Why Ross Ulbricht Should Be Immediately Released

The news of the arrest of two government agents, Carl M. Force and  Shaun W. Bridges, involved in the Silk Road case, signals just how corrupt the Silk Road investigation was.

 This come directly from the Department of Justice press release:

 In one such transaction, Force allegedly sold information about the government’s investigation to the target of the investigation.

Note well what Ross Ulbricht's attorney stated in his opening remarks during the trial of Ross:

 And at the end -- I will get to the middle as well, but at the end he was lured back by those operators to be in a position, that you heard about from the prosecutor in that library that day, to take the fall for the people operating the website. Because they had been alerted that they were under investigation. They had been alerted that the walls were closing in on them. They had been alerted that time was scarce for them to escape. And Ross was the perfect fall guy because, after all, Silk Road was his idea. He was also involved in Bitcoin. He was an investor in Bitcoin. He was a trader in Bitcoin. You will hear about that. So the connection of Bitcoin and Silk Road, again, made him the perfect fall guy. So other than that day of arrest we'll see what connects Ross to the operation of Silk Road, whether it's just a digital contrivance that left him holding the bag when the real operators of Silk Road knew that their time was up.

Get a load of some of the other criminal activities the DOJ alleges Force conducted (my bold):

According to the complaint, Force was a DEA agent assigned to investigate the Silk Road marketplace.  During the investigation, Force engaged in certain authorized undercover  operations by, among other things, communicating online with “Dread Pirate Roberts” (Ulbricht), the target of his investigation.  The complaint alleges, however, that Force then, without authority, developed additional online personas and engaged in a broad range of illegal activities calculated to bring him personal financial gain.  In doing so, the complaint alleges, Force used fake online personas, and engaged in complex Bitcoin transactions to steal from the government and the targets of the investigation.  Specifically, Force allegedly solicited and received digital currency as part of the investigation, but failed to report his receipt of the funds, and instead transferred the currency to his personal account.  In one such transaction, Force allegedly sold information about the government’s investigation to the target of the investigation.  The complaint also alleges that Force invested in and worked for a digital currency exchange company while still working for the DEA, and that he directed the company to freeze a customer’s account with no legal basis to do so, then transferred the customer’s funds to his personal account.  Further, Force allegedly sent an unauthorized Justice Department subpoena to an online payment service directing that it unfreeze his personal account. 

The case against Ross was contaminated from the start. Ross should be immediately released from prison in the face of these developments. There is simply no way that truth from fiction can be separated when such a bad actor was at the core of the investigation.

    -RW