Sayoc pleaded guilty in March to mailing 16 bombs to people he considered to be Trump’s enemies. The FBI said the devices were packed with powder from fireworks, fertilizer, a pool chemical and glass fragments that would function as shrapnel, but they would not have worked as designed.
In the end, the flaws in the bombs’ design were critical to a federal judge’s decision to give Sayoc 20 years in prison rather than the life sentence prosecutors requested. The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said he had concluded that Sayoc, though no firearms expert, was capable of concocting a pipe bomb that could explode and had consciously chosen not to.
“He hated his victims,” the judge said. “He wished them no good, but he was not so lost as to wish them dead, at least not by his own hand.”
Though the timing was coincidental, the sentencing came as the nation was on edge after the weekend’s back-to-back mass shootings, one of which appeared to have been inspired by anti-immigrant rhetoric from right-wing pundits and politicians, including Trump.
On Monday morning, Trump gave a national address in which he denounced white supremacists and said hatred had no place in the country. He promised the government would do more to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
Still, the president has a long history of making inflammatory statements not just about immigrants, but about his political opponents. Sayoc’s lawyers said their client was particularly susceptible to those ideas.
Indeed, the lawyers argued in a recent court filing that Sayoc, 57, suffered from a long-untreated mental illness and drew inspiration from the president for his terror campaign.
“He was a Donald Trump superfan,” they wrote.
During the sentencing, however, Rakoff said Sayoc’s politics were “something of a sideshow.” Instead, the judge said the design flaws in the bombs — including timers that were not set to go off and fuse wiring that was inoperable — indicated that Sayoc had only intended to scare his victims, not harm them.
Before he was sentenced, Sayoc read a handwritten statement, apologizing. “I wish more than anything I could turn back time and take back what I did,” he said. “But I want you to know, your honor, with all my heart and soul, I feel the pain and suffering of these victims.”
As the judge announced the sentence, Sayoc broke into sobs, resting his head in his hands clasped on the table before him. Then he looked up at the ceiling and mouthed, “Thank you.”
Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said after the sentencing that although “thankfully no one was hurt by his actions, Sayoc’s domestic terrorism challenged our nation’s cherished tradition of peaceful political discourse.”
Sayoc’s lawyers, who are federal public defenders, had no comment.
Sayoc’s terror campaign and the frenzied investigation that followed seized the nation for two weeks in October, just before the midterm elections. After a four-day manhunt, Sayoc was arrested outside an auto-parts store near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he was living in a decrepit white van that was plastered with bombastic stickers that glorified Trump and placed Obama and Clinton in red crosshairs.
Sayoc’s lawyers had urged Rakoff to impose a prison sentence of 10 years, which would have been the mandatory minimum Sayoc faced, plus one month.
At the time of his arrest, they said, Sayoc was suffering from the untreated mental illness, compounded by excessive steroid use, and he had become increasingly obsessive, isolated and paranoid.
“In this darkness,” the lawyers wrote in a sentencing memo, “Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump.”
Sayoc listened to Trump’s self-help books and championed him on social media. He watched Fox News religiously while working out at the gym.
“Because of Mr. Sayoc’s mental illness, this type of rhetoric deeply affected him because he so greatly admired the president,” one of Sayoc’s lawyers, Ian Marcus Amelkin, said in court. “It is impossible, I believe, to separate the political climate and his mental illness.”
Last fall, Sayoc’s lawyers wrote, the “slow-boil of Mr. Sayoc’s political obsessions and delusional beliefs” led him to build and send his 16 packages to 13 intended victims he considered to be Trump’s enemies. In Sayoc’s mind, the devices were “designed to look like pipe bombs,” his lawyers said, but they were a hoax to scare his targets.
Each device consisted of plastic pipe with a digital alarm clock and attached wires. An FBI explosives expert, Kevin D. Finnerty, testified at the sentencing the devices would not have functioned as designed but were capable of exploding if mishandled.
Jane Kim, a prosecutor, said in court that because of Sayoc’s attacks, hundreds of law enforcement officers were mobilized around the country, thousands of postal employees were on alert for suspicious packages, buildings and mail facilities were evacuated, and schools were ordered to shelter in place.
“The defendant’s campaign of terror was national in reach and extremely serious,” she said.
She added that had Sayoc intended the bombs to be hoaxes, he could have packed them with sand, but he chose to use glass fragments.
Kim also addressed the defense’s argument that shifted blame to Trump. “With respect to some of the excuses that the defendant has advanced about politics and politicians, the government would submit that politics cannot justify a terrorist attack,” she said. “Politics here cannot justify 16 bombs being mailed.”
When Sayoc pleaded guilty in court, he listed his intended victims. In addition to Obama and . Clinton, they included former Vice President Joe Biden; Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; George Soros, a billionaire Democratic donor; and John O. Brennan, a former CIA director.
The list also included Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; Tom Steyer, a prominent Democratic donor; James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence; actor Robert De Niro; and CNN.
Prosecutors had also said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., was a victim of Sayoc’s campaign; he falsely listed her as the return address on his packages.
After the sentencing, Wasserman Schultz said in a statement that Sayoc “was admittedly inspired by the president’s hateful rhetoric.”
“This president’s words have consequences,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.