A right-wing blogger and former GOP candidate reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors that will send him to jail for 29 years after he mailed a pipe bomb last year that injured a pregnant postal worker.
The agreement has 46-year-old Indiana resident Eric Krieg pleading guilty to one count of mailing an unregistered destructive device, one count of mailing a destructive device, one count of malicious use of explosive materials, and one count of mailing a threatening communication.
A federal judge still has to accept the plea agreement.
The pipe bomb package was intended for an attorney who filed a defamation lawsuit against Krieg, but instead the bomb prematurely detonated at a post office in East Chicago, Ind.
“In retaliation for the filing and settling of this lawsuit and other grudges I held, I devised a plan to construct and mail a pipe bomb that I hoped and believed would kill or injure Victim 1,” Krieg wrote in his plea agreement. “I constructed his pipe bomb and knew that it contained explosives and items that would produce shrapnel.”
Krieg also wrote that he would have to pay $45,000 to the attorney’s client and apologize online for the defamatory statements he made on his blog.
Krieg said he separately sent a second package with a bullet in it threatening a different person who mocked the blogger in online forums.
The blogger ran in a Republican primary for Lake County Council in 2011 and for Lake County surveyor in 2012.
This plea deal comes a month after Cesar Sayoc was arrested for mailing more than a dozen suspicious packages containing potentially explosive devices to prominent Democrats and critics of President Trump.
