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Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he had granted a “full and unconditional” pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the illegal online drug marketplace the Silk Road.
Ulbricht has been incarcerated since 2013 and was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running the underground market where drug dealers and others conducted more than $200m in illicit trade using bitcoin. Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her he would pardon her son “in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous,” the president said in a Truth Social post.
The move drew praise from the Libertarian party – Trump had announced plans to commute Ulbricht’s sentence in May during a speech at the Libertarian national convention. The party, which has advocated for drug legalization, had long pushed for Ulbricht’s release and called the case an example of government overreach.
“Ross Ulbricht has been a libertarian political prisoner for more than a decade. I’m proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities and that has finally paid off,” said Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee.
Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua Dratel, in an email said he was “extremely gratified that an injustice has been corrected”. He said the pardon ensured Ulrbicht “can have a life ahead of him to be the productive person he could have been all these years”.
He has been imprisoned at a federal prison in Arizona and it was not immediately clear when he would be released.
The decision comes as Trump’s administration is expected to significantly reverse course on what had been a crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector during Joe Biden’s tenure.
Trump has pledged to transform the US into the crypto capital of the world, taking an altogether looser approach to regulation of digital currencies. Leading cryptocurrencies including bitcoin have surged in value since his election victory last November.
Ulbricht’s 2013 arrest shut down what prosecutors described as an unprecedented one-stop online shopping mall where the supply of drugs was virtually limitless, enabling nearly 4,000 drug dealers to expand their markets from the sidewalk to cyberspace, selling drugs on a never-before-seen scale to more than 100,000 buyers in markets stretching from Argentina and Australia to the United States and Ukraine.
In the three years Ulbricht ran Silk Road, prosecutors said he collected $18m in bitcoins through commissions on a website containing thousands of listings under categories like “Cannabis”, “Psychedelics” and “Stimulants”. They said he brokered more than 1m drug deals worth over $183m while he operated on the site under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts – a reference to the swashbuckling character in The Princess Bride. Prosecutors said some people died due to drugs bought on Silk Road.
The government said in court papers that Ulbricht left a blueprint that others have followed by establishing new “dark markets” in sophisticated spaces of the Internet that are hard to trace, where an even broader range of illicit goods are sold than were available on Silk Road.
