Look Who's Thanking Trump
Trump gave him a pardon--why?
I was curious when I saw this post earlier today on Truth Social:
Ross Ulbricht looks like a nice guy. How courteous of him for thanking “a truly great American President” who “cares about freedom and second chances.”
I did not know who Ulbricht was. I had not heard of him. Why was he put in prison? Here’s what I found:
Ross Ulbricht, aka “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was sentenced Friday in federal court to life in prison in connection with his operation and ownership of Silk Road, a hidden website designed to enable its users to buy and sell illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement between January 2011 and October 2013.
Ulbricht created Silk Road in January 2011, and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by law enforcement authorities in October 2013. Silk Road emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet, serving as a sprawling black-market bazaar where unlawful goods and services, including illegal drugs of virtually all varieties, were bought and sold regularly by the site’s users. While in operation, Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services to more than 100,000 buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions.
Ulbricht deliberately operated Silk Road as an online criminal marketplace intended to enable its users to buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods and services anonymously and outside the reach of law enforcement. Ulbricht sought to anonymize transactions on Silk Road in two principal ways. First, Ulbricht operated Silk Road on what is known as “The Onion Router,” or “Tor” network, a special network of computers on the Internet, distributed around the world, designed to conceal the true IP addresses of the computers on the network and thereby the identities of the networks’ users. Second, Ulbricht designed Silk Road to include a Bitcoin-based payment system that served to facilitate the illegal commerce conducted on the site, including by concealing the identities and locations of the users transmitting and receiving funds through the site.
Mr. President, why? Aren’t you the same guy denying due process to hundreds of suspected gang members who were arrested based on their tattoos?
Trump freed Alexander Vinnik in a prisoner exchange with Russia. Vinnik was convicted for crypto currency laundering. This too went under the radar.
So he pardoned the worst American cyber criminal and freed a Russian cyber criminal in his first few weeks of his presidency.
Considering Trump and Melania brought out their own Meme Coins just before his inauguration and Musk has his own crypto currency and they both want to remove regulations and checks and balances, I’d say they have a bit in common. Now they have announced that they are creating a Crypto Currency Treasury, I’m sure a couple more cyber criminals on the streets won’t do any harm 🤔
What this leaves out are the types of services (murder/rape/torture/abduction for hire) and goods (organs/CSAM/snuff films/weapons/poisons/drugs/exotic animals) that were available on that site. Anything evil you could think of and much more that most people couldn’t even conceive of, you could order on Silk Road. Ross Ulbricht himself tried to hire a hit man several times.
He wasn’t put away for life just for having a drug selling website. He was responsible for hundreds of people losing their lives because of what could be done through it.
Ulbricht believed that the government should have no control over what people should be able to do. So he developed a way to allow people the ‘freedom’ to do whatever they wanted online. It was an interesting experiment that showed the depravity of human kind when left unsupervised. He is a hero to the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg.
Ross Ulbricht’s pardon went largely unnoticed because Trump pardoned all the insurrectionists at the same time.