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Comment by Phlarp | Hacker News Reader

He also never actually had anyone killed, the feds created the personas attempting to 'extort' or 'steal' from DPR. The feds detailed their transgressions to DPR and introduced the idea of murder + offered to commit the murders for a fee. Afterwards they fabricated evidence of the hit(s) to steal money from him. --These were the "above board" official and sanctioned things that the feds did during this investigation.

Shaun Bridges of the US secret service and Carl Force of the US DEA were siphoning bitcoin off to their personal accounts throughout the investigation. Bridges even tried to flee the country while on bail.

Think what you want about Ulbrict, but the cops that took him down were every bit as dirty as he was, if not more.

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From your "Bridges tried to flee while on bail", it seems like both agents were caught and prosecuted. And, AFAIK, the claim was never made that they fabricated evidence. Heck, I don't know who disputes his guilt, just the appropriate sentence.

In any other situation, testimony or evidence from such an easily impeachable witness would get laughed out of court. Why do we allow it from cops?

If a journalist or academic gets found to have knowingly fabricated even the smallest detail it immediately calls into question their entire body of work, and even colleagues they may have worked with.

These are federal agents and the best standard we can hold them to is "oh, we don't have direct evidence of other crimes so we'll just assume the first time we caught you was the first time you did it"

They sold him details of the case for bitcoin into their personal wallets. It wasn't part of a sting or intel operation. The same cops that built the case against him were themselves indicted for money laundering payments they received from Ross. Multiple independent agencies and field offices with rogue agents undermining the cases they were building in real time for personal gain that was contemporaneously worth less than a million dollars.

You alternate between the general "why do we allow it from cops"/"journalists don't do this" and the specifics of what these two did.

We don't allow it from cops (they're going to jail). In the case of these two cops, it's not clear what you want. From what I can tell, they weren't allowed to testify, and they gathered none of the evidence used to convict him. Instead, that evidence was to be used in another trial on different charges and the government dropped those charges because the cops were unreliable.

> Think what you want about Ulbrict, but the cops that took him down were every bit as dirty as he was, if not more.

Obviously the agents who stole the funds were dirty, but the contents of your first paragraph is called a criminal investigation. Nothing untoward there (as described, at least).

That's certainly how the courts have interpreted things. As always the distinction between "Legal" and "Justice" is left as an exercise to the reader.

For my 2 cents it seems entirely reasonable that an armed gang backed by the state would consider themselves to be individually above the law, since they are constantly told that the ends always justify the means, no matter how odious those means may be.

It’s called entrapment, and it’s not a normal part of a criminal investigation. It’s why they knew they wouldn’t be able to land the murder-for-hire charges. It could have invalidated the whole case.

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