This was one of the biggest requests of the Libertarian Party and Trump followed through with it. Could you imagine the Democratic Party agreeing to any demand from the Green Party in an attempt to get votes?
I can imagine them agreeing to all sorts of things!<br>
He referred to the prosecutors as scum and said they were the ones who were persecuting him like it was some purely political shit when he is an incredibly prolific fraudsters, rapist, and traitor. He should have been arrested during the Jan 6th insurrection and never allowed free again.
His reasoning was that Ross was a libertarian and this is to honor the libertarian movement that supported him… dude! He labeled the fucking drug cartels terrorist organizations and Ross enabled so much drug trafficking it isn’t funny. How the fuck do people not see through that?
Here’s my convoluted conspiracy theory for how this makes sense.
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Trump launches Trump Coin
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Trump pardons crypto drug dealer, but not paper drug dealers
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Crypto market booms
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Trump sells coin to whichever idiots he hasn’t scammed yet
I also think this is some crypto bro shenanigans. Ulbricht might even have billions in Bitcoin stashed away somewhere for a juicy payback.
That cryptoscan was to allow untraceable bribes from enemy nations.
You can already do that with any cryptocurrency using a mixer. And some of them already have strong privacy built in or available as add-ons.
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“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
He called Ulbricht’s prison sentence “ridiculous.”
I clearly recall Trump being president from 2016-2020, Ulbricht was sentenced to life without parole in 2015.
If it was so ridiculous, why didn’t he pardon him on his first term? What changed to make it such an immediate priority now?
Because he needed the libertarian vote this time in order to win. Its a very cheap promise that guarantees votes and doesnt alienate anyone that doesnt care. Honestly, the fact that he followed through suprises me.
“But why didnt he need the libertarian vote in 16?”
Because he never intended to win the first time. The first run was a fluke. He wanted to play victim and run the media circuit for profit.
Back then he thought Bitcoin was bad and a scam. This time someone showed him how to make money by creating a scam coin and doing a pump and dump, so now he’s pro Bitcoin. So pro he’ll get rid of all regulation so pump and dump scams are completely legal.
Imagine how many times he was asked:
“Why don’t you have your own “Bitcoin” coin yet, Mr. President?”
Trump doesn’t need to think about re-election this time around so he has more political freedom.
Wow that brings me joy. Silkroad is where I bought my first drugs
Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her he would pardon her son “in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”.
Wildy transactional.
So… does “full and unconditional” mean he’s also pardoned for the murders-for-hire? Or just for being a drug lord and America’s Next Top Website Boy?
I’m actually kind of impressed he kept his word. That’s unexpected
His part is signing a piece of paper with a Sharpie that one of his handlers puts in front of him. That phone call had to be horrible, Trump trying to explain to a mom he is setting her son that he knows nothing about, free because he once said he would to a large group of people he wants to grift.
Because 0% he knows the guy’s name, who he was, or why he was in prison.
Edit - autocorrect =(
I mean, I’m just going to go with the most obvious grift. Ulbricht is going to go right back to operating a crypto street pharmacy. Hell, he’ll do it on the open web now. He’ll call it “The New Silk Road” or similar.
And then there’s an agreement for the feds to not go after them. In exchange, Ulbricht uses a good portion of his earnings to become the largest single investor in Trumpcoin ever. If asked, the feds can either ignore the question or hide behind some fig leaf excuse they come up with.
It’s not like Trump didn’t run blatant undeniable cons in the last administration.
Having something like that as a government honeypot is also a great way to get kompromat on people.
He was never convicted on murders for hire, charges were dropped
Yeah, it’s insane that he’s just openly being like, “I promise to use the powers of my office to solely benefit myself,” and the Supreme Court’s just like, “Get it, grrrrrl”
Although, to be fair, it did also benefit a guy who tried to murder five people.
Didn’t Donald the Jester say something about fighting crime before the election? And then he drops thousands of hard criminals back on the street?
Trump is a demon, but this was a good call. His sentence was wildly disproportionate to what he did.
Didn’t he try to hire a hitman?
No. The evidence against him was fabricated because they didn’t have any evidence.
I somehpw doubt that considering some if the evidence used to convict him was used to convict his DEA mole later
Nonetheless, he was not convicted on those charges.
The judicial system in America is obviously not about what is written in their legal statutes or the veracity of the evidence presented. Otherwise war criminals, fraudsters and rapists like Bush, Cheney, Trump and Clinton would be in prison. It is about advancing an agenda for a white male US hegemony and that explains most of the outcomes, e.g. black people being enslaved in prison. Ulbricht thumbed his nose at the establishment and they got pissy. Assange and Snowden revealed their crimes and they hunted them to the ends of the earth. The CIA and their stooges, the Swedes, fabricated a rape allegation against Assange that was quietly dismissed, unfulfilled, seven years later. This establishment will stop at nothing to assert their authority and you wonder about evidence in the Ulbricht case?
No I don’t wonder because again that evidence was used to convict the DEA agents that stole from Silk Road. You are linking a bunch of things that have nothing to do with each other. The pattern you are seeing is an illusion
The pattern I’m seeing is a corrupt government not to be trusted. You have a fraudster in charge and his henchmen are Nazis. The fact that those agents were convicted of stealing money is not a good sign.
it was to kill competition who were threatening to kill him. id say if the law won’t protect you, you are free to protect yourself
Edit: I wrote a whole comment about this and the corrupt DEA agents involved in pushing him into a murder-for-hire scheme who were also working as moderators for the Silk Road, and later went to prison for crimes surrounding the ordeal.
But I decided against it, because the fact remains that it is likely he did attempt to have people killed. It was due to threats of exposing him, not threats on his life. And the fact is that him likely being entrapped is a good legal defense but not a good moral one.
If we ignore everything involving the possible contract murder deals, I say that his release is wonderful. Considering he was never convicted of any of the murder for hire stuff, his sentence was draconian, and marked a real shift in the freedom of the internet. As to Trump, even a broken clock is right twice every 78 years.
But this release is not so sweet knowing what Ross may have and likely tried to do in order to hang onto his crumbling empire.
Could prosecutors still charge him with murder for hire, ultimately forcing Trump to double down?
I really don’t know, but I doubt they would. It’s possible for the original 5 instances he was accused of, as he was never tried but the district court conceded he probably did it.
The 6th, later and more famous instance? Probably not. He was actually indicted for that in Maryland, but it was a weak case that was dropped once he was convicted of his other drug and financial crimes. In the later incident, the hitman who he purportedly hired was Carl Force; the corrupt DEA agent. At best, Force’s action constituted entrapment. At worst, the whole story is unreliable. Either way, I can’t see any government agency thrilled about dragging the details of that situation out of obscurity.
even a broken clock is right twice a day…
this was probably timed to distract from the whole, nazi salute controversy.
Tough on drugs… For people who aren’t white
Someone should really convince him to legalise all drugs to stick it to the cartels.
OMG Trump did a positive thing 🤯, maybe by mistake
Freeing a drug lord is a good thing?
He was white with a white name. If it was Carlos Fernandez he would had his life sentence upgraded to death and had his executed ASAP.
deleted by creator
Oh… He’s not even the real Dread Pirate Roberts!
Don’t know or care about this guy but all drugs should be legal.
Then you should probably care about him. He gave people around the world access to medicine that was illegal
Silk Road wasn’t the first darknet market ya know. I helped launch the first couple that were .onion prior to Ross, but the movement has been about since the 90s at least and would’ve happened without any of us. We were working on a decentralised version that would’ve been unstoppable but people moved on and got other priorities when SR took all the media attention and spotlight. I’m guessing it’ll emerge out crypto soon now the tech has caught up with the theory.
I’m kind of curious to hear about this decentralized solution…
I lost touch with the guy who was working on it, but this was before smart contracts even came on the scene.
The original text that radicalised me; https://anarplex.sirion.io/hosted/files/Toward_A_Private_Digital_Economy/index.html
There was OpenBazaar, but flopped for obvious reasons.
Could someone explain like to an non American why the president gets to pardon people at all?
If someone committed a crime they’re guilty, if there’s new evidence that they’re not guilty then that’s what appeals are for.
Just FYI this is not just an American thing. In Italy for example the President of the republic can cancel or amend sentences too, and it does happen relatively often, although not in the same partisan way as in the US (but that’s also because the president in Italy is a neutral and representative position).
Some example from few years ago when the president graced 33 people (each with a specific articulated motivation) https://www.ilpost.it/2021/12/10/mattarella-grazia-sette-persone-sebastian-oberleteir-heinrich/ (in Italian, but you can translate if you wish).
In a perfect system, the pardon is meant to be a “check” on the powers of the other branches. (Legislative and judicial). Each branch is meant to both support AND check the others.
Obviously we are watching it all unwind. Certain things were a “gentleman’s agreement” in that a president normally wouldn’t over do it and just pardon tons of people. We are finding out lots of things were just assumed to be ok, but are easily abused by bad actors
Yeah the number of pardons Biden performed raised the bar like crazy.
Between Biden and trump we are in a new era.
Similarly McConnell holding up supreme court nominee hearings for months, the way he did represents the erosion of another “gentleman’s agreement” between the branches of government.
My best understanding is that it was a historic right of kings, governors, etc. The idea was to show mercy to those who may have been convicted wrongly, or to people convicted of laws that have been overturned.
Trump is abusing it in ways never done before to payback political supporters.
TBF Biden abused it as well in pardoning his son.
Sounds like a rule that very much should have been left in the 17th century
Carter’s blanket pardon of Vietnam War draft dodgers was pretty important
Yes - exactly. That’s the sort of high-minded use that I believe the framers were considering.
Sir, you look like the piss boy!
Yeah? And you look like a bucket of shit.
This is a win for drug cartels
