A California man was on Wednesday convicted of sending a series of threatening emails to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with his messages making repeated reference to the notorious “Unabomber” and culminating in threats to bomb an FBI field office.
At the hearing, Mr. Anten will face a possible sentence of up to five years in prison for each count.
His attorney was not immediately available for comment on the conviction.
‘SuperMax or Death’
Prosecutors said that, starting around July 2023, Mr. Anten sent a series of increasingly threatening communications to the FBI, which escalated to the point that he twice threatened to target the FBI’s field office in Westwood, Los Angeles, with a bomb attack.
Mr. Anten’s messages included repeated references to Ted Kaczynski, a man known as the “Unabomber” whose 20-year bombing campaign injured nearly two dozen people and killed three. Mr. Kaczynski, who died in a federal prison last year, spent most of his sentence at Colorado’s Supermax federal prison, a facility to which Mr. Anten also made reference in his threats.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Anten sent an email to the FBI on Dec. 5, 2023, stating “I AM THE UNABOMBER” and “I WILL UNABOMB THE LOS ANGELES FBI HQ.”
The following day, Mr. Anten sent another threatening email that he signed “SuperMax or Death.”
“I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact it would be very explainable by your actions,” he wrote, concluding with “[y]ou ain’t getting away with this one.”
More Details
Surveillance showed Mr. Anten visited the FBI’s Los Angeles field office in person, later emailing FBI agents to say he would continue to show up at the building, per the DOJ.Several FBI task force members encountered Mr. Anten in front of his home in November 2023 and during an interview, he admitted to sending threatening communications. Despite being admonished to cease doing so, his conduct escalated, prosecutors said.
“Even after being warned, Mr. Anten double-downed on his threats to murder FBI employees,” Krysti Hawkins, the Acting Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, said in a statement. “The FBI will not tolerate credible death threats to individuals or institutions and, as evidenced during the trial, neither did the jury.”
U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement that Mr. Anten’s conviction shows that prosecutors stand by law enforcement in the face of threats.
“Law enforcement officers put their lives on the line to keep our community safe and therefore deserve our thanks and respect,” Mr. Estrada said in a statement.
“Those who threaten the FBI and other law enforcement officers ignore the daily sacrifices these officers make to protect us and undermine the rule of law. We will continue to stand with our law enforcement partners,” he added.
‘Elevated’ Threats
The FBI director testified on June 4 before the Senate Appropriations Committee to provide an overview of the agency’s request for $11.3 billion as part of the fiscal year 2025 budget proposal.While discussing the budget request, Mr. Wray discussed various threats to national security.
He said that the FBI continues to see cartels trafficking fentanyl and other deadly drugs across the U.S.–Mexico border, cyber attacks seeking to disrupt critical infrastructure and businesses, high levels of violent crime, and the threat of terrorism.
While in past years, the biggest terror threat was from lone actors or small cells of individuals who mostly use easily accessible weapons against soft targets, Mr. Wray said that the FBI has grown increasingly concerned that foreign terrorist organizations are looking to carry out direct attacks on U.S. soil.
He said that homegrown violent extremists—local people who have been radicalized to violence primarily in the United States—pose the most immediate international terror threat to the homeland. The FBI chief said that the fact that such individuals are not receiving individualized direction from foreign terrorist organizations makes them harder to detect and counteract.
“The breadth of these threats and challenges are as complex as at any time in our history, and the consequences of not responding to and countering threats and challenges have never been greater,” Mr. Wray said.
