Man Pleads Guilty to Plotting to Bomb Amazon Data Center

A Texas man who had boasted that he was at the United States Capitol when swarms of Trump supporters stormed the building on Jan. 6 pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, prosecutors said. The New York Times reports: The man, Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, of Wichita Falls, Texas, had been arrested in April after he went to pick up what he believed were bombs made of C-4 plastic explosives and detonation cords from an explosives supplier in Fort Worth, but were actually inert objects provided by an undercover F.B.I. agent, prosecutors said. In a conversation recorded by an undercover agent on March 31, Mr. Pendley said he had hoped to anger 'the oligarchy' enough to provoke a reaction that would persuade Americans to take action against what he perceived to be a 'dictatorship,' prosecutors said.

On Wednesday, in an appearance before Magistrate Judge Hal R. Ray Jr. of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Mr. Pendley pleaded guilty to a malicious attempt to destroy a building with an explosive. He faces five to 20 years in federal prison. His sentencing has been set for Oct. 1. 'Due in large part to the meticulous work of the F.B.I.'s undercover agents, the Justice Department was able to expose Mr. Pendley's twisted plot and apprehend the defendant before he was able to inflict any real harm,' Prerak Shah, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in a statement. 'We may never know how many tech workers' lives were saved through this operation -- and we're grateful we never had to find out.'

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