By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence after being convicted of running an underground online marketplace that was used by thousands of drug dealers and others to conduct over $200 million worth of illicit sales using bitcoin.
The Republican president made good on a campaign pledge to end the imprisonment of Ulbricht, 40, that began with his arrest in 2013 in what became a landmark U.S. prosecution launched only a few years after the emergence of the popular cryptocurrency.
“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,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump’s administration is expected to significantly reverse course on what had been a crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector during Democratic former President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Trump had announced plans to commute Ulbricht’s sentence in May during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarian Party, which has advocated for drug legalization, had 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 bazaar that for two years starting in 2011 had been used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214 million worth of illegal drugs and other illicit services.
The website relied on the Tor network to communicate anonymously and accepted bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to conceal their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht ran Silk Road under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a character in the 1987 movie “The Princess Bride,” and took extreme steps to protect the marketplace’s operation.
Those steps, they said, included soliciting the murders of several people who posed a threat, though they also said no evidence exists that any murders were actually carried out.
Ulbricht acknowledged he created Silk Road, which a defense lawyer at his trial said was intended as a “freewheeling, free market site.” But his lawyers contended Ulbricht had later handed off the website to others and was lured back toward its end to become the “fall guy” for its true 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 of charges including distributing drugs through the Internet and conspiring 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 in breaking that ground as the first person, you sit here as the defendant having to pay the consequences for that.”
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil, Jasper Ward and Nate Raymond; Editing by Sandra Maler, Alexia Garamfalvi and Rosalba O’Brien)
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