Trump pardons Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht on Day One

On January 21, 2025, his first full day in office, President Donald Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, an underground website used for illegal drug sales. Ulbricht had been sentenced to life in prison in 2015 following a high-profile federal prosecution in Manhattan. Trump announced the pardon on Truth Social, noting he had spoken with Ulbricht's mother, Lyn Ulbricht, who with libertarian activists had spent years reframing her son's case as a political cause and lobbying Trump's circle directly. According to a consultant who worked on the release, Trump had planned to commute Ulbricht's sentence at the end of his first term but held off after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, to avoid further antagonizing the Justice Department that had prosecuted him. During the 2024 campaign Trump pledged to free Ulbricht in a speech at the Libertarian Party National Convention, and party leaders told him the movement's support depended on it; he later acknowledged he granted the pardon for that support. Announcing the clemency, Trump said the prosecutors who convicted Ulbricht were "some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me."