U. S. President Donald Trump has pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for running an underground online marketplace where drug dealers and others made more than $200 million in the illicit Bitcoin industry.
Trump has pledged to release Ulbricht, 40, who was arrested in 2013 and convicted in 2015 in what has a landmark U. S. lawsuit against him. U. S. Introduced just a few years after the popular cryptocurrency emerged.
Ulbricht’s arrest had ended in the past a global black market that was used through more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214 million worth of illegal drugs and other illicit services.
His pardon comes as rioters who stormed the U. S. Capitol 4 years ago when Joe Biden chose began to be released from Criminal on Trump’s first day in office.
“The foam that worked to condemn him among the same crazy people who were concerned about the trendy weaponry of the government opposed to me,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump called the pardon “complete and unconditional,” adding that he called Ulbricht’s mother to break the news on Tuesday.
Ulbricht became a federal criminal in Arizona, and his attorney said he hoped Ulbricht would be released soon.
“After enduring more than a decade of incarceration, this resolution provides Ross with the opportunity to get started, rebuild his life and make a definite contribution to society,” Brandon Sample, Clemency de Ulbricht’s attorney, said in a statement.
Trump’s management is expected to be particularly opposed to the course of what had been a crackdown on former Democratic President Joe Biden’s crypto regulators.
Trump announced his goal of commuting Ulbricht’s sentence in May in a speech at the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarian Party, which has advocated for the legalization of drugs, had pushed for Ulbricht’s release, calling the case an example of government exaggeration.
Prosecutors had said other people had died because of drugs purchased on Silk Road.
Silk Road’s online page relied on the Tor network to anonymously accept Bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said users allowed users to hide their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht ran the Silk Road under hacker alias Dread Roberts, a reference to a character in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” and overstepped the market’s operations.
These steps, they said, included soliciting the killings of several other people who posed a threat, though they also said there is no evidence that killings were carried out.
Ulbricht admitted to the creation of Silk Road, which a defense attorney said was intended for a “freewheel-free and freewheel-free site. “But his lawyers argued that Ulbricht then passed over the online page to others and was lured toward its end. “For their genuine operators.
“I searched to allow other people to make possible options in their lives and have privacy and anonymity,” Ulbricht said at his sentence hearing in May 2015.
A federal jury in Manhattan in February 2015 found Ulbricht guilty of drug-adding fees from internet distribution and conspiring to engage in PC hacking and money laundering.
“What you did was unprecedented,” U. S. District Judge Katherine Forrest said in Ulbricht’s sentencing. “And by innovating that flat as a first person, you sit here as a defendant who has to pay the consequences for it. “
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