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Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison 2015 for designing an online marketplace for illegal drugs and hacking services.
“The scum who worked to convict him [Ulbricht] were some of the same lunatics involved in the modern weaponization of the government against me,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social late Tuesday.
During UlbrichtAt trial, US prosecutors said he built an anonymous marketplace, known as Silk Road, to take advantage of the anonymity of the dark web and the digital currency bitcoin.
At the time, the case drew attention from bitcoin evangelists and libertarian groups who argued that the government was trying to turn web hosting into a criminal activity.
In announcing the pardon, Trump said it was “in honor of the Libertarian Movement that has supported me so strongly.”
Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht, who was arrested in 2013 in San Francisco, at the Libertarian National Convention last May.
“This is a seismic shift, a crack in the suffocating wall of state oppression,” the Libertarian Party said after the pardon.
The move comes after the crypto industry donated millions of dollars to Trump’s election campaign, in which he promised to make America the “bitcoin superpower of the world.”
Silk Road was run on the Tor network and only accepted bitcoin as payment, which US prosecutors said helped keep its users and their locations anonymous.
The site allowed criminals to sell vast amounts of drugs, computer hacking services and forged documents, among other illegal goods and services, prosecutors said.
The US government seized 173,991 bitcoins from Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest.
