Why Trump made a deal to free Ross Ulbricht

A second chance for the creator of the dark web drug site the Silk Road might be coming…from an unlikely savior. https://reason.com/video/2025/01/17/trump-promised-to-free-ross-ulbricht-heres-why-he-should/ Zach's full interview with Angela McArdle is available here: https://youtu.be/uG3spGgzPAI 0:00 - Intro 1:30 - The Arrest of Ross Ulbricht 2:06 - The Philosophy of Ross and the Silk Road 3:55 - Why Ross is a libertarian icon 4:43 - Did Ross "Break Bad" and hire a hitman? 9:00 - The failures of the drug war exposed 9:52 - Trump makes a deal with the Libertarian Party 14:07 - The case for freeing Ross Correction: 14:01 This piece includes a line that "[Ulbricht would] already be out if he'd accepted the 10-year plea deal the government offered him." This assertion, originally made in reporting by Vanity Fair, has been disputed by Ulbricht's defense and the prosecuting U.S. Assistant Attorney, who testified that the only plea offer he was aware of carried "a mandatory minimum of ten years and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment." — Ross Ulbricht was arrested at 29. Now, he's 40. He faces a double life sentence plus 40 years with no possibility of parole for creating the Silk Road, a dark web drug marketplace that facilitated $1.2 billion in bitcoin-denominated transactions. "I'll spend the next few decades in this cage. Then, sometime later this century, I'll grow old and die. I'll finally leave prison, but I'll be in a body bag," he told an interviewer at a 2021 virtual blockchain conference.