President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he 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. President Trump said he called Ulbricht's mother and told her he intended to pardon 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. It’s ridiculous,” Trump said in a Truth social post.
President Trump has vowed to turn the United States into the crypto capital of the world by ending the crackdown promoted by officials under Joe Biden and taking a completely relaxed approach to regulating digital currencies. did. 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.
Over the three years Mr. Ulbricht ran Silk Road, prosecutors say he made $18 million in fees on a website that listed thousands of products in categories such as “marijuana,” “psychedelics,” and “stimulants.” announced that they had collected over 10,000 Bitcoins. 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.
The government said in court papers that Mr. 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, including on the Silk Road. He said there was a wider range of illegal products being sold than what was available. .
