Donald Trump pardoned the founder of the Silk Road drugs website

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Donald Trump They pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running an online marketplace for illegal drugs and hacking services.

“The crooks who worked to impeach him (Ulbricht) were some of the crazies involved in the modern apparatus of government against me,” Trump wrote late Tuesday.

At Ulbricht’s trial, U.S. prosecutors said he built an anonymous marketplace known as Silk Road to exploit the anonymity of the dark web and the digital currency bitcoin.

At the time, the issue attracted the attention of bitcoin evangelists and freedom groups as the government tried to criminalize hosting.

Trump, who announced the apology, said it was “a tribute to the libertarian movement that has supported me so strongly.”

Trump in 2016 Ulbricht, who was jailed in San Francisco in 2013, pledged to pardon Ulbricht at the Libertarian Party National Convention last May.

“This is a seismic shift, a crack in the wall of government oppression,” the Liberal Party said following the apology.

The move comes after the crypto industry donated millions of dollars to Trump’s election campaign, promising to make America the “Bitcoin superpower of the world.”

Silk Road is run by the Tor network and only accepts bitcoin as payment, which US prosecutors say has helped keep its users and their locations from being known.

The website allowed criminals to sell large quantities of drugs, computer hacking services and forged documents and other illegal goods and services, prosecutors said.

During the US government raid, 173,991 bitcoins were seized from Ulbricht’s laptop.