U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday granted a “full and unconditional pardon” to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous Silk Road drug marketplace, after spending 11 years behind bars.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” Trump said in a post shared on Truth Social.
“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!”
Launched in February 2011, Silk Road emerged as a major hub on the dark web for illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services. The marketplace generated over $200 million in revenue in its nearly three years of existence, per authorities.
It was taken down in October 2013 coinciding with the arrest of Ulbricht, who then went by the online moniker Dread Pirate Roberts. In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole after being found guilty of money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and computer hacking charges.
A little over two years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) revealed it confiscated 50,676 Bitcoin in November 2021 that was stolen in the 2012 hack of the now-defunct Silk Road dark web marketplace, making it one of the largest cryptocurrency seizures to date.
James Ellingson (aka redandwhite), a Silk Road drug vendor who claimed to have arranged for the murder of five people for Ulbricht, has since been charged with narcotics trafficking and money laundering offenses. However, the DoJ said there is no evidence these murders actually took place.
In a letter to the judge seeking leniency prior to his sentencing, Ulbricht said he wasn’t seeking financial gain when he started Silk Road and that it was supposed to be “about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit.”
“I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else,” he added. “Silk Road turned out to be a very naive and costly idea that I deeply regret.”
