US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Albrecht, who was sentenced to life in prison for running an underground online marketplace where drug dealers and others made more than $200 million through bitcoin. Illegal trade.
The Republican president made good on a campaign promise to free Albrecht, 40, who was arrested in 2013 and convicted in 2015, just a few years after the popular cryptocurrency emerged. was
Trump said in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, “The scum who tried to convict him were the same lunatics who were involved in modernizing the government against me.”
Trump said the pardon was “full and unconditional,” adding that he called Albrecht’s mother on Tuesday to break the news.
Albrecht is being held in a federal prison in Arizona, and his attorney said he hopes Albrecht will be released soon.
“After more than a decade in prison, this decision gives Ross a chance to start over, rebuild his life, and contribute positively to society,” said Brendan Semple, Albrecht’s leniency attorney. said in a statement.
The Trump administration is expected to react significantly to the crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector under former Democratic President Joe Biden.
Trump announced plans to commute Albrecht’s sentence during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention in May. The Libertarian Party, which has advocated for drug legalization, had pushed for Albrecht’s release, calling the case an example of government overreach.
His arrest ended what prosecutors described as a global, black-market marketplace in which more than 100,000 people traded $214 million worth of illegal drugs and other illegal services over a two-year period beginning in 2011. Used for buying and selling.
Prosecutors said some people died because of drugs bought on the Silk Road.
The Silk Road website relied on the Tor network to communicate anonymously and accepted bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to hide their identities and locations.
Albrecht ran Silk Road under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a character from the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” and took extreme measures to protect the market’s operation, prosecutors said.
He said the measures included requesting the killing of several people who posed a threat, although he also said there was no evidence that any had actually been killed.
Albrecht acknowledged that he created the Silk Road, which a defense attorney at his trial said was intended as a “free-wheeling, free-market site.” But his lawyers claimed that Albrecht later turned the website over to others and was lured to its end by being a “fall man” for its real operators.
“I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and to have privacy and anonymity,” Albrecht said at his sentencing in May 2015.
In February 2015, a federal jury in Manhattan found Albrecht guilty of conspiracy to distribute drugs via the Internet and conspiracy to commit computer hacking and money laundering.
“What you did was unprecedented,” now-former U.S. District Judge Catherine Forrest said in sentencing Albrecht. “And as the first person to break that ground, you sit here as a defendant to suffer the consequences.”
Democratic-led states sued Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
Democratic-led states and civil rights groups have filed several lawsuits against US President Donald Trump. His opponents tried to roll back the birthright citizenship on Tuesday in an initial attempt to block his agenda in court.
After his inauguration on Monday, Trump, a Republican, ordered U.S. agencies to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. if either parent is a U.S. citizen or legal immigrant. Not a permanent resident.
Twenty-two Democratic-led states, as well as the District of Columbia and the city of San Francisco, have filed a pair of lawsuits in federal courts in Boston and Seattle alleging Trump violated the U.S. Constitution.
Two similar lawsuits were filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, immigrant organizations and an expectant mother within hours of Trump signing the executive order, setting off the first major court battle of his administration.
The lawsuits are a central part of Trump’s immigration crackdown. If allowed to stand, Trump’s order would for the first time deny citizenship to more than 150,000 children born in the United States annually, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell’s office said.
He said in a statement that President Trump does not have the authority to take away constitutional rights.
States argue that losing citizenship would prevent those individuals from accessing federal programs like Medicaid health insurance and, when they become adults, from legally working or voting.
“Today’s swift lawsuit sends a clear message to the Trump administration that we will stand up for our residents and their basic constitutional rights,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Plotkin said in a statement.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
More lawsuits are expected from Democratic-led states and advocacy groups challenging other aspects of Trump’s agenda, including cases challenging Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and Trump’s job protections for government employees. signed an order to weaken
1898 US Supreme Court precedent
Three of the four lawsuits were filed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Any decision by the judges in those New England states will be reviewed by the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, the only federal appeals court whose active judges are all Democratic appointees.
The four states filed a separate lawsuit in Washington state, which has jurisdiction over the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. U.S. District Judge John Cognore in Seattle has scheduled a hearing Thursday on whether he should issue a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s order from being implemented.
A fifth lawsuit was filed in federal court in Maryland by a group of pregnant women and immigrant rights groups including Casa.
Various lawsuits have argued that Trump’s executive order violated the right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which provides that anyone born in the United States is considered a citizen. .
The complaints cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which ruled that children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents are entitled to U.S. citizenship.
The plaintiffs challenging the order include a Massachusetts woman identified only as “O. Doe” who is in the country through temporary protected status and is due to give birth in March.
Temporary protected status is available to people whose countries of origin have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events and currently covers more than 1 million people from 17 countries.
Several other lawsuits challenging aspects of Trump’s other early executive actions are pending.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents federal government employees in 37 agencies and departments, filed a lawsuit late Monday challenging an executive order signed by Trump that furloughs thousands of federal agency workers. It becomes easier to fire and replace them with political loyalists.
