Trump promised Libertarians that if they voted for him, he’d pardon Ross Ulbricht. If you don’t know who that is and his story, below vid gives details. This is a good day for Libertarians, Ross Ulbricht (obviously) and freedom/liberty loving 'Muricans:
Not sure I’m on board with the President on this one. I can’t say I am totally up to speed on this guy, but he sounds like a genuine bad actor. I mean this guy straight up ran a darknet “Amazon”. Can’t really agree with the argument some make about him just setting up a free marketplace and bearing no responsibility for the activities therein. Drugs, guns, and frankly who knows what else.
If the argument is life imprisonment was to harsh, wouldn’t a commutation have been more appropriate?
What about the murder for hire charges that were dropped following his federal conviction. Are the states able to refile? I’m guessing not.
Do the feds have to refund the billions of $ they seized?
Sorry, but I’m finding myself on the “Fuq this guy” side of this one.
I never expected to agree with every decision he’s gonna make. This is one of them. I appreciate his willingness to keep the promises he made on the campaign trail, but a commutation would’ve sufficed here.
Am i getting this right that his crime was setting up a website that didn’t lend itself to .gov tracking users?
Basically he ran an online black market for everything from drugs to prostitution to contract killers. When things got dicey he tried to hire a hitman himself to take out the threat to his empire and freedom.
Of course the “hitman” he hired was a fedboi.
The hitman claim seems to be dubious at best.
It really sounds like he had a platform the feds didn’t like.
I was extremely happy to see this.
Ross may have committed a crime technically. It was a fairly passive one.
He was sentenced to two life sentences and 40 years. This wqs a message to anyone who dare keep commerce out of the control of government.
His ten years served is more than enough for any crime he committed.
So let’s set the “murder for hire” charges to the side for a minute.
From what I have been able to find in some brief looking around the guy knowingly facilitated, and profited from, the sale of:
Large amounts of illegal drugs
Illegal firearms sales
Counterfeit currency
Fraudulent identification documents
Identity theft data
I have seen other criminal activities mentioned. Like child porn, prostitution, and trafficking but I haven’t seen any official statements of that. Just a lot of mention of “other criminal acts”. I’m inclined to believe it happened given the circumstances, I just don’t see the reporting of it. So I will leave them off the list unless someone can firm them up. My list of 5 comes from DOJ, FBI, DEA, and ICE official statements and charging/conviction
documents.
So yeah, I’m still on “Fuq this guy”. Not that I have any say in the matter, just my .02. A commutation wouldn’t bother me near as much as a pardon, but this dude is a legit bad guy.
That’s what I was getting out of this too. From what I have put up a site and was hands off letting users do their own thing.
Meanwhile, there are scams openly running on Facebook that Facebook does not intervene against. This is the same Facebook that regulates what users do including collusion with .gov to silence opposing views/promote official desires.
That part can’t be set aside because it was allegedly brought up during the trial for the stuff he got convicted on. If that is fact, it was obviously done to intentionally put a thumb on the scale.
That is getting in to similar territory of going after firearms manufacturers/sellers because a firearm was later used in a crime.
That Mark Zuckerberg(who rules FB content with an iron fist) didn’t pull some time for knowingly facilitating and profiting from stuff like this
Makes me skeptical of .gov claims against a guy over a site he was running laissez faire.
I meant that solely for the purposes of that post. Just like I “set aside” the other allegations further down in the post that I cannot cite.
Doesn’t change the list of 5 that are provable fact.
Now sure, crappy stuff probably happens on Facebook (not that I would know, not a user) and other online sites. The big difference here is that he designed Silk Road, by his own admission (in the form of communication as "Dread Pirate Roberts), primarily to enable and profit from criminal activities in a protected environment.
ETA: I’m gonna guess Silk Road didn’t move a lot of used cars, kittens, or free couches like the online marketplaces I see. 
If it was provable fact, the prosecution wouldn’t have looked around the room and suddenly have felt the need to toss in claims that Ulbricht was hiring assassins.
From Ulbricht’s journal:
“While all of this was happening, I began working on a project that had been in my mind for over a year. I was calling it Underground Brokers, but eventually settled on Silk Road. The idea was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them.”
Which doesn’t sound bad to me, but obviously would enrage a bureaucratic ideology that simultaneously claims it needs to operate in secrecy.
For Trump I believe it was more transactional. He wanted more votes from libertarians. A lot of libertarians expressed that they’d like to see Ulbricht released from prison. Done.
I don’t necessarily agree with his release, but it is a very small disagreement compared to a Kamala presidency. There are, and will be, many things that I don’t agree with Trump. Add them all up x 100 and it’s still a very small price for making America great again.