Court filing says friend of Md. suspect disclosed plan for convoy attack

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By Dan Morse

A close friend of Collin McKenzie-Gude’s told investigators that the former Bethesda honor student, who kept a small arsenal in his bedroom, was plotting to assassinate Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, federal prosecutors stated in a court filing Monday.

According to the filing, which offers the most detail yet about why authorities have taken the 16-month-old case so seriously, McKenzie-Gude planned to use bombs planted in the road to halt Obama’s convoy, then kill him with the long-range AR-15 rifle that police found in his bedroom. Prosecutors also said McKenzie-Gude had drawn up plans to kill his friend’s mother and another student if a possible gun deal went bad, according to the filing.

McKenzie-Gude, now 20, pleaded guilty Sept. 23 to possessing bomb-making chemicals, which were found in his room at his home just outside the Capital Beltway. He has not been charged with plotting to shoot or kill anyone, and nothing in the filing suggests that he will be. Prosecutors filed the papers in advance of a Jan. 7 sentencing hearing, when they are expected to argue that he should be sentenced to eight years in prison for possessing the chemicals.

McKenzie-Gude’s attorney, Steven Kupferberg, has said authorities exaggerated the threat McKenzie-Gude posed and ruined his name in the process. Kupferberg said Monday that prosecutors put too much credence in Gude’s former close friend, Patrick Yevsukov, now 18, who also has pleaded guilty in the case and has cooperated with investigators.

“It doesn’t seem to me to be anything but a far-fetched fairy tale,” Kupferberg said of the document filed Monday. McKenzie-Gude never wanted to kill Obama or anyone else, Kupferberg said.

“There isn’t a possibility of that. It couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said.

Prosecutors have acknowledged that they never learned the depth of McKenzie-Gude’s convictions. “We cannot know for certain what Collin McKenzie-Gude would have done if law enforcement had not acted,” Rod J. Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, said in September.

McKenzie-Gude has been held in the Montgomery County jail since summer 2008. He also has pleaded guilty in Montgomery Circuit Court to attempted carjacking in connection with events on July 29, 2008. On that morning, after he learned that police were about to search his bedroom, he went to the White Flint mall, attacked a 78-year-old man and tried to steal his car. Prosecutors have said he wanted to flee the area.

Kupferberg has said the incident was fueled by panic and was out of character for McKenzie-Gude, and that he eventually turned himself in to police.

The items found in McKenzie-Gude’s room propelled the story to national news: three high-powered rifles, two shotguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a document showing how to kill someone from 200 meters away, more than 50 pounds of chemicals and a map with markings around Camp David, according to authorities.

The pre-sentencing documents filed Monday describe additional items, specifically documents found on a thumb-drive computer storage device, that speak to the alleged plots to kill his friend’s mother and to shoot a student selling a gun if the deal went bad. Investigators said a map they found had markings along Interstate 270.

“The highlighted points are marked with code names, such as ‘RP-Tomahawk,’ and correspond to bridge overpasses, areas where McKenzie-Gude could have been planning to stage the assault by placing booby-trap or roadside IEDs [improvised explosive devices] along the side of the road,” prosecutors wrote.

Much of prosecutors’ assertions about McKenzie-Gude’s possible plans regarding Obama appear to have come from the former close friend, Yevsukov, who, like McKenzie-Gude, attended St. John’s College High School in Northwest Washington. He has pleaded guilty to making/possessing pipe bombs and awaits sentencing. He has not always given consistent statements to authorities, and early on said he didn’t think McKenzie-Gude had any malicious intent, according to those familiar with the case.

Yevsukov later told investigators that McKenzie-Gude planned to use explosives to kill Obama, according to the filing. “McKenzie-Gude hated then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s political views, particularly regarding gun control,” federal prosecutors wrote.

As for the possible killing of Yevsukov’s mother, prosecutors said that McKenzie-Gude’s plan involved a six-man team to attack the house. The allegation has come up before in the case and was dismissed out of hand by Yevsukov’s mother, Meghan Haney.

This story is filed under: American Gangster

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