Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Trump pardons online drug boss and alleged would-be murderer - [...]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 U.S. 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."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-founder-ulbricht-online-drug-scheme-2025-01-22/

And Trump promised he would to buy votes. Anything you do for Trump, no problem. He
has a bucketload of pardons to use before February 2029. Promoting lawlessness 101.