By Nate Raymond (NS:)
(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 market where drug traffickers and others conducted more than $200 million in illicit trade using Bitcoin.
The Republican president followed through on his campaign pledge to free Ulbricht, 40, who was arrested in 2013 and sentenced in 2015 in what became a landmark American trial that began just a few years after the rise of the popular cryptocurrency.
“The scum who worked to convict him were the same lunatics who participated in weaponizing the modern-day government against me,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Trump said the pardon was “full and unconditional,” adding that he called Ulbricht's mother to tell her the news on Tuesday.
Ulbricht has been imprisoned in a federal prison in Arizona, and his attorney said he hopes Ulbricht will be released soon.
“After more than a decade in prison, this decision provides Ross the opportunity to start over, rebuild his life, and contribute positively to society,” Ulbricht’s attorney, Brandon Sample, said in a statement.
The Trump administration is expected to significantly reverse course on what was a crackdown on the cryptocurrency sector by regulators during former Democratic President Joe Biden's term.
Trump had announced plans to commute Ulbricht's sentence in May during a speech at the Liberal National Convention. The Liberal Party, which has called for drug legalization, had pressed for Ulbricht's release, describing the case as an example of government excesses.
His arrest ended what prosecutors described as a global black market that more than 100,000 people used for two years starting in 2011 to buy and sell illegal drugs and other illicit services worth $214 million.
Prosecutors said some people died from drugs purchased on the Silk Road.
The Silk Road website relied on the Tor network to communicate anonymously and accepted Bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to hide their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht ran Silk Road under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a character in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” and took aggressive steps to protect the market's operation.
They said those steps included incitement to kill several people who posed a threat, although they also said there was no evidence that any murders were actually carried out.
Ulbricht admitted that he created Silk Road, which the defense lawyer said at his trial was intended to be a “free market free site.” But his lawyers contended that Ulbricht later turned the site over to others and was once again lured toward his end to become its “fall guy” for its real operators.
“I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity,” Ulbricht said at his sentencing hearing in May 2015.
A federal jury in Manhattan in February 2015 found Ulbricht guilty on charges including online drug distribution, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and money laundering.
“What she did was unprecedented,” former U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest said in her sentencing of Ulbricht. “By breaking that foundation as the first person, you sit here as the defendant who has to pay the consequences.”
