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Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced life in prison in 2015 for masterminding an online marketplace for illegal drugs and hacking services.

“The scum working to convict him (Ulbricht) are some of the same idiots involved in the modern day weaponization of the government against me,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.

During the UlbrichtAt trial, US prosecutors say he set up the anonymous marketplace, known as Silk Road, to take advantage of the anonymity of the dark web and digital currency bitcoin.

At the time, the case attracted the attention of bitcoin evangelists and libertarian groups who claimed that the government was trying to make web hosting a criminal activity.

In announcing the pardon, Trump said it was “in honor of the Libertarian Movement, which has supported me so much”.

Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht, who was arrested in 2013 in San Francisco, at the Libertarian party’s national convention in May.

“This is a seismic shift, a breach in the suffocating wall of state oppression,” the Libertarian party said after the pardon.

The move comes after the crypto industry donated millions of dollars to Trump’s election campaign, where he promised to make America the “bitcoin superpower of the world”.

Silk Road is powered by the Tor Network and only accepts bitcoin as payment, which US prosecutors say helps to anonymize its users and their locations.

The site allowed criminals to sell large quantities of drugs, computer hacking services and forged documents, among other illegal goods and services, prosecutors said.

The US government seized 173,991 bitcoins from Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest.