers and other individuals to make illicit sales worth more than $200 million in bitcoins.
The Republican president kept his campaign promise to end the imprisonment of Ulbricht, 40, which began with his 2013 arrest in what became a historic US prosecution launched just years after the emergence of the popular cryptocurrency.
“The scum who worked to convict him are some of the same crazy people who participated in modern weaponizing the government against me,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
The Trump administration is expected to significantly roll back what had been a crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector during former Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Mr. Trump announced his intention to commute Ulbricht’s sentence in May, during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarian Party, which advocates the legalization of drugs, had pushed for Mr. Ulbricht’s release, calling the case an example of excess of power.
His arrest ended what prosecutors described as a global black market bazaar that, for two years starting in 2011, was used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell illegal drugs and other services. illicit assets worth $214 million.
The website relied on the Tor network to communicate anonymously and accepted bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to conceal their identity and location.
-Prosecutors said Ulbricht ran Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a character in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” and took extreme measures to protect the marketplace’s operation .
These measures included soliciting the killing of several people who posed a threat, although there is no evidence that any killings were actually committed.
Ulbricht admitted to creating Silk Road, which a defense attorney said at his trial was a “free-travel, free-market site.” But his lawyers argued that Mr Ulbricht then handed the site over to others and was lured towards the end to become a “scapegoat” for its real operators.
“I wanted to allow people to make choices in their lives and to have a private and anonymous life,” Mr. Ulbricht said at his sentencing hearing in May 2015.
In February 2015, a Manhattan federal jury convicted Ulbricht of distributing drugs over the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering.
“What you did is unprecedented,” former U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest said during Ulbricht’s sentencing. “By being the first to take this step, you sit here as the accused and you must pay the consequences.
