From Nate Raymond (NSE:)
(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for running an underground online marketplace where drug dealers and others conducted more than $200 million in illegal trade using bitcoin.
The Republican president made good on a campaign promise to free Ulbricht, 40, who was arrested in 2013 and convicted in 2015 in what became a landmark US prosecution launched just a few years after the popular cryptocurrency emerged.
“The scum who worked to impeach him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern weaponization of the government against me,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Trump said the pardon was “complete and unconditional.” He said he called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her the news on Tuesday. Ulbricht was being held at a federal prison in Arizona and it was unclear when he would be released.
Ulbricht’s attorney, Joshua Dratel, said in an email that he was “extremely pleased that the wrong has been righted.” He said the pardon ensured that Ulrbicht “can have a life ahead of him to be the productive person he has been able to be all these years.”
The Trump administration is expected to significantly reverse course from what was a crackdown on the cryptocurrency sector by regulators during former Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Trump announced plans to commute Ulbricht’s sentence in May during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarian Party, which advocated drug legalization, pushed for Ulbricht’s release, calling the case an example of government overreach.
His arrest brought to an end what prosecutors described as a global black market that used more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214 million worth of illegal drugs and other illegal services in two years, starting in 2011.
Prosecutors said some people died from drugs bought on the Silk Road.
The Silk Road website relied on the Tor network for anonymous communication and accepted bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to mask their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht ran Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to the character in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” and took extreme steps to protect the market’s operations.
Those steps, they said, included inciting the killings of several people who posed a threat, although they also said there was no evidence that any killings had actually been carried out.
Ulbricht admitted to creating Silk Road, which a defense attorney at his trial said was intended as a “free market place.” But his lawyers argued that Ulbricht later turned the website over to others and was lured back toward its end to become a “fall guy” for its real operators.
“I wanted to empower people to make decisions in their lives and to have privacy and anonymity,” Ulbricht said at a sentencing hearing in May 2015.
A federal jury in Manhattan in February 2015 found Ulbricht guilty of charges that included internet drug distribution and conspiracy to commit computer hacking and money laundering.
“What you did was unprecedented,” now-former U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest said in sentencing Ulbricht. “And by breaking that foundation as the first person, you sit here as a defendant and you have to pay the consequences for that.”
