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Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running an online marketplace for illegal drugs and piracy services.
“The scum who worked to convict him (Ulbricht) were some of the same crazy people who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of the government against me,” Trump wrote in an article on Truth Social Tuesday evening.
During UlbrichtAt trial, U.S. prosecutors said he built the anonymous marketplace, known as Silk Road, to exploit the anonymity of the dark web and the digital currency Bitcoin.
At the time, the case attracted the attention of Bitcoin evangelists and libertarian groups who claimed the government was trying to turn web hosting into a criminal activity.
In announcing the pardon, Trump said it was “in honor of the libertarian movement, which has so strongly supported me.”
Trump pledged to pardon Ulbricht, arrested in 2013 in San Francisco, during the Libertarian Party’s national convention last May.
“This is a seismic shift, a rupture in the stifling wall of state oppression,” the Libertarian Party said after the pardon.
The move comes after the crypto industry donated millions of dollars to Trump’s election campaign, during which he pledged to make America the “Bitcoin superpower of the world.”
Silk Road was run on the Tor network and only accepted bitcoin as payment, which U.S. prosecutors said helped keep its users and their locations anonymous.
The site allowed criminals to sell large quantities of drugs, hacking services and fake documents, among other illegal goods and services, prosecutors said.
The US government seized 173,991 bitcoins from Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest.