Topic: DEA Agents in Silk Road Case Face Fraud Charges - page 12. (Read 14464 times)

As you're a hero member, I assume you're just joking? If not, I beg to differ.

It does not matter much what country it is, history has shown that agents from the US has been capable of doing operations also on foreign soil. And who's really to hold them responsible when they do so?

So there's in reality a non-zero chance. I would not put money on it, but the possibility is not nill.

Do the police who police the police beat the shit out of the police and steal from them?

I'd previously thought how easy would it be for law enforcement officials working on a case like this could just simply steal bitcoins by just sending them to an address they controlled. I think this sort of thing could become more widespread and fall under the radar with possible rogue agents working for the NSA. Imagine if they have access to all our internet traffic and date and mobile phone logs it probably would be very easy to just steal peoples coins. This is the big issue with all this NSA spying because who polices the police?

It is well known that Mark Karpeles was the one who stole all the money from Gox users. And Gox was based in Japan. There is ZERO chance of any US involvement.

Very well thought out post, not to mention reasonable.

I think many here are being caught up in what some are trying to portray as a black and white issue of Ross Vs. the State and are overlooking the actual State's workers throughout the trial. You can't separate the two. You can't say "legally" that what Ross did is wrong when the actual evidence collectors had access to the site (the Admin account no less!) and were blackmailing him for money and setting him up with murder for hire. ALL THE EVIDENCE is now tainted.

I really wonder if the Judge was influenced (a lot) by the governments demands of this case being too "important" to lose (especially in light of Cannabis legalization spreading like wildfire and the whole basis for the War on Drugs going with it in most likely hood.) I say the former as the judge disallowed all of what is coming to light now. I mean, that is ridiculous and seems more like the Judge was hell bent on putting Ross away rather than having anything resembling a fair trial.

This is going to be much more than a made for TV movie. This is a 5 year series in part on how the war on drugs failed, for starters.

Ross' lawyers have gone into some detail here regarding things: http://freeross.org/ulbrichts-attorneys-statement-regarding-silk-road-corruption/



Ulbricht’s attorney’s statement regarding Silk Road corruption
March 30, 2015 ● Lyn's Blog   


The government’s considerable efforts at keeping this monumental scandal from being aired at Ross Ulbricht’s trial is itself scandalous.

In addition to:

1. Keeping any information about the investigation from the defense for nearly nine months;

2. then revealing it only five weeks prior to trial;

3. then moving to keep sealed and secret the general underlying information so that Mr. Ulbricht could not use it in his defense at trial;

4. then stymying the defense at every turn during trial when the defense tried to introduce favorable evidence;

the government had also refused to agree to the defense’s request to adjourn the trial until after the indictment was returned and made public – a modest adjournment of a couple of months, since it was apparent that the investigation was nearing a conclusion.

Throughout Mr. Ulbricht’s trial the government repeatedly used the secret nature of the grand jury investigation as an excuse to preclude valuable defense evidence that was not only produced in discovery, independent of the investigation of Mr. Force, but also which was only at best tenuously related to that investigation.  In that manner the government deprived the jury of essential facts, and Mr. Ulbricht of due process.

In addition, the government failed to disclose previously much of what is in the Complaint, including that two federal law enforcement agents involved in the Silk Road investigation were corrupt.  It is clear from this Complaint that fundamentally the government’s investigation of Mr. Ulbricht lacked any integrity, and was wholly and fatally compromised from the inside.

Also, it is clear that Mr. Force and others within the government obtained access to the administrative platforms of the Silk Road site, where they were able to commandeer accounts and had the capacity to change PIN numbers and other aspects of the site – all without the government’s knowledge of what precisely they did with that access.

In light of the information provided in the Complaint, it is now apparent to all just how relevant some of the issues raised by the defense at trial were, including:

1. The payment by Dread Pirate Roberts to a law enforcement agent for information about the investigation;

2. The ramping up of the investigation of Mr. Ulbricht in mid-2013, soon after that paid information began  flowing;

3. The creation of certain evidence at trial, such as the 2013 journal that conveniently begins – again – in Spring 2013, after the corruption alleged in this Complaint ripened.

As the evidence at trial – particularly from the government’s law enforcement witnesses – demonstrated, the Baltimore investigation and agents were inextricably involved in the evolution of the case and the evidence, as well as with alerting Mark Karpeles that he was under investigation, and meeting with his lawyers and exchanging information.

At Mr. Ulbricht’s trial, knowing full well the corruption alleged in the Complaint made public today, the government still aggressively precluded much of that evidence, and kept it from the jury (and had other similar evidence stricken from the record).

Consequently, the government improperly used the ongoing grand jury process in San Francisco as both a sword and a shield to deny Mr. Ulbricht access to and use of important evidence, and a fair trial.

Joshua L. Dratel

what do you think about the possibility that we discover in the future that the Mt. Gox implosion had something to do with those agents/US gov.?

In my wild youth I witnessed drugs being confiscated much more often than people being arrested for drug possession. They would pretty much just steal the drugs and tell you to fuck off.

An interesting fact is also the following:

If you steal take money from anybody that he has earned through any kind of business, be it legit or illegal - you are a thief and will be prosecuted if caught. If the money is earned from illegal business, it's called illegal proceeds. Anybody dealing in said money is defined as criminals.

Now, If you put a label on yourself, calling yourself "government", you now have a free card to use any money as you see fit.

For example, if an illegal operation makes 10 million dollars, and this is confiscated by the government, the government can use it as it sees fit, lastly shown with the auction of silk road bitcoins.

It's quite interesting that one standard applies to the people, and another standard applies to the government. It sure's got to have everybody bow their necks in respect and accept their overlords.

Now, when some actors within the government decides to go about this nefarious business themselves, they're caught. What makes their actions worse than the actions of the government?

Now, if everything was fair, any bitcoins, gold, silver, cash or other valuables from criminal proceeds should be  destroyed and not benefit anyone.

Since US police is known for taking cash from travellers on the road, who's controlling that this cash does not go directly to the pockets of the officers.

It's also interesting to see the general attitude of many people thinking that the cops are on their side. Sure, there's good cops, but overall the cops are the hands of the government, and their goal is to enrich themselves, as such, the agents that took these bitcoins are no different but the government themselves, they all just want to grab the money..

The most awkward moment/period in a cop's career is probably the icebreaking period when they test to see if the other cops are on board with their plan. I wonder what strategies they use to test when another cop sees eye to eye with them. It must be such a sigh of relief when they realize the other cops have been wanting to steal the valuables too.

I think it happens all the time.  One way to prove that is to consider how casually Force4 did things.  He didn't bother even a little bit to conceal his identity - just the opposite, he was showing off his badge when wiring funds all over the place.  A guy who spent his career following these kinds of trails knew his tracks could VERY easily be followed.  He just believed they would not be followed because he was a cop and cops do this all the time and get away with it all the time.  If he felt they would come looking for him, he would have been far more tidy with his activity.  The reason he was so wantonly careless is because he and his coworkers had been doing this for many years and getting away with it.

Blackbird0's position is that there were multiple investigations. It's possible (I don't know the case well enough to know) that the other investigation was separate enough that that argument doesn't hold weight. You can see my prior post for another argument that depends less on that, but at this point in time it's not entirely good what good it will do. While the argument I gave might have sewn doubt for a jury, the jury didn't hear it and unless they're able to argue that this mess is of the right shape they won't get  a chance to try that argument in a trial court.

Oh yeah?  Haven't you ever heard about 'fruit from the poisoned tree'?  Force4 was the lead investigator.  Every bit of evidence is derived from his original efforts.  There is no evidence which does not come from the work product of a criminal whose efforts were per se adverse to Ross' position.  

How do you like them apples Legal Beagle?

The Judge won't change her mind - I agree with you on this point.  But request for retrial is an action taken against her.  No doubt she won't agree with it.  But on appeal, a different judge will decide the tree question. 

I would never make a good cop because I would be tempted to steal shit all the time.  "Oh look, this belongs(ed) to the bad guy, no one will ever miss it..."

I can see how this would happen, it probably happens more than is ever found out.

Team America! Fuck yeah!

They did much more than steal some bitcoins according to the indictment. The investigators, in an effort to conceal their criminality and in bad faith did systematically conceal and destroy material evidence collected during their investigation. The investigators had administrator access to the Silk Road systems which they used to rob the silk road service and then framed the original owner of their admin account for the theft (and then, with another account, offered to conduct a "hit" against that admin to extract more money from DPR) in one of many (successful) extortion attempts they carried out over months-- spanning back long before the government had any idea who DPR might be (e.g. in April 2013 they believed it was "A.A."). Their unlawful actions were not limited to SR, e.g. Force ripped off a random user of the CoinMKT exchange to the tune of a quarter million dollars where he was moonlighting (against policy and in a conflict of interest) as their compliance officer. When Force's improper use of an administrative subpoena (to attempt to unblock his rightfully suspicious-flagged account) was reported to his  superior by Venmo (a payment processor subsidiary of Paypal) he responded by attempting to seize Venmo's accounts.

Lets put aside for a moment Force and Bridge's roles as law enforcement and read their indictment as though they were just private individuals. Considering their access, strongly established involvement (e.g. the money trail connecting _them_ to SR appears to be much stronger than the money trail connecting Ross to SR), established pattern of fraudulent and vindictive activities including framing C.G. for the theft of bitcoin; they'd make a nice direction to throw doubt at the prosecutions claims and support of Ross'  "it was someone else" argument.

Consider the counterfactual with the character portrait painted in their indictment in mind: If Force and/or Bridges had had the opportunity to take over the operation of SR (from which they could rip people off on a greater scale), would they have done so? I think the picture painted by the indictment says yes. If they had and Ross pissed them off, would they have framed him? I think the indictment says yes (or even without pissing them off: They seized MTGox's US accounts immediately after successfully getting their own funds out (to the detriment of everyone now suffering from MTGox's insolvency)). I think this is a much more powerful line of argument than "maybe magicaltux did it", at least. They destroyed evidence related to their own interactions with magicaltux (and appeared to have made a successful unlawful forfeiture against MTGox as part of their criminal activities). In the story told in the indictment, these parties had the motive, the means, and opportunity that would have permitted them to frame Ross in order to conceal their own criminality (or to protect someone else who was paying them more); and the defense was apparently prohibited from presenting this in the trial.

No doubt the prosecution did their hardest to separate out  any potentially poisoned evidence, but these parties were the states only inside eyes inside silkroad. It seems unlikely to me that any of the later evidence was derived in isolation of their input, but regardless: it appears that they'd heavily spoiled the crime scene before any of the other investigators arrived.

What this actually means in terms of the actual law and procedures in the court, but I can't imagine that it would have had no effect on the jury unless they were prohibited from hearing it, nor can I really imagine them being prohibited from hearing it if it had been anything other than law enforcement agents (e.g. if it had just been other random criminals).  But they were. I can't imagine why the defense didn't delay the trial so that more of this information could be presented.

This information has certainly made a number of strange things I observed make more sense.

Edit: Ah, I see Ross' attorney has made a statement: http://freeross.org/ulbrichts-attorneys-statement-regarding-silk-road-corruption/   Seems that I called at least part of their approach, plus apparently the state used the existence of this other prosecution to suppress other evidence from being presented.  Hopefully Dratel will now move to have whatever relevant filings or orders were made regarding this unsealed, so we can get a more objective view of how much this prejudiced the case.

Those DEA agents had no right to take that money. That was money the U.S. government could have used for police/military gear and police/military salaries to uphold freedom in the only free and great country on Earth, and also to uphold American freedom by setting up military bases all over the world. This gives the American government no choice but to print more money or to declare more things illegal so that more money can be rightfully stolen.

Happy to answer questions! I usually get shouted down because I don't follow the bitcoin hive-mind.

I don't think the agents made up "claims" or "crimes" that Ulbricht was supposed to have committed. But rather they committed crimes themselves, by stealing some BTC. I don't think anything that they did demonstrates that Ulbricht did not do what he was convicted of doing.

Yeah, well, try to look at it this way: the FBI and government is a big place. If you have a criminal case A in New York, say, and some agents in Chicago that aren't on the case commit some crime, there's no reason to bring that into trial, right? We can all agree there. Now let's say you have criminal case B in Los Angeles, and the agents in that case commit a crime, they testify in the trial, and the court doesn't let in evidence of their crimes. We can all agree that that should be in the trial. So what about something more in the middle, like what we have here? We have agents on a team (a team that, in all likelihood, was probably pretty large given the scope of the SR case) who commit a crime, but don't testify at trial, and whose crimes don't, ultimately, exculpate Ulbricht. Should that come in? I would think not, and I expect the judge will agree.

It's really incredible, at least to me, that you can have agents who are investigating you fabricate and extort you during their investigation and that this can have no ill effects on the findings of their investigation!

I believe you, btw... you obviously know a lot more about the case and law than I. I just find it somewhat strange that something like this can be allowed to remain outside of the trial. If the agents made up a number of claims and "crimes" that were supposed to be committed, I find it very hard to prove in court what charges and accusations are in fact real and which are fabricated - at least so that the jury could feel they have grasped the situation beyond a reasonable doubt.

Thanks for you answers, I'm glad to learn more about these issues. I will follow what happens from here on out. 

I don't think so, no. Given that these agents did not testify in trial, I imagine that their testimony was not used to lay down chains of custody for any evidence at trial. And that their testimony was not necessary to prove any of the charges against Ulbricht.


Entrapment is not what you think it is. Entrapment is an extremely narrow type of legal argument, that depends on a defendant successfully arguing that absent the government action, they would not have done what they were alleged to have do. That's a pretty laughable argument against Ulbricht, given that he was running SR long before the federal agents became involved.

Just reading the reporting from this, I would think "nothing" will change. I'm sure the defense team will file some motions, but I don't think any of them will be successful. After all, from the reporting I read, the defense knew about this already, and the judge precluded them from bringing it up during trial. If the judge didn't think it was relevant then, it wouldn't be relevant now.

Much of the evidence used in the trial was collected via the agents who are now being charged with extortion the person they were investigating, no? If that is the case, then it would appear that throwing doubt on what parts of their investigation were true/real and what parts were fabricated would be pretty easy, no? At least enough to interfere with the juries ability to reach a verdict, correct?

Does this not also amount to entrapment on some level? Seems like the government can usually get away with entrapment, but, something like THIS!? I would be surprised if "nothing" changes in the coming weeks. There needs to be a re-trial at the very least - reasonable doubt is now in play for many charges, no?