“MAGA Bomber” Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday for sending 16 mail bombs to 13 people around the United States last year, including leading critics of President Donald Trump such as former President Barack Obama, ex-Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and financier George Soros.
What We Know:
- “MAGA Bomber” Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday for sending 16 mail bombs to 13 people around the United States last year.
- The targets included leading critics of President Donald Trump such as former President Barack Obama, ex-Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and financier George Soros.
- Sayoc’s other targets included CNN, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former CIA Director John Brennan, Senators Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, and Kamala Harris, D-California, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, former Director James Clapper and Tom Steyer, the billionaire now running for the Democratic presidential nomination with Booker and Harris.
“I am beyond so very sorry for what I did,” Sayoc said before he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Judge Jed Rakoff, according to the Courthouse News service.
- Sayoc’s lawyers asked that he be sentenced to 10 years in prison, the mandatory minimum for his crimes. They claim “a series of traumatic events pushed Cesar Sayoc further and further into the margins of society.” Those events included being abandoned by his father as a boy, being sexually abused by a teacher at his Catholic school, and losing “everything in the Great Recession. As a man, he became increasingly estranged from his family and dependent on drugs, particularly steroids,” Sayoc’s lawyers wrote.
Defense lawyers wrote that “in this darkness, Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump.”
