Who is Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder Trump pardoned?

• 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 U.S. Penitentiary in Tucson since the FBI arrested him in 2013.

FBI described Silk Road as a “digital bazaar” 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 convicted Ulbricht, now 40, to life in prison for drug trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering without the possibility of parole, ruling that Silk Road was “destructive to our social fabric.”

Libertarian cause célèbre

Ulbricht has become a célèbre for the libertarian movement.

The Libertarian Party, which has long supported criminal justice reform and drug legalization, has consistently pushed 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 promised to reverse Ulbricht’s sentence on the first day of his administration if re-elected president.

Trump said in his remarks Tuesday that he granted Ulbricht’s pardon in honor of Ulbricht’s mother “and the Libertarian Movement that 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 interventionism and proponent of the moral purpose of free-market capitalism.

In one letter he wrote to the trial 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 what they wanted as long as they did not hurt someone else.”

“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 this right, I never tried to create a site that would give people another way to feed their addiction.”

But according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, “by far” the majority of goods sold on Silk Road were illegal drugs.

Preet Bharara, the US attorney for Manhattan at the time, 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 people.”

Ulbricht was convicted of seven offenses 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 Truth Social post, Trump called Ulbricht’s sentences “ridiculous.”

In one declaration on Tuesday Angela McArdle, the chairwoman of the Libertarian National Committee, thanked Trump for following through on 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 incredible moment in Libertarian history,” McArdle added.

On Monday, Trump also issued sweeping pardons to about 1,500 people related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, fulfilling a campaign promise to expunge the records of most people connected to the riot.