President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he has pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, an underground website that the FBI once called “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet.”
Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015.
Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media site, that he had spoken to Ulbricht’s mother on his first full day in office.
“It was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” he wrote. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
He called Ulbricht’s prison sentence “ridiculous.”
During the campaign, he had promised to help Ulbricht in a speech at the Libertarian Party National Convention last May.
Libertarian activists, who generally oppose criminal drug policies, have long believed that government investigators overreached in building their case against Silk Road. Many held “Free Ross” signs.
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The Silk Road site was set up by Ulbricht in 2011 on the dark web, a part of the internet that’s inaccessible to traditional search engines. It did not accept cash or credit cards; users had to pay with cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin. All transactions were encrypted and hence untraceable.
It became a place for people to buy and sell illicit drugs, weapons, poisons, and services such as computer hacking.
“Silk Road was the Amazon of drug sites,” former FBI Special Agent Milan Patel said in an interview for the CBS News series “FBI Declassified.”
“We saw murder-for-hire postings, hacking-for-hire postings, which was, ‘hey, pay me two bitcoin and I’ll hack into your ex-wife or ex-husband’s email account,'” Patel said. “…It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it.”
Ulbricht ran the site until his arrest in 2013, when it was seized by the FBI. During his trial, prosecutors said at least six deaths were traced to overdoses from drugs bought on Silk Road. They alleged that Ulbricht collected $18 million through commissions on tens of thousands of drug sales, and presented evidence alleging he sought to have people killed for threatening his business.
Since Mr. Trump assumed office, he has also pardoned about 1,500 defendants convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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