I believe his job is to get the best price possible to reimburse those that lost out in the bankruptcy. If he didn't do that he would he would be negligent and get fired. His job description doesn't include any consideration to what effect that has on Bitcoin.
You get a BETTER price at an auction. That is how the USA sells seized bitcoins. You might have to wait a few weeks, but the price is better. That is the reason I said I see malicious intent.
He probably doesn't have to consider that in a vacuum, no.
But it was irrational to dump high volume tranches into spot markets -- especially all at once, like he did -- since he obviously planned to sell additional tranches in the future. That's economic suicide in such a low liquidity environment as BTC markets. Even if selling on exchange markets was rational, he should have used iceberg orders over much longer periods of time. Dumping on spot markets at these volumes = significant slippage, which certainly wouldn't net the best possible price for creditors. He failed the creditors in both logic and practice.
The trustee obviously doesn't have experience as a fund manager, so I'm bewildered as to why he explicitly ignored the advice of multiple interested parties (Jesse Powell and Mark Karpeles to name a couple).
I'm still waiting to get a bit more information on this. He said he sold via exchanges but, for example, Bitfinex offers OTC services for large trades. He may well have used that and/or icebergs we really don't know. Most of the analysis I've seen claiming to identify drops caused by his dumping would have resulted in a much higher average price than the 10k he actually got. I'm taking a lot of what has been published about this with a pinch of salt.
He got an offer from KRAKENFX to sell that in the darkpool which he refused. The darkpool would not cause a market crash and he could still sell it fast.
Another point as to why this is malicious, another pin in the coffin.
Japan is acting along and collaborating with USA, dropping the price intentionally. The reason for that is the meeting between the president Trumpovski and Kim Jong Unovski.
Trumpovski wants sanctions to be effective, and Kim Jong Unovski wants to bypass sanctions using BTC (all that South Korean hacks and such if ya all remember). Kim wants to go to the table claiming he can do it, Trumpovski wants to strengthen his hand saying that no dude, you cannot do that because BTC price is frigging low.
So, there you go. We are all victims of an international bargain.
Any other theories? Let's see it.
I feel like this is too much of a stretch. North Korea can use Bitcoin to go around sanctions, but there's no way it alone will ever be enough to even come close to solving any of their problems.
According to
this article, it is estimated that North Korea made around $200 million off cryptocurrencies last year.
According to
this site, North Korea spends around $15 billion on their military annually.
If we go by these figures, then Bitcoin at most provided only 1.3% of their military budget alone. It's far too little to really provoke any grand conspiracies in my opinion. I would also like to note that North Korea has been softening their stance lately, so there's little point in ramping up the chokehold at the moment.
It does not have to be the ONLY factor in the matter. Whatever you can do, every bit will help. The opposing party will do whatever it can do to weaken THAT specific card. I am sure they have other cards, or factors they play with, but this is only one of them. According to Carnegie Europe,
http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/75740?lang=enThe West is in the middle of an undeclared cyberwar with Russia. This could be a part of it. As you may have guessed, North Korea and Russia are high school buddies.
I don't believe it's that it just seems more conceivable than the original suggestion. 
