The president granted unconditional release to Internet drug impresario as a boon to libertarians and cryptocurrency partisans.
President Donald Trump’s crude and ill-advised pardon of 1,600 rioters who sought to overturn the 2020 election has sparked widespread outrage, even from Editorial page Wall Street Journal. Trump has long stated his intention to settle this score by referring to these government partisans as “hostages” and “political prisoners” from the 2024 campaign, and in large part their reason is to perpetuate the first Trump administration and its supposed crusades against selective interventions and the deep state. Now that Trump has returned to office thanks to favorable election results (although one will disappear by a narrow electoral margin well shy of a majority of mandates), the shape of his second administration will be better predicted by his other pardon: the unconditional release of convicted cybercrime racketeer Ross Ulbricht.
Ulbricht, owner of the Silk Road Dark Web Bazaar, which traded drugs, hardware and other contraband, was convicted in 2013 on seven federal drug and conspiracy charges, serving two life terms and an additional 40 years. The sentence was serious because during the trial it was revealed that Ulbricht had allegedly contracted half a dozen contract killings for people who either blackmailed him or were willing to help in criminal investigations of him and the site, although none of the murders were carried out. .
Trump also trumpeted his intentions for that pardon on the campaign trail, having originally promised Last year’s Libertarian Party convention in May. Ulbricht, a staunch libertarian true believer, conducted most of his site’s business in the then-Libertarian currency of bitcoin to avoid traditional government tracking of his transactions. Trump, after once announcing a cryptocurrency As a “scam” now obsessed with the flicker of all things, including his own Slapdash Pre Innouguration Memecoin. So, with his finely tuned Hustler instinct, Trump upgraded his first promise to libertarians from a commutation to a full pardon and wiped Ulbricht’s criminal record clean.
And Trump being Trump, he also took pains to make it all about him. “The gang that worked to convict him were the same lunatics that were involved in the government’s modern weapon against me,” Trump wrote in Its true social post announcing a pardon. This clumsy effort to enlist Ulbricht in the ranks of the fake militia was roughly conceived as a Trump Memecoin, but like this sketchy proposal The mission of his second term.
Playing on Ulbricht’s image as a fellow victimizer, Trump also borrowed the main refrain of the libertarian crusade to secure Ulbricht’s release: with a suspected DEA agent in the picture, all the charges against Ulbricht came from the same poisoned tree. Of course, this broad pivot claim does nothing to explain the other five contracts that sought to govern; It seems that here, once an impostor leads you to your first contract kill, everyone else you’re involved in is in the house.
There is one important point of contact with the Trump J6 Pardons here: One of the influential Mago conspiracy theories claims that the entire botched coup was designed initially by the FBI to discredit the patriotic motives of the Mago election deniers. This isn’t a right-wing fringe meme — ever, you can expect to hear a lot more about it in the coming days, during confirmation hearings for Trump’s pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel, who’s who An ardent promoter of this clever story.
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But just like January 6 the most well-documented crime in American history,“According to Maryland Democratic Representative Jamin Raskin, Ulbricht’s crimes are widely chronicled, thanks to the capture of all his Silk Roads on his hard drive. In one exchange, a chat with a DEA agent about the first murder-for-hire, Ulbricht offered this bloodless, iron: “I’m angry, I should have killed him. But what’s done is done.” In a subsequent exchange with a self-proclaimed Hell’s Angel silk customer, Ulbricht spoke Avoiding another user of the site Who apparently blackmailed him: “In my eyes, a friendly read is a responsibility and I wouldn’t mind fulfilling it,” he wrote, before providing the aspiring hitman with his real username, location and marital status. Although the Hell’s Angel appears to have been the no-hit booth, Hoose beat Ulbricht — and he was reportedly pleased with the results. “Your problem has been taken care of … But rest easy, because he is no longer blackmailing anyone. Ever,” said the cab. Ulbricht’s response was again brief, but ordered: “Great job.” Told that the victims were landlords who should probably be cut out of the picture, Ulbricht quickly agreed, and they all engaged in more down-to-earth online discourse. While Wired Writer Joshua Berman notes in his epic account of the rise and fall of Silk Road, they “spent some time troubleshooting the Hells Angels’ new chat and privacy app (No Bulk Discounts) next set of executions.” . Any other Silk Road functionary roads, not to mention a bent DNA agent, doing technological work from screenshots.)
It is common knowledge that federal drug prosecutions often involve gross miscarriages of justice, and that the entire war on drugs is an unmitigated and devastating failure. And yet, against the background of all the flagrante, and blindingly rationalizedprosecutorial abuses in the drug wars, it speaks volumes that Trump’s only acknowledgment of such excesses is on behalf of a white cyberpreneur who skillfully recorded the murders of brazen Internet adversaries and their roommates by working out bugs in a chat app. This is a particularly ironic speech, given that Trump also has repeatedly advocated the death penalty For convicted drug traffickers – and doubt who in the US is dealing drugs on the scale that Ulbricht has. But it’s just business as usual in the Trump White House 2.0; The president reportedly said, “fuck you, let them all out” when he approved the Jan. 6 mass pardon for violators. The same basic logic applied to the escalation of Ulbricht’s broad pardon—and in both cases, Trump is watching as he laid himself out on Jan. 6, when his aides called for an armed mob to be dispatched in his Rotunda speech rejecting the election through the metal. through metal. Detectors: “They’re not here to hurt me.” The unspoken implication, of course, is that Donald Trump never really cares about anyone else getting hurt.
