In another sop to the libertarian crypto bros, President Trump has pardoned the San Francisco founder of the Silk Road online drug marketplace, indicating Trump’s increasing fondness for crime among the cryptocurrency crowd.

Donald Trump's pardon of the January 6 rioters is rightly drawing a great deal of attention and outrage from both law enforcement and regular folk. But another pardon is getting less attention, and involves one of the most notorious cybercriminals in San Francisco history.

CBS News reports that on Tuesday, Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 for operating the early “dark web” site Silk Road that was largely an Amazon for illegal drugs and maybe the occasional murder-for-hire.  

Trump said on Truth Social that he had spoken with Ulbricht’s mother about the pardon, a pardon that Trump had promised before the election when speaking to some Bitcoin-crypto convention.

"It was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross," Trump wrote on that platform. "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."

This is unusual, considering that Trump had been president from 2017-2021, and never mentioned Ulbricht, who was convicted years earlier, or made a single public statement about him.

It was pretty big local news when Ulbricht was arrested at SF’s Glen Park library in 2013, and while Silk Road had been in the news for months, no one knew the identity of the user “Dread Pirate Roberts” who was actually the SF resident Ulbricht. The site had been a haven for Bitcoin-based online narcotic sales, the purchase of identity theft and hacking services, and money laundering.  

Yet on not one, not two, but five occasions, Ulbricht tried to hire hitmen to carry out murders of Silk Road users. His defense was an early adopter of the “We’re just a platform, we have no responsibility for this thing we profit from” argument that has since been popularized by large tech companies.  

Either way, Ulbricht has already been released and is now a free man. And while Trump may complain about illegal drugs crossing the border and the San Francisco drug trade, he also just released a San Francisco man who effectively dealt more drugs than every Honduran national in the Tenderloin combined.

Related: Trump Panders to Libertarians, Says He'd Pardon Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht [SFist]

Image: FressRoss.org