Trump pardons Silk Road founder Ulbricht for online drug scheme

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for running an underground online marketplace where drug dealers and others conducted over $200 million in illicit trade using bitcoin.

The Republican president made good on a campaign pledge to free Ulbricht, 40, who was arrested in 2013 and sentenced in 2015 in what became a landmark US prosecution launched only a few years after the emergence of the popular cryptocurrency.

“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump said the pardon was “full and unconditional”, adding he called Ulbricht’s mother to break the news to her on Tuesday.

Ulbricht has been imprisoned at a federal prison in Arizona, and his attorney said he was hopeful Ulbricht would be released shortly.

“After enduring over a decade of incarceration, this decision offers Ross the opportunity to begin anew, to rebuild his life, and to contribute positively to society,” Brandon Sample, Ulbricht’s clemency attorney, said in a statement.

Trump’s administration is expected to significantly reverse course on what had been a crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector during former Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure.

Trump had announced plans to commute Ulbricht’s sentence in May during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarian Party, which has advocated for drug legalisation, had pushed for Ulbricht’s release, calling the case an example of government overreach.

His arrest brought to an end what prosecutors described as a global, black market bazaar that for two years starting in 2011 was used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214m worth of illegal drugs and other illicit services.

Prosecutors said some people died due to drugs bought on 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 conceal their identities and locations.

Prosecutors said Ulbricht ran Silk Road under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a character in the 1987 movie “The Princess Bride,” and took extreme steps to protect the marketplace’s operation.

Those steps, they said, included soliciting the murders of several people who posed a threat, though they also said no evidence exists that any murders were actually carried out.

Ulbricht acknowledged he created Silk Road, which a defense lawyer at his trial said was intended as a “freewheeling, free market site.” But his lawyers contended Ulbricht had later handed off the website to others and was lured back toward its end to become the “fall guy” for its true operators.

“I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity,” Ulbricht said at his sentencing hearing in May 2015.

A federal jury in Manhattan in February 2015 found Ulbricht guilty of charges including distributing drugs through the internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering.

“What you did was unprecedented,” now-former US District Judge Katherine Forrest said in sentencing Ulbricht. “And in breaking that ground as the first person, you sit here as the defendant having to pay the consequences for that.”

bid to roll back birthright citizenship on Tuesday in an early bid by his opponents to block his agenda in court.

After his inauguration on Monday, Trump, a Republican, ordered US agencies to refuse to recognise the citizenship of children born in the US if neither their mother or father is a US citizen or legal permanent resident.

Twenty-two Democratic-led states along with the District of Columbia and city of San Francisco filed a pair of lawsuits in federal courts in Boston and Seattle asserting Trump had violated the US Constitution.

Two similar cases were filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, immigrant organisations and an expectant mother in the hours after Trump signed the executive order, kicking off the first major court fight of his administration.

The lawsuits take aim at a central piece of Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown. If allowed to stand, Trump’s order would for the first time deny more than 150,000 children born annually in the United States the right to citizenship, said the office of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell.

“President Trump does not have the authority to take away constitutional rights,” she said in a statement.

Losing out on citizenship would prevent those individuals from having access to federal programs like Medicaid health insurance and, when they become older, from working lawfully or voting, the states say.

“Today’s immediate 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 Platkin said in a statement.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

More lawsuits by Democratic-led states and advocacy groups challenging other aspects of Trump’s agenda are expected, with cases already on file challenging the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and an order Trump signed weakening job protections for civil servants.

Three of the four lawsuits were filed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Any rulings from judges in those New England states would be reviewed by the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, the only federal appeals court whose active judges are all Democratic appointees.

Four states filed a separate case in Washington state, which the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over. US District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle has scheduled a Thursday hearing on whether he should issue a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of Trump’s order.

A fifth lawsuit was filed in federal court in Maryland by a group of pregnant women and immigrant rights groups including Casa.

The various lawsuits argue that Trump’s executive order violated the right enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment that provides that anyone born in the United States is considered a citizen.

The complaints cite the US Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a decision holding that children born in the United States to non-citizen parents are entitled to US citizenship.

The plaintiffs challenging the order include a woman living in Massachusetts 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 home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events and currently covers more than 1m people from 17 nations.

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, late on Monday filed a lawsuit challenging an order Trump signed that makes it easier to fire thousands of federal agency employees and replace them with political loyalists.

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