Lyn Ulbricht

Lyn Ulbricht

This week, as we celebrate the full and unconditional presidential pardon of Ross Ulbricht, we also honor Ross’s mother, Lyn Ulbricht, as our Hero of the Week. Ross’s pardon is in large part the culmination of Lyn’s unceasing efforts to right the egregious miscarriage of justice that threw her son into maximum-security prison in 2013 with double life sentences plus 40 years and no possibility of parole. (Lyn noted in a 2022 interview that this sentence for non-violent offenses was twice as long as the sentence given to Sinaloa Cartel leader “El Chapo.”)

Ross’s conviction related to the anonymous Silk Road e-commerce website he created at age 26 and ran for less than three years; all transactions were conducted with Bitcoin. As Lyn told Catherine in 2018 in a Special Solari Report interview, Ross was an idealist who had worked on a Ron Paul campaign and launched his website out of a passion for free markets, voluntaryism, and privacy. In that 2018 interview, Lyn speculated that Ross became the prosecutors’ “poster boy” and “trophy” because the powers-that-be didn’t like a “rebellious little cryptocurrency that they couldn’t control.” She also emphasized the far-reaching ramifications of her son’s case for First Amendment rights and the right to a fair trial.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer led the crackdown against Ross and Silk Road and, according to Lyn, hand-picked both judge and prosecutor. Lyn commented that despite 100 letters “begging for mercy,” New York District Judge Katherine B. Forrest gave Ross “the worst possible sentence that the law allowed—and would probably have given him the death penalty if the law had allowed it.”

Because of Catherine’s own experiences with Department of Justice (DOJ) targeting and falsification of evidence, she was quick to recognize similar patterns in Ross’s case—with the critical difference being that the government was able to control the data (and thus the narrative) in Ross’s case but never managed to do so in the case of Hamilton Securities. In introducing Lyn to the Solari Report audience, Catherine described Ross’s saga as “one of the worst examples of prosecutorial abuse…seen yet” and a case study of “the extraordinary debasement of federal enforcement.” She also noted how government uses complexity as a strategy to mask its lawlessness. When announcing the pardon, President Trump seemed to hint as much by publicly branding the “scum that worked to convict [Ross]” as “some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”

Roger Ver was one of Ross Ulbricht’s early and consistent supporters, and many people are now asking whether the president will also pardon Ver, arrested in 2024 in another case of massive government overreach. The question Catherine posed in her interview with Lyn is relevant to both cases: “Are we going to be a society with the rule of law, and should the enforcement institutions of the United States be held to the rule of law?”