Leader Of Massive On-Line Illicit Drug Network Would Be Set Free By Trump
A promise by trump to pardon the imprisoned leader of a world-wide illegal, on-line drug network seems to contradict trump’s call for the death penalty for convicted drug dealers.
But as with much that trump says, naked pandering is just business as usual.
This time it involves “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the alias of Ross Ulbricht, a self-professed libertarian and the drug kingpin founder of the infamous, worldwide, online narcotics marketplace, Silk Road. Ulbricht is serving a life sentence, without possibility of parole, in the U.S. Penitentiary in Tucson, Ariz. Ulbricht also was fined $183,961,921.
Ulbricht, now 40, was arrested in October 2013, and was imprisoned in 2015 for charges ranging from hardcore drug trafficking, that led to a series of overdose deaths, to money laundering while he also allegedly tried to pay to have a witness, informant and three others murdered.
The Libertarian Party has long advocated for drug legalization and criminal justice reform and Ulbricht has become a poster boy of the party, which claims he is a victim of broad, government overreach.
Trump, who has promised to increase government overreach to give him unchecked powers, had lobbied for an invitation to the Liberty National Convention, hoping to convince some of the attendees to support his presidential bid in November’s election. As bait, trump promised that if reelected, his first act will be to pardon Ulbricht. Trump also vowed to include a Libertarian in his new cabinet.
Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for serious drug dealers while he has suggested the U.S. invade Mexico to capture drug cartel leaders. His offer to pardon Ulhbricht smelled of blatant politicking to Libertarian politician Chase Oliver.
“Do you think Donald Trump even knew Ross Ulbricht’s name before he decided to come here and pander to us?” Oliver asked the crowd following Trump’s remarks.
Trump also drew howls of derision when he told the crowd that “the Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for president.” Trump failed to qualify for the nomination and the party instead chose Chase Oliver as the 2024 presidential nominee.
There were no adoring fans in the crowd, as there are in the highly orchestrated MAGA rallies. They initially cheered when trump said he would free Ulbricht, but applause quickly turned to jeers, to trump’s feigned sadness and shock.
One member of the crowd shouted, “Lock him up!” a reference to trump’s 2016 campaign calls to have his Democratic foe, Hillary Clinton, arrested. Another yelled, “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy!” Others called out at trump, “F — — you” and “You already had four years, you a — hole.”
A Libertarian candidate called trump a war criminal for ordering drone strikes against Syria. Libertarian Caryn Ann Harlos said that rather than vote for trump, “I would rather eat my own foot out of a bear trap.”
Some in the crowd rejected trump for violating a key tenet of Libertarians by lording over a federal deficit that grew to $8.4 trillion during his administration. Some shouted that trump tries “to make himself sound Libertarian … but he’s the ultimate authoritarian” and “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy!” Another person held up a sign that read, “No wannabe dictators!”
Peter Goettler, president and chief executive of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post that many libertarians oppose trump because he does not support Libertarians’ core beliefs, including “individual freedom, equality under the law, pluralism, toleration, free speech, freedom of religion, government by consent of the governed, the rule of law” and “limited constitutional government.”
Ulbricht, who is in an Arizona prison, responded on his website to trump’s pledge of freedom.
“Last night, Donald Trump pledged to commute my sentence on day 1, if reelected. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. After 11 years in prison, it is hard to express how I feel at this moment. It is thanks to your undying support that I may get a second chance,” Ulbricht wrote.
According to the federal indictment, 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.
“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 well over a hundred thousand buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions,” the indictment alleged.
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 the identities of the networks’ users. Silk Road used 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.
The vast majority of items for sale on Silk Road were illegal drugs, which were openly advertised as such on the site. As of September 23, 2013, Silk Road had nearly 13,000 listings for controlled substances, under such categories as “Cannabis,” “Dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Intoxicants,” “Opioids,” “Precursors,” “Prescription,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.”
From November 2011 to September 2013, law enforcement agents made more than 60 individual undercover purchases of controlled substances from Silk Road vendors. The purchases included heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD, among other illegal drugs, and were filled by vendors believed to be located in more than 10 different countries, including the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Austria and France.
In addition to illegal narcotics, other illicit goods and services were openly bought and sold on Silk Road. For example, as of September 23, 2013, there were: 159 listings under the category “Services,” most of which offered computer hacking services, such as a listing by a vendor offering to hack into social networking accounts of the customer’s choosing; 801 listings under the category “Digital goods,” including malicious software, hacked accounts at various online services, and pirated media content; and 169 listings under the category “Forgeries,” including offers to produce fake driver’s licenses, passports, Social Security cards, utility bills, credit card statements, car insurance records, and other forms of false identification documents.
Preet Bharara, who was U.S. attorney for Manhattan when Ulbricht was sentenced in 2015, said at the time that Ulbricht’s actions contributed to at least six deaths and that Uhlbricht was “a drug dealer and criminal profiteer.”
After the four-week trial, Bharara described Silk Road as a “clandestine global marketplace” and 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.”
The Immigrations and Customers Enforcement agency said in a 2015 statement that, “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 grew up in Austin, Texas, where he was a Boy Scout and attained the vaunted rank of Eagle Scout. He attended the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. Ulbricht won another scholarship to attend Pennsylvania State University, where he was in a master’s degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography.
By the time Ulbricht graduated, he had become interested in libertarian economic theory and adhered to the political philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, and supported former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. Ulbricht also promoted agorism, a social political philosophy which advocates for a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics. Most agorists strictly oppose voting as a strategy for achieving their desired outcomes.
After graduating from Penn State in 2009, Ulbricht tried day trading and started a video game company but both ventures failed. He later partnered with his friend Donny Palmertree to help build an online used book seller, Good Wagon Books. Around this time, Ulbricht began planning Silk Road, a website “where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them.”
“I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force,” he wrote.
Ulbricht ran Silk Road as an “onion” or “hidden service” on the Tor network, which implements data encryption and routes traffic through intermediary servers to anonymize the source and destination Internet Protocol addresses. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was used for transactions on the site while users could avoid linking their legal names to the cryptocurrency.
In a 2015 letter to his trial judge, Ulbrich said he created Silk Road, “because I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else. When I created Silk Road, I wasn’t seeking financial gain.”
In May 2015, a federal appeals court rejected Uhlbricht’s appeal and upheld the life sentence without parole. Uhlbricht had claimed that he was a victim of illegal searches, that at least two federal agents involved in his case have proven to be corrupt, and that the punishment was draconian for non-violent crimes. The appeals panel dismissed Uhlbricht’s claims but acknowledged that two agents had stolen millions in crypto currency from Uhlbricht but that Uhlbricht had still broken various federal laws.
The judges noted that the drug deaths of Silk Road customers don’t figure into the life sentence, so much as Ulbricht’s alleged attempts to pay for the murders of a witness, an informant, and three others, even though no actual murders occurred.
“Ulbricht was prepared, like other drug kingpins, to protect his profits by paying large sums of money to have individuals who threatened his enterprise murdered,” the panel wrote. “It would be plainly wrong to conclude that he was sentenced for accidental deaths that the district court discussed only in passing in imposing sentence.”
The U.S. Supreme Court denied Ulbricht’s appeal in 2018.
In May 2023, a federal indictment was unsealed charging James Ellingson, a/k/a “redandwhite” with drug trafficking and money laundering in connection with his sale of large quantities of narcotics on the “Silk Road” marketplace. The indictment said that Ellingson claimed to have arranged for the murder of five people for Ulbricht, for which he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin. Law enforcement did not have any evidence that the purported murders actually took place.
In March 2013, Ellingson contacted Ulbricht about a purported Silk Road user who had threatened to release personal identifying information of Silk Road drug vendors and customers. In one message, Ulbricht responded to Ellingson that “[the murder target] is a liability and I wouldn’t mind if he was executed.” In another message, Ulbricht said “[the murder target] is causing me problems . . . I would like to put a bounty on his head if it’s not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him?”
Ellingson settled for a payment of $150,000 worth of Bitcoin to pay for the purported murder.
Later in April 2013, Ellingson and Ulbricht exchanged additional messages regarding a plot to kill four other people in Canada. Ulbricht sent Ellingson an additional $500,000 worth of Bitcoin for the murders. Law enforcement does not possess any evidence that the purported murders that Ellingson claimed to have arranged actually took place.
Ulbricht was not charged with murder but the accusations were used as “overt acts” in a narcotics trafficking charge. Under federal law, the government could use the allegations as evidence of Ulbricht’s character, without actually charging him with murder.
Ulbricht says on his website that he was an “entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy” and that he should be released because he is a first-time offender, and has already served 10 years in prison, all for creating an anonymous e-commerce website called Silk Road. He also says that he was “never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.”
Uhlbricht said he most of the drugs sold on Silk Road were “small amounts of cannabis.”
He claims to have the support of more than 250 organizations and individuals.
Uhlbricht’s mother, Lyn, has led a campaign for her son’s release. Others have jumped on the bandwagon, also claiming a egregious violations of Uhlbricht’s civil rights.
In May 2022, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., called for Uhlbricht’s release, saying that the sentence “is the greatest violation of the Eighth Amendment that I’m aware of in the United States today.” Massie, a far right lawmaker and staunch trump supporter, made the unlikely request that President Joe Biden vacate Uhlbricht’s sentence.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a former GOP candidate for president and unswerving trump lackey, said he has “studied up on Ross’s case…There was a lot in his case that smelled rotten to me, including the initial supposed allegations of murder-for-hire, which the government didn’t actually charge in the end…Ten years is sufficient. He deserves a commutation of sentence.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an Independent presidential candidate, also vowed to “immediately investigate this case when I become president and if I find that Ross Ulbricht was punished as an example, then I will give him clemency. That is not consistent with American justice and it’s wrong.”
Rod Blagojevich was Illinois governor and a congressman before he was jailed for eight years on federal public corruption charges. He was pardoned by trump.
“The length of Ross Ulbricht’s sentence is unconscionable and wicked,” Blagojevich said. “I hope to see an end to this terrible injustice.”
Former N.Y. City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was convicted of numerous federal charges for tax fraud, ethics violations, and criminal false statements. He also was pardoned by trump.
“Ross Ulbricht is clearly the victim of over-sentencing for a non-violent, first-time offense. He was essentially condemned to die in prison for what others chose to buy and sell on the platform he created when an idealistic twenty-six-year old entrepreneur,” Kerik said.