Although McKay earlier had claimed an FBI informant entrapped him, he told a judge in a plea hearing that he and co-defendant Bradley Neal Crowder had violence in mind when they came to St. Paul for the convention. While the informant was there, he didn't influence their actions, he said.
"I think we would've done it anyways," McKay said of his and Crowder's decision to build the bombs.
By pleading guilty to three felony counts, McKay, 23, avoids a retrial. His first trial, in which he claimed entrapment, ended with a hung jury.
The retrial was to begin Monday, but after Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis granted a last-minute motion by the prosecution to make Crowder testify by granting him immunity, McKay and his lawyer, Jeffrey DeGree, decided to take a plea agreement the government had offered.
That decision led to a roller-coaster ride of a hearing in which McKay said he was ready to accept responsibility for making and possessing the bombs, but he wouldn't abandon his claim that the informant, a fellow Texan named Brandon Darby, played a role.
An exasperated Davis said he couldn't accept the guilty plea, adjourned the hearing and gave McKay the night to think about the plea bargain. When McKay stood before Davis on Tuesday morning, the judge told him he wanted to know the details of what happened in St. Paul last September.
"I will have to hear a bit more than a bare-bones 'I accept responsibility,' " the judge warned McKay.
Later, after asking McKay about the activist group he was a member of in Austin, the judge sought assurances that McKay's plans for violence were hatched before he came to the Twin Cities.
"So I'm clear, you did not come to Minneapolis-St. Paul to peacefully demonstrate?" the judge asked.
"Yes, sir," McKay replied.
When it was over, Davis accepted the plea and ordered McKay into custody to await sentencing, a date for that will be set later. He had been free on bail since the mistrial.
McKay and Crowder were members of a small "affinity group" of activists in Austin who came to St. Paul to disrupt the Republican National Convention, held at the Xcel Energy Center. McKay said they schemed to build Molotov cocktails after learning police had seized their U-Haul trailer filled with homemade riot shields.
At first, their intended target was a truck-mounted JumboTron screen parked near the convention center. Later, after Crowder was arrested in a street demonstration, McKay allegedly decided a better target would be law-enforcement vehicles parked in a lot near the apartment house he was staying in.
McKay told Davis that he and Crowder and others — but not Darby — went to Wal-Mart to buy the components for the Molotov cocktails. After they bought gasoline, McKay said he and Crowder started assembling the devices in the apartment's bathroom.
McKay sat in the tub and filled eight bottles half-full with gas, then handed them to Crowder, who topped off each bottle with motor oil. They capped the bottles and made fuses by using rubber bands to fix a tampon to the neck of the bottle.
Davis asked McKay why they had a friend drive them to the gas station instead of just walking. McKay replied that the apartment was close to the convention center so there were constant police patrols and "what we were doing was probably very illegal."
McKay and Crowder didn't know at the time that the FBI had used Darby to infiltrate their group. Darby was a longtime Texas activist who had earned a national reputation for his relief work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
But he said he'd become disenchanted with the radical community and had worked as an informant in one case before the FBI asked him to join the Austin group and report what he saw. He accompanied the group to St. Paul.
When Crowder pleaded guilty to a single count in January (prosecutors dropped two other counts) he told Davis nobody influenced him or McKay to build the bombs. But when McKay testified at his trial, he said Darby was the one who came up with the idea to make the Molotov cocktails.
The defense painted the informant as reckless, dangerous and out of control, a view still held by McKay's supporters in Austin.
"It's a big step from building a shield to protect yourself in a mass demonstration to building something that could be used for mass destruction like a Molotov cocktail, and those two kids didn't have the ideological knowledge to put that together, and I believe Darby filled that gap," Scott Crow, an Austin activist who worked with Darby in New Orleans, said in a telephone interview after the guilty plea.
But Paulsen defended Darby, saying he acted appropriately and was crucial to the case.
"He was not a loose cannon that was left out there to do whatever he wanted," the prosecutor said. "He was under close supervision."
Darby was not present for the plea hearing, but he said afterward that he felt "honored" to have worked with the FBI.
"As usual, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office and other law-enforcement agencies have done a great job of protecting Americans' lives and civil rights," he said. "There are enough legitimate injustices in this world that there's no place for ridiculous allegations against our government when it's doing a good job."
The plea agreement between the government and McKay has not yet been made public, but details about it emerged in the hearings. In return for McKay's admission of guilt, the government agreed it wouldn't seek to lengthen his sentence for possessing a weapon in the course of committing another felony. Such a move, called an "enhancement," could have added 2 1/2 years to McKay's sentence.
DeGree said the understanding is that McKay would get a sentence of about four years. Davis is not bound to follow that, though, and each of the three charges against McKay carries a maximum 10 years' imprisonment.
But Paulsen said prosecutors aren't prohibited from raising other factors that could lengthen the sentence. He said one such issue might be for obstruction of justice in light of the fact McKay testified earlier that he was entrapped.
No sentencing date has been set for Crowder, and his attorneys and prosecutors have yet to agree on how long a sentence he should get. Prosecutors are advocating a sentence of 37 to 46 months, but Crowder's attorney claims he played a minor role in the scheme and should get 30 to 37 months.
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