Trump Pardons Drug Dealer 'In Honor Of' Libertarians

It's not a bribe, it's a sparkling honorarium.

On Tuesday night Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the largest online drug market in history. And he did it as an explicit political payback to the Libertarian Party for its support in the election.

Every bit of the chaos unfolding around us can be laid at the feet of Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court’s conservatives who revisited the Nixon precedents and decided that, on second thought, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But in the melee, we should not lose track of the fact that the sitting president just announced that he’s using his office to pay back a political constituency for votes. And he did it in exactly the way Justice Amy Coney Barrett predicted in her famous concurrence in the Trump v. US immunity decision, when she castigated her five conservative brethren for functionally legalizing bribery.

Who is this asshole anyway?

Ross Ulbricht’s journey to Libertarian cause célèbre and crypto-hero was an unlikely one. In 2011, after a couple of failed online businesses, Ulbricht started the Silk Road website on the dark web, allowing buyers to connect with sellers and use bitcoin to trade for almost anything. The site’s primary offering was illegal drugs, although it hosted a brisk trade in more or less everything but weapons and child sexual abuse materials.

The DOJ described Ulbricht’s wares thusly:

For example, as of September 23, 2013, there were: 159 listings under the category “Services,” most of which offered computer hacking services, such as a listing by a vendor offering to hack into social networking accounts of the customer’s choosing; 801 listings under the category “Digital goods,” including malicious software, hacked accounts at various online services, and pirated media content; and 169 listings under the category “Forgeries,” including offers to produce fake driver’s licenses, passports, Social Security cards, utility bills, credit card statements, car insurance records, and other forms of false identification documents.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of contraband moved through the Silk Road exchange, making Ulbricht (who called himself “Dread Pirate Roberts” after the character in The Princess Bride) a wealthy man. But it also put a target on his back, since he was effectively running an open air drug market and thumbing his nose at law enforcement. And by 2013, with the feds hot on his trail, the nerdy weirdo who once posted on social media that he hoped to “use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind,” decided that maybe a little coercion was just the thing.

Per Ulbricht’s indictment:

On or about March 31, 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," a/k/a "DPR," a/k/a "Silk Road," the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road website, paid a Silk Road user ("User-1") approximately $150,000 to murder another Silk Road user ("User-2") who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.

On or about April 8, 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," a/k/a "DPR," a/k/a "Silk Road, " the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road website, paid User-1 approximately $500,000 to murder four additional persons, whom ULBRICHT believed were associated with User-2.

None of the killings actually took place, although Ulbricht’s efforts did result in an elaborate photo shoot where the “hitman” — it’s always an FBI agent — dumped a can of Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup on the head of a former Silk Road moderator and ordered him to look like he’d been suffocated.

On February 5, 2015, a jury found Ulbricht guilty of five counts of narcotics distribution, conspiracy to abet computer hacking, and continuing criminal enterprise. He was not charged with putting out the five hits, although the judge took that evidence into account as “relevant conduct” pursuant to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which allows judges to consider other criminal evidence proven only by a preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, if there is sufficient evidence that the defendant committed other crimes for which he was not charged, the judge is required to consider those crimes when determining an appropriate sentence. In this case, Judge Katherine Forrest sentenced Ulbricht to a life sentence for distribution of narcotics via the internet and also for continuing criminal enterprise, with the two sentences to be served concurrently. (Presumably it’s the word “concurrently” that’s tripping up President Bigly Brain.)

Ulbricht appealed his conviction to the Second Circuit, alleging multiple Fourth Amendment violations and contesting the life sentence on the theory that the trial judge wrongly considered the five fake contract killings and six drug-related deaths of people who purchased narcotics on his website.

The Second Circuit unanimously affirmed the conviction and sentence, noting that “A reasonable jury could easily conclude, however, that the evidence demonstrated that Ulbricht ordered and paid for the [Chicken and Stars] killing, and that he believed that it had occurred.” As for the other four contract hits, they noted Ulbricht’s chat logs, along with the $650,000 worth of Bitcoin that he sent to the “killer,” and agreed that it did not constitute a Sixth Amendment violation for the trial judge to take that conduct into account.

In December of 2017, Ulbricht petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari. He was represented by Kannon Shanmugam, who is widely agreed to be the best appellate lawyer in the country. Multiple amici filed briefs in support of Ulbricht’s Fourth and Sixth Amendment claims, although none of them argued that his conviction was illegitimate because “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against” the once and future president. But the Supreme Court rejected the petition.

All of which is to say that Ulbricht is a bad dude, who did the type of bad things that Trump says should merit the death penalty.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised that "We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts. Because it's the only way."

But of course, it’s not the only way. Another way is to make yourself a celebrity among the crypto bros and libertarians, in which case, you get a full pardon. And after exhausting all his appeals, that’s exactly what Ulbricht did.

Per the New York Times:

In December 2023, Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Trump wanted to know how to win over libertarian voters, a constituency he thought could help him reclaim the presidency, Ms. McArdle said in an interview. She had an answer: Free Ross Ulbricht, a Bitcoin pioneer who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for creating Silk Road, the world’s largest online drug marketplace. Mr. Ulbricht was regarded as a libertarian hero for building an illegal market outside the government’s reach.

“I love freeing people,” Mr. Trump said, according to Ms. McArdle. Five months later, she hosted him at the Libertarian Party’s national convention, where he announced onstage that, if elected to the presidency, he would release Mr. Ulbricht.

Ulbricht has long been a hero of the crypto bros, for recognizing the great advantage of untraceable, decentralized currency. (Hint: It is crime!) And now, he’ll be able to do a whole lot more of it.

But about Justice Barrett …

The Supreme Court has had a long term project to functionally legalize political bribery, and so, even if the Ulbricht pardon were an explicit quid pro quo, this gross abuse of power could never be prosecuted.

In 2016, the justices ruled unanimously that the only thing that legally counts as a quo for purposes of criminal bribery is whether the elected official commits an “official act.” And then they defined “official act” so narrowly as to exclude more or less everything besides signing bills into law. And so it was not bribery for former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to accept a Rolex, a fur coat for his wife, various pricey golf outings, and liberal use of a Ferrari from a supplement salesman, and then introduce said benefactor to influential legislators. McDonnell even made a big show of horking down his pal’s pills in the middle of a meeting with the Department of Human Resources, loudly proclaiming that they "were working well for him," would be “good for" state employees, and that the state officials should meet with his buddy and listen to his spiel.

But that wasn’t enough. “Setting up a meeting or talking to another official, or organizing an event (or agreeing to do so) — without more — does not fit that definition of ‘official act,’” the Chief Justice reasoned.

Then in 2024, Roberts handed off the pen to Justice Kavanaugh for a 6-3 decision in a case involving James Snyder, a former Indiana mayor who awarded $1.1 million in city contracts to a local truck company, and then accepted a $13,000 check from the same company after leaving office. A jury convicted Snyder of accepting a bribe, but the Supreme Court reversed, holding that a payment made after the fact is merely a gratuity, not a bribe. And if gratuities are crimes, Justice Kavanaugh was concerned that the next step would be… outlawing tipping the garbage men at Christmas?

The flaw in the Government’s approach—and it is a very serious real-world problem—is that the Government does not identify any remotely clear lines separating an innocuous or obviously benign gratuity from a criminal gratuity. The Government simply opines that state and local officials may not accept “wrongful” gratuities.

That is no guidance at all. Is a $100 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card for a trash collector wrongful? What about a $200 Nike gift card for a county commissioner who voted to fund new school athletic facilities? Could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration? And if so, would it somehow become criminal to take the professor for a steak dinner? Or to treat her to a Hoosiers game?

But of course the body blow to presidential accountability came in Trump v. US, which paved the way for Trump to casually announce that he was using his official presidential powers to pay off a political constituency. Indeed, Justice Amy Coney Barrett penned a concurrence predicting that the majority’s bar on use of official acts as evidence of crimes — even crimes committed in an unofficial capacity — would make it impossible to prosecute a president for taking bribes.

“Consider a bribery prosecution,” Justice Barrett hypothesized, perhaps anticipating Trump’s second term. “The federal bribery statute forbids any public official to seek or accept a thing of value ‘for or because of any official act.’ The Constitution, of course, does not authorize a President to seek or accept bribes, so the Government may prosecute him if he does so.”

“[E]xcluding from trial any mention of the official act connected to the bribe would hamstring the prosecution,” she continued. “To make sense of charges alleging a quid pro quo, the jury must be allowed to hear about both the quid and the quo, even if the quo, standing alone, could not be a basis for the President’s criminal liability.”

Writing again for the majority, the Chief Justice shrugged off Barrett’s concerns:

[O]f course the prosecutor may point to the public record to show the fact that the President performed the official act. And the prosecutor may admit evidence of what the President allegedly demanded, received, accepted, or agreed to receive or accept in return for being influenced in the performance of the act. See 18 U. S. C. §201(b)(2). What the prosecutor may not do, however, is admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety. As we have explained, such inspection would be “highly intrusive” and would “ ‘seriously cripple’ ” the President’s exercise of his official duties.

But Barrett was exactly right. Less than 48 hours into his second term, Trump blatantly announced that he’s abusing his office as a sop to a small group of political supporters. And there’s no way to stop it, thanks to SCOTUS. Because even if it were possible to prosecute the president for selling a pardon, the announcement itself is an official act, which must be excluded from evidence under the immunity ruling. Ulbricht can walk out of prison and throw millions of dollars at Donald Trump tomorrow, and that would be a gratuity. Or immune. Or inadmissible as evidence in court. Or all three, probably.

And, hey, would you look at that! Just hours before taking the oath of office, our president set up a memecoin so his pals can slide infinity cash right into his pocket with no repercussion whatsoever.