Trump pardons Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road drug marketplace
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/ross-ulbricht-silk-road-trump-pardonOpen linkView original on lemmy.world461
Comments166https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/ross-ulbricht-silk-road-trump-pardonOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Wildy transactional.
So... does "full and unconditional" mean he's also pardoned for the murders-for-hire? Or just for being a drug lord and America's Next Top Website Boy?
I'm actually kind of impressed he kept his word. That's unexpected
His part is signing a piece of paper with a Sharpie that one of his handlers puts in front of him. That phone call had to be horrible, Trump trying to explain to a mom he is setting her son that he knows nothing about, free because he once said he would to a large group of people he wants to grift.
Because 0% he knows the guy's name, who he was, or why he was in prison.
Edit - autocorrect =(
I mean, I'm just going to go with the most obvious grift. Ulbricht is going to go right back to operating a crypto street pharmacy. Hell, he'll do it on the open web now. He'll call it "The New Silk Road" or similar.
And then there's an agreement for the feds to not go after them. In exchange, Ulbricht uses a good portion of his earnings to become the largest single investor in Trumpcoin ever. If asked, the feds can either ignore the question or hide behind some fig leaf excuse they come up with.
It's not like Trump didn't run blatant undeniable cons in the last administration.
Having something like that as a government honeypot is also a great way to get kompromat on people.
Yeah, it's insane that he's just openly being like, "I promise to use the powers of my office to solely benefit myself," and the Supreme Court's just like, "Get it, grrrrrl"
Although, to be fair, it did also benefit a guy who tried to murder five people.
He was never convicted on murders for hire, charges were dropped
I clearly recall Trump being president from 2016-2020, Ulbricht was sentenced to life without parole in 2015.
If it was so ridiculous, why didn't he pardon him on his first term? What changed to make it such an immediate priority now?
Because he needed the libertarian vote this time in order to win. Its a very cheap promise that guarantees votes and doesnt alienate anyone that doesnt care. Honestly, the fact that he followed through suprises me.
"But why didnt he need the libertarian vote in 16?"
Because he never intended to win the first time. The first run was a fluke. He wanted to play victim and run the media circuit for profit.
Back then he thought Bitcoin was bad and a scam. This time someone showed him how to make money by creating a scam coin and doing a pump and dump, so now he's pro Bitcoin. So pro he'll get rid of all regulation so pump and dump scams are completely legal.
Imagine how many times he was asked:
“Why don’t you have your own “Bitcoin” coin yet, Mr. President?”
I bet Trump is still anti Bitcoin. Under the previous administration, the SEC applied the Howey Test to cryptocurrencies and would have identified Trump Coin as a security. Trump is only interested if he can be in charge of it.
Trump doesn’t need to think about re-election this time around so he has more political freedom.
Tough on drugs... For people who aren't white
Someone should really convince him to legalise all drugs to stick it to the cartels.
Wow, holy fuck, I never thought it'd happen. Even a broken clock is right twice a day I guess.
This dude is about to have a very lucrative career.
You're saying it's the right move to release a man convicted of (I believe) several counts of attempted murder?
Absolutely, free Ross.
I’m not a trump fan
The dude's a clown. Get better role models.
He wasn't charged with any of that.
Because instead of paying a hitman, he was paying a scammer thinking he was a hitman. He's still an asshole though.
We don't actually know as those charges were dropped. In this country you're innocent until proven guilty, therefore he's innocent.
I'm not making any statements on his personality or character, just that he's not guilty.
Absolutely, he is legally innocent of this, as the charges were indeed dropped.
However, it's all publicly documented. You can read the DMs where all of this occurred if you'd like. It includes the transaction IDs and wallets in which this all occurred. The paper trail is all there. This happened, whether legally recognized or not. I do completely agree with you that he is legally innocent, but the evidence that this happened is overwhelming.
The reason he wasn't found guilty of this specifically is because the prosecution, in the case in which he was found guilty, didn't even include this in his charges, but instead used it as an example of his character in relation to the charges he did receive. Considering there was no actual murder that took place, they probably felt they had significantly better odds with other charges that they could easily get a guilty verdict (and significant sentence) with. This isn't uncommon procedure.
Meanwhile, the Maryland case in which he was being charged in relation to this, was dropped once he'd already been found guilty in NY and sentenced to two life sentences.
I remember this guy being a fucking idiot that paid for several fake assassinations of fake rivals. It was pretty funny.
It is funny in hindsight, knowing the assassinations were a scam. But he thought they were real, he talked in great detail about them and payed for them. This is missing from the article, I believe it was part of his indictment.
Oh yeah, he's a piece of shit for sure. I just think it's funny that he's also a moron. What kind of drug lord gets a message saying "Hey, I heard of a guy who wants to take you down, wire me a cool mil and I'll kill him for you, k?" and just... sends the money? More than once?! He definitely tried to rescue an overthrown Nigerian prince as a kid.
lol I totally forgot about that. He should be used as evidence that meritocracy isn't real.
Even better, he asked a question on StackOverflow lol
Yeah, when I watched a synopsis of the story, multiple alarm bells rang in my head midway through watching it. He's so gullible for how rich he fucking was
So the twist that was that they were all the same person, didn't even surprise me, you could see that it was a scam a mile away if you were paying attention
The scammer was pretty good, though, I will give them that. Too bad the scammer was also pretty dumb about how the handle the money after the fact, and got caught lmao.
This was one of the biggest requests of the Libertarian Party and Trump followed through with it. Could you imagine the Democratic Party agreeing to any demand from the Green Party in an attempt to get votes?
I can imagine them agreeing to all sorts of things!
Trump is a demon, but this was a good call. His sentence was wildly disproportionate to what he did.
Didn’t he try to hire a hitman?
No. The evidence against him was fabricated because they didn't have any evidence.
I somehpw doubt that considering some if the evidence used to convict him was used to convict his DEA mole later
Nonetheless, he was not convicted on those charges.
The judicial system in America is obviously not about what is written in their legal statutes or the veracity of the evidence presented. Otherwise war criminals, fraudsters and rapists like Bush, Cheney, Trump and Clinton would be in prison. It is about advancing an agenda for a white male US hegemony and that explains most of the outcomes, e.g. black people being enslaved in prison. Ulbricht thumbed his nose at the establishment and they got pissy. Assange and Snowden revealed their crimes and they hunted them to the ends of the earth. The CIA and their stooges, the Swedes, fabricated a rape allegation against Assange that was quietly dismissed, unfulfilled, seven years later. This establishment will stop at nothing to assert their authority and you wonder about evidence in the Ulbricht case?
No I don't wonder because again that evidence was used to convict the DEA agents that stole from Silk Road. You are linking a bunch of things that have nothing to do with each other. The pattern you are seeing is an illusion
The pattern I'm seeing is a corrupt government not to be trusted. You have a fraudster in charge and his henchmen are Nazis. The fact that those agents were convicted of stealing money is not a good sign.
it was to kill competition who were threatening to kill him. id say if the law won't protect you, you are free to protect yourself
Edit: I wrote a whole comment about this and the corrupt DEA agents involved in pushing him into a murder-for-hire scheme who were also working as moderators for the Silk Road, and later went to prison for crimes surrounding the ordeal.
But I decided against it, because the fact remains that it is likely he did attempt to have people killed. It was due to threats of exposing him, not threats on his life. And the fact is that him likely being entrapped is a good legal defense but not a good moral one.
If we ignore everything involving the possible contract murder deals, I say that his release is wonderful. Considering he was never convicted of any of the murder for hire stuff, his sentence was draconian, and marked a real shift in the freedom of the internet. As to Trump, even a broken clock is right twice every 78 years.
But this release is not so sweet knowing what Ross may have and likely tried to do in order to hang onto his crumbling empire.
Could prosecutors still charge him with murder for hire, ultimately forcing Trump to double down?
I really don’t know, but I doubt they would. It’s possible for the original 5 instances he was accused of, as he was never tried but the district court conceded he probably did it.
The 6th, later and more famous instance? Probably not. He was actually indicted for that in Maryland, but it was a weak case that was dropped once he was convicted of his other drug and financial crimes. In the later incident, the hitman who he purportedly hired was Carl Force; the corrupt DEA agent. At best, Force’s action constituted entrapment. At worst, the whole story is unreliable. Either way, I can’t see any government agency thrilled about dragging the details of that situation out of obscurity.
Because of bitcoin I'm sure.
Yeah, you know the kids smart enough to have some hidden like thousands of them or something crazy and made a deal.
It's not out of the kindness of his heart.
He referred to the prosecutors as scum and said they were the ones who were persecuting him like it was some purely political shit when he is an incredibly prolific fraudsters, rapist, and traitor. He should have been arrested during the Jan 6th insurrection and never allowed free again.
His reasoning was that Ross was a libertarian and this is to honor the libertarian movement that supported him... dude! He labeled the fucking drug cartels terrorist organizations and Ross enabled so much drug trafficking it isn't funny. How the fuck do people not see through that?
Here's my convoluted conspiracy theory for how this makes sense.
Trump launches Trump Coin
Trump pardons crypto drug dealer, but not paper drug dealers
Crypto market booms
Trump sells coin to whichever idiots he hasn't scammed yet
I also think this is some crypto bro shenanigans. Ulbricht might even have billions in Bitcoin stashed away somewhere for a juicy payback.
That cryptoscan was to allow untraceable bribes from enemy nations.
You can already do that with any cryptocurrency using a mixer. And some of them already have strong privacy built in or available as add-ons.
Could someone explain like to an non American why the president gets to pardon people at all?
If someone committed a crime they're guilty, if there's new evidence that they're not guilty then that's what appeals are for.
In a perfect system, the pardon is meant to be a "check" on the powers of the other branches. (Legislative and judicial). Each branch is meant to both support AND check the others.
Obviously we are watching it all unwind. Certain things were a "gentleman's agreement" in that a president normally wouldn't over do it and just pardon tons of people. We are finding out lots of things were just assumed to be ok, but are easily abused by bad actors
That kinda makes sense, but aren't some of your top judges appointed by the president. Which would mean the office of the president automatically has 2/3 of the things under their control.
Congress/Senate has to confirm judge appointments, but they mostly rubber stamp the appointments if the Senate is the same party as the president.
Yeah the number of pardons Biden performed raised the bar like crazy.
Between Biden and trump we are in a new era.
Similarly McConnell holding up supreme court nominee hearings for months, the way he did represents the erosion of another "gentleman's agreement" between the branches of government.
My best understanding is that it was a historic right of kings, governors, etc. The idea was to show mercy to those who may have been convicted wrongly, or to people convicted of laws that have been overturned.
Trump is abusing it in ways never done before to payback political supporters.
TBF Biden abused it as well in pardoning his son.
Carter's blanket pardon of Vietnam War draft dodgers was pretty important
Yes - exactly. That's the sort of high-minded use that I believe the framers were considering.
Sounds like a rule that very much should have been left in the 17th century
Wasn't there a situation where he did not pardon his son?
Same situation, he just waited until later in his presidency
So first he didn't and then he did? Alright
Sir, you look like the piss boy!
Yeah? And you look like a bucket of shit.
Just FYI this is not just an American thing. In Italy for example the President of the republic can cancel or amend sentences too, and it does happen relatively often, although not in the same partisan way as in the US (but that's also because the president in Italy is a neutral and representative position).
Some example from few years ago when the president graced 33 people (each with a specific articulated motivation) https://www.ilpost.it/2021/12/10/mattarella-grazia-sette-persone-sebastian-oberleteir-heinrich/ (in Italian, but you can translate if you wish).
It’s so easy to see who bough his bitcoin “scam” now, isn’t it?
You think Ross did from prison?
Absolutely I do.
Of course they do. This is how they cope with anything Trump related. They come up with conspiracy theories.
Kodak black paid 2mil for a pardon the first time. This is highly likely to be true, you are either uniformed, a bot, or in on the grift.
Hey buddy, chill, there's almost certainly talented doctors from other countries who couldn't afford to recertify managing at least 2 Arby's...and those will be the only 2 you don't get food poisoning from.
Sure, or you can read my comment again and realise the joke I was making.
they didn't catch him because of bad opsec, unless you consider Tor to be bad opsec. they caught him with a parallel reconstruction after the NSA illegally spied on him.
change my mind
How does being in prison prohibit moving around assets?
This is incredibly stupid. Prison officials will do everything they can to prevent an inmate from moving around assets for VERY OBVIOUS reasons. But, after thinking about it, it may not be so obvious for this echo chamber so let me explain the obvious.
You are an inmate in prison. You made millions doing your illegal thing while free but you hare now doing hard time. You don't like hard time, you want easy or no time. How do you make your life better while in prison. Wait, you have millions. You'll just use that money to have your way with the guards and prison system. Guard giving you trouble? Use your assets that you've amassed to "get rid of them".
The prison system has protocols and processes in place to prevent all inmates from being able to control any assets they have on the outside. This prevents them from committing further crimes, exerting influence, or running an enterprise (criminal or legal) while incarcerated.
Wardens do not have access to financial of prisoners. Why would you think that would be the case?
You are naive.
Again, I’m gonna suggest you look up lawyers and what they do.
Here’s some resources:
Lawyer (children’s edition)
Revocable Living Trust (apologies, but this one isn’t very kid friendly)
How prisons work (children’s edition)
Lawyers or anyone that has power of attorney can make payments on your behalf. How do you think people pay mortgages or make payments in jail?
That is literally NOT the definition of a lawyer.
I never said it was. I specified who can make payments for you while you are serving time. The fact you think this can’t happen or that the prison has any involvement in this is really off
edit: It should say Lawyers OR not ir perhaps that’s the confusion?
Lawyers and setting up trust funds.
Try this website:
You can’t see Trump is for sale?
I never said he wasn't. If I had the cash I would ask for favors too.
Then why would you think this is a conspiracy theory?
I don't think that Ulbricht had the capability to bribe Trump. I think that Lemmy and Reddit users are trying to justify Trump's pardon by saying it was done through illegal activity (bribery) instead of campaign promises. That's why I say they are making up conspiracy theories. Now I believe he can be bribed because of all the felonies he got from issuing bribes.
Gotcha, I still think he got paid for this because Ross was in for hiring a hitman which is an odd thing for Trump to pardon.
Soooo…. Do you not know what lawyers and trusts are and what they do? If not, have an adult explain these things to you when you can, and if so….
Why embarrass yourself wish such an ignorant comment?
Don't know or care about this guy but all drugs should be legal.
Then you should probably care about him. He gave people around the world access to medicine that was illegal
Silk Road wasn’t the first darknet market ya know. I helped launch the first couple that were .onion prior to Ross, but the movement has been about since the 90s at least and would’ve happened without any of us. We were working on a decentralised version that would've been unstoppable but people moved on and got other priorities when SR took all the media attention and spotlight. I'm guessing it'll emerge out crypto soon now the tech has caught up with the theory.
I'm kind of curious to hear about this decentralized solution...
I lost touch with the guy who was working on it, but this was before smart contracts even came on the scene.
The original text that radicalised me; https://anarplex.sirion.io/hosted/files/Toward_A_Private_Digital_Economy/index.html
There was OpenBazaar, but flopped for obvious reasons.
Didn't Donald the Jester say something about fighting crime before the election? And then he drops thousands of hard criminals back on the street?
Snowden next?
Lol, fat chance
He will have him executed.
Lol explain the logic here... Russian asset gonna execute another Russian asset cuZ?
Asset doesn’t mean Russia has full power over them, only that they’re acting to their advantage
Putler does it all the time
Anyone else remember the panic when you logged in and saw the notice that the site was seized by the feds?
I mean, certainly not something I experienced but I’m sure if I had it would’ve been terrifying to think the feds could find your info
All sellers had pgp keys published, everyone just used these and feds could not see shit.
Not like the later honeypots where the market published fake pgp keys on sellers' profiles and MITMed the communications.
Daaaaamn
Okay i remembered it wrong, not PGP keys but close
Wow, thats crazy.
Goddamn.
Probably made a deal and wants all his Bitcoin. Smart kid, you know it's hidden somewhere. Thank God he's out there double life without parole. It's inhumane.
Not to mention that undercover basically set him up to look bad.
If he didn't wanna look bad he shouldn't have sent a person he believed to be a hitman $300,000 to murder someone.
He was never charged or convicted of those charges, he's innocent of that.
Well, you're half correct. He was charged in Maryland for attempted witness murder, but the charges were dropped once he'd been sentenced so harshly in New York. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, and there's plenty of conspiratorial debate about them.
I strongly doubt that the prosecution would have brought the charges if they didn't have traceable evidence (through blockchain transaction records, undercover police chat logs, and data seizure) that coins, sent to an undercover agent for the purposes of murder, originated from wallets that were owned by Ulbricht. You can read more about one of the employees Ulbricht allegedly tried to have murdered (Curtis Green, who was sentenced for his own crimes) here and here.
You're right, though, he's technically innocent as the charges were dismissed. Perhaps it was all a huge setup/honeypot but the truth of whether or not he sent the coins should be discoverable with enough due diligence scouring the blockchain records. Intent matters, even though it didn't end up getting tried in this instance.
🙂
You're right, I should've said never convicted. There's a ton of conspiracies around it all, was he actually the first Dread Pirate Roberts or was it actually a title passed down? At the time everyone was saying parallel construction but in hindsight he was probably just sloppy. It was a really exciting time.
How was he set up to look bad?
People can watch his wallets right? And they suspect/know what ones they are? And this is something people are hotly following now?
I should look this up. It’s fascinating if we can just watch it happen, on the chain.
Can't watch Monero. Which is what he should have been using instead of Bitcoin.
Yeah, he really should have set that up before he went to prison, you know, before Monero existed, lol.
Ok. But Bitcoin didn't suddenly become transparent the moment Monero was created.
Uh...okay then?
I didn't even notice that this happened:
Today, President Biden granted Leonard Peltier executive clemency and commuted the remainder of his sentence.
Commuted it to home fucking arrest, not even full clemancy.
Oh... He's not even the real Dread Pirate Roberts!
OMG Trump did a positive thing 🤯, maybe by mistake
If you read the article Trump called his mother to tell her personally so not really an accident
Freeing a drug lord is a good thing?
He was white with a white name. If it was Carlos Fernandez he would had his life sentence upgraded to death and had his executed ASAP.
Wow that brings me joy. Silkroad is where I bought my first drugs
Amazing
Imagine having millions of dollars worth of bitcoin in 2013 and then being imprisoned until 2024.
I hope he made a good backup of at least a few thousand coins.
You're making assumptions.
Also, he wasn't an idiot. He just didn't have any prior experience or training as a Dev or in opsec.
Glen geeenwald is not an idiot and he was just as ignorant when Snowden tried to contact him.
I feel like if you're running an online black market, step number one is not using your real name or regular email (it was gmail, no less, so hello NSA). I'm not opsec, that's just insanely dumb.
no, Glen Greenwald is an idiot
Yay drugs!
Of course he would, that's who Mike Lindell wants to get his dope from!
This is a win for drug cartels
Based?
Why though?
I mean, who is looking at this and calling it an injustice?
Side note: does he get his bitcoin wallet back?
He got more time than actual gang bangers without committing any violent crime. His sentence was way longer than it should have been.
I think the pot sales were probably not a huge deal, and some of the other recreational drugs too (I don’t think anyone should do those drugs, but I’m not going to restrict everyone else).
The hitman services listed and other illegal stuff was definitely an issue he deserved time for.
He was never criminally tried for those charges. That means just selling drugs have him two lifetimes in prison plus 40 years without possibility of parole
Interesting, I didn't know that, though I didn't follow the case too closely, but the arrest was big news
Yeah, they pulled a fast one by alleging the murder for hire, but not actually charging him with it
The US already auctioned off his coins. But its possible that maybe he had some more on a backup somewhere
Dude was deep into Bitcoin back when it was less than a dollar. If he diversified and stashed just a fraction of his holdings, he might now be one of the richest people on the planet.
Who says crime doesn't pay? :/
Prison = forced hodling
To buy votes