The presidential changeover last week was accompanied by a flurry of pardons stretching the power of the pardon about as far as weve ever seen it go. Outgoing President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned a group of people believed to be on the new administrations enemies list: members of his family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, the Congressional Select Committee to Investigate January 6 Attack, and more. Incoming President Donald Trump, meanwhile, pardoned 1,500 Capitol riot insurrectionists, plus two DC-area police officers and 23 anti-abortion activists. But even among the deluge, one pardon stood out: Trump granted clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web drug marketplace Silk Road. In so doing, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise he made to libertarians and crypto fans alike, to whom Ulbricht is something of a folk hero. Nick Bilton, author of American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road, joined Today, Explained to talk about how Ulbricht was originally captured, break down Trumps decision to grant him clemency, and explain what it tells us about the new administration.Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. Theres much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.Sean RameswaramYou say this pardon is inevitable. How come? Nick BiltonTrump went to the Libertarian Convention in May. The room was filled with all these people, and theyre holding up these Free Ross signs. Everything that comes out of Trumps mouth is met with a boo except for when he says, If you vote for me, on day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht. That was when the room burst into applause and cheers. And so for me, it was like: If he was going to win I believed he was going to win then Ross was going to be freed. Sean RameswaramWho is Ross Ulbricht, a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts?Nick Bilton Ross Ulbricht is a guy who came from Austin, Texas. Upper middle class, very nice, caring family. He was a really sweet kid. One of my favorite stories about him then is: Hes with a friend, walking down the street in Austin one day. He stops at the flower stall and buys some roses and then hands them back to the woman who works there and then continues to walk. His friend says, Whyd you do that? And he said, Because no one ever buys flowers for the person who works at the flower stall.Ulbricht goes off to college and he gets into not drugs, but the stuff we all do: smoking a little weed and taking some acid. The usual stuff kids these days do in college. He also falls deeply into the libertarian philosophy that the government should have no say in what you do with your own body: If you want to take drugs, you should be able to. He thinks that the problem with the war on drugs is that it has created a system where people only buy and sell these things in dark alleys and in dangerous places, which has led to so much crime around drugs and so on. And that if you legalized all drugs imaginable, you would essentially stop all the harm that happens to society. If you made it so that you could buy these drugs in an Amazon-like forum, people who sold bad drugs that killed people would get bad ratings, and you wouldnt buy from them anymore. Good people that cut their drugs up really nicely would become the bestsellers, and so on.He learns about this thing called the Tor Onion Browser. Its an untraceable browser. Then along comes bitcoin, and he has this realization, like, Oh my God, I can pair the Tor Onion browser with bitcoin, and I can create the website that is the Amazon of drugs. That becomes the Silk Road.Sean RameswaramWhat is Silk Road, beyond the Amazon of drugs? Nick Bilton To prove his thesis, Ross Ulbricht rents a cottage in Bastrop Park in Austin, and he secretly starts to grow magic mushrooms. He does it, ironically, while he is watching the show Breaking Bad.Eventually, he gets enough mushrooms that he fills a big trash bag with them. He posts the mushrooms on his website and waits for a buyer. In the meantime, he goes to online forums and anonymously says, Hey, has anyone seen this website, the Silk Road, where you can buy and sell drugs?Then one day, someone orders some. He mails them, and hes like, Holy shit, I sold some drugs. This is amazing. It worked.It started to spread, and soon people started listing other drugs, like marijuana and acid. A few months go by. Then, the website Gawker writes about it. And in that moment, it explodes. Its covered in the national news. The Chuck Schumer set finds out about it. This national attention turns into international attention, and before you know it, hes selling hundreds of millions of dollars of drugs. Silk Road starts to move to much more nefarious things than just basic weed and magic mushrooms. Theres a debate about whether they should sell body parts on the platform. They create another version of the site where they start selling guns. That proves to be more difficult because its harder to mail those to people. But it was a free-for-all. Anything you wanted to buy and sell was available on this marketplace, and all you needed was a few bitcoin and the Tor Onion Browser, and that was it. It gets to a point where Ulbricht is making so much money, and so much is being sold on Silk Road, that it captures the attention of people in China who were starting to make fentanyl at the time. Silk Road enabled them to mail fentanyl to the US. You start to see the beginning of the fentanyl epidemic, and the first people affected by it are kids.Of course the government was desperately trying to figure out how to stop it while all this was going on. Sean RameswaramHow do they catch the pirate?Nick Bilton The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are trying to solve the case. Theres a big meeting with all of the agencies, and they decide theyre going to do this big sting operation in San Francisco.There was a little library there just two stories tall. The Dread Pirate Roberts goes there to work, because he doesnt like going on the internet to do his Silk Road work from his apartment in case its ever traced back. One day he goes to the local library in Bernal Heights, and he logs on. But two agents are sitting in the library across from him and they get into a fake screaming match. And when he looks up to see whats going on, another agent swoops in, grabs the laptop, and the other agents arrest him.Hes sentenced for distributing narcotics, using the internet to distribute narcotics, all of these different things. And the judge said, I believe that there are good in people and there are bad in people. And she says, I believe that there is good in you and bad in you. But what you did started an entire new paradigm of crime in this country, and people died as a result of it.Sean RameswaramHow quickly does a movement to free him spring up? Nick Bilton It starts during the trial in 2015, and it grows and grows as crypto and bitcoin grow into mainstream topics. Theres an argument to be made that before the Silk Road and the Dread Pirate Roberts, there was nothing that you could do with bitcoin that made any sense. A lot of people got incredibly rich as a result of the things that Ross Ulbricht did, and they see him as a sort of bitcoin deity. Sean RameswaramNick, we know how this story ends. We know that Ulbricht, the Dread Pirate Roberts, gets a presidential pardon. When does Donald Trump enter the chat?Nick BiltonWhen he was president as number 45, there were discussions, funnily enough, about pardoning Ulbricht on his way out. From what I have heard, there were a lot of people in the White House that didnt want that to happen, because it wasnt law and order. Trump 45 was very anti-drugs.But Trump 47 is so enmeshed with the tech community. The tech community sees anything anyone does with technology as a good thing, and they lock arms and sail off into the sunset together.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More: