- President Donald Trump granted Ross Ulbricht a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday.
- Ulbricht was the founder of Silk Road, the online drug marketplace.
- He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015.
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online drug marketplace Silk Road, received a full and unconditional pardon Tuesday from President Donald Trump, who announced the move in a Truth Social post.
Ulbricht has been held at the US prison in Tucson since the FBI arrested him in 2013.
The FBI described Silk Road as a “digital marketplace” for illegal goods and services that buyers and sellers accessed through Tor – a network designed to hide the identity and location of its users.
The FBI said it generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, as well as more than $13 million in commissions.
In 2015, a judge sentenced Ulbricht, now 40, to life in prison without the possibility of parole for drug trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering, ruling that the Silk Road was “destructive to our social fabric.”
Libertarian cause célèbre
Ulbricht has become a cause celebre for the libertarian movement.
The Libertarian Party, which has long supported criminal justice reform and drug legalization, has repeatedly called for his release, viewing his life sentence as an example of government overreach.
In a speech at the Libertarian National Convention in May 2024, Trump vowed to commute Ulbricht’s sentence on the first day of his administration if he were re-elected president.
Trump said in his tweet on Tuesday that he granted the pardon to Ulbricht in honor of Ulbricht’s mother “and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly.”
According to a 2015 Wired report, Ulbricht developed an interest in libertarian economic theory while at university and embraced the political philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, a staunch opponent of intervention and advocate of the moral purpose of free-market capitalism.
In a letter he wrote to the judge in 2015, he said he created Silk Road not to seek financial gain, but because he “believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted for as long as that they weren’t”. don’t hurt anyone else.”
“The Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness,” he added.
Ulbricht also said, “While I still don’t think people should be denied that right, I never sought to create a site that would provide another avenue for people to feed their addictions.”
However, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the “vast” majority of goods sold on Silk Road were illegal drugs.
Preet Bharara, then-US Attorney for Manhattan, said at the time that: “Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young men.”
Ulbricht was convicted of seven felonies after a four-week jury trial and sentenced to life in prison. He was also ordered to forfeit $183,961,921.
Trump’s pardoning power
In his post on Social Truth, Trump called Ulbricht’s sentences “ridiculous.”
In a statement Tuesday, Angela McArdle, chairwoman of the Libertarian National Committee, thanked Trump for keeping his promise.
“I am proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities and it has finally paid off,” she said.
“This is an extraordinary moment in Libertarian history,” added McArdle.
On Monday, Trump also issued sweeping pardons for roughly 1,500 people connected to the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, fulfilling a campaign promise to expunge the records of most people connected to the riots.