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Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running an online market for illegal drugs and hacking services.
“The scumbags who worked to convict him (Ulbricht) were some of the same lunatics who participated in weaponizing the modern-day government against me,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social late Tuesday.
during UlbrichtDuring the defendant's trial, US prosecutors said he built the anonymous market, known as Silk Road, to exploit the anonymity of the dark web and the digital currency Bitcoin.
At the time, the case attracted the attention of bitcoin advocates and libertarian groups who claimed the government was trying to turn web hosting into a criminal activity.
When announcing the pardon, Trump said it was “in honor of the libertarian movement that strongly supported me.”
Trump had pledged to pardon Ulbricht, who was arrested in 2013 in San Francisco, during the Liberal Party's National Convention last May.
The Liberal Party said after the amnesty: “This is a seismic shift, a rupture in the stifling wall of state repression.”
The move comes after the cryptocurrency industry donated millions of dollars to Trump's election campaign, in which he pledged to make America the “bitcoin superpower of the world.”
Silk Road ran on the Tor network and only accepted bitcoin as payment, which US prosecutors said helped keep its users and locations anonymous.
Prosecutors said the site allowed criminals to sell large quantities of drugs, computer hacking services and forged documents, among other illegal goods and services.
Prosecutors prepared statements from family members of the victims who purchased drugs and later died as a result of purchasing them from the site.
At a sentencing hearing in 2015, the judge said Ulbricht ordered five murders and paid for them, although she acknowledged that he was ultimately not charged and there was no evidence that any murder had been committed.
The US government seized 173,991 bitcoins from Ulbricht's laptop at the time of his arrest.
