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Donald Trump has pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for masterminding an online marketplace for illegal drugs and hacking services.
“The scum that worked to convict him [Ulbricht] were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump wrote in post on Truth Social late on Tuesday.
During Ulbricht’s trial, US prosecutors said he had built the anonymous marketplace, known as Silk Road, to exploit the anonymity of the dark web and 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.
Announcing the pardon, Trump said it was “in honour of the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”.
Trump had pledged to pardon Ulbricht, who was arrested in 2013 in San Francisco, at the Libertarian party’s national convention last May.
“This is a seismic shift, a rupture in the suffocating wall of state oppression,” the Libertarian party said following the pardon.
The move comes after the crypto industry donated millions of dollars to Trump’s election campaign, in which he pledged to make America the “bitcoin superpower of the world”.
Silk Road was run on the Tor Network and accepted only bitcoin as payment, which US prosecutors said had helped keep its users and their locations anonymous.
The site allowed criminals to sell vast quantities of drugs, computer hacking services and forged 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.