Trump pardons Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht for online drug scheme

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for running an underground online marketplace where drug dealers and others conducted more than $200m (R3.71bn) in illicit trade using bitcoin.

The Republican president made good on a campaign pledge to free Ulbricht, 40, who was arrested in 2013 and sentenced in 2015 in what became a landmark US 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 weaponisation of government against me,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump said the pardon was “full and unconditional” and he called Ulbricht's mother to break the news to her. Ulbricht was released from a federal prison in Arizona late on Tuesday after Trump's announcement, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records.

“After enduring more than a decade of incarceration, this decision offers Ross the opportunity to begin anew, to rebuild his life and to contribute positively to society,” Brandon Sample, Ulbricht's clemency attorney, said.

Trump's administration is expected to significantly reverse course on what had been a crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector during former Democratic president Joe Biden's tenure.

Trump 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 legalisation, 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 was used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214m (R3.97bn) worth of illegal drugs and other illicit services.

Prosecutors said some people died due to drugs bought on 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 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 carried out.

Ulbricht acknowledged he created Silk Road, which a defence lawyer at his trial said was intended as a “freewheeling, free market site”. His lawyers contended Ulbricht later handed off the website to others and was lured back towards 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 US 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.” 

Reuters