WASHINGTON — A Texas man who plotted to blow up a Virginia data center was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison Friday.
According to Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Prerak Shah, 28-year-old Seth Aaron Pendley of Wichita Falls, Texas, attempted to destroy a building with an explosive. He was arrested in April and pleaded guilty to the charges in June 2021.
“The Justice Department is constantly on guard for threats posed by violent domestic extremists,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah. “As this case shows, radicals are lurking on the internet, looking for ways to lash out – and far too often, they move their plans off of the web and into the real world. We are indebted to the FBI employee who put his life on the line to disrupt Mr. Pendley’s plot before he could inflict real harm on data center workers, and are proud of today’s sentence.”
In a complaint filed in federal court, FBI special agent John Coyle said a confidential source notified the FBI in January of threatening posts on social media by a user later identified as Presley.
A second confidential source later in January notified the FBI that Pendley had threatened to blow up Amazon Web Services data centers in Ashburn, Virginia, to “kill off about 70% of the of the internet.”
When the confidential source offered to help Pendley get C4 explosives to use in the attack, Pendley was enthusiastic. He would later show the source a hand-drawn map of the data center and explained how he planned to disguise his car to not be detected by law enforcement.
In March, the source introduced Penley to an undercover FBI agent pretending to be an explosives supplier. Pendley allegedly told the undercover agent all about his plan to attack web servers that he believed provided services to the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies.
“The main objective is to f*** up the Amazon servers,” he said, adding that he hoped to anger “the oligarchy” enough to provoke a reaction that would convince the American people to take action against what he perceived to be a “dictatorship.”
According to federal officials, Pendley bragged about being at the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that led to the death of multiple people, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer.
Pendley again met with the undercover agent in April to pick up what he believed to be explosive devices that were inert and was arrested by FBI agents.