Trying to set explosives near China’s embassy got a Florida attorney disbarred
Disillusioned with governments, blaming China for COVID-19 and COVID vaccines for his father’s death, a Panama City attorney used explosives to damage a sculpture making fun of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and tried to set off explosives at the Chinese embassy wall.
This got Christopher Rodriguez disbarred in June as well as an 8 1/2-year federal prison sentence he’s currently a year into serving.
Rodriguez pleaded guilty to damaging property occupied by a foreign government, explosive materials—malicious damage to federal property, and receipt or possession of an unregistered firearm. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, the 47-year-old resides at FCI Coleman, a medium security prison in Sumterville.
“These actions are completely at odds with Mr. Rodriguez’s upbringing and lifelong character,” federal public defender A.J. Kramer wrote in court documents about his client, who had been a public defender in Panama City. “They were the result of profound personal loss and a sincere belief that the Chinese government was to blame for his loss.”
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Losing faith
Before joining the Florida Bar in 2018, Rodriguez graduated from college, joined the U.S. Army after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in the Washington, D.C. area. Court documents by Kramer say Rodriguez eventually was detailed in the security unit for the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
“While he learned much in his military service, Mr. Rodriguez could not help but develop a sense of distrust upon the realization that his government had taken advantage of him and his fellow soldiers,” Kramer wrote in the sentencing memorandum. “He recognized that the government had not been entirely honest with its citizens, and it turned him into a much more critical and even skeptical thinker.”
Rodriguez’s distrust of both the U.S. and Chinese governments ballooned with the COVID-19 pandemic. Just over year into the pandemic, Rodriguez’s father died of a heart attack in Puerto Rico, a death Rodriguez blamed on COVID vaccines.
When Rodriguez returned home from the funeral, he left his job as a public defender, showed all his possessions into a car and drove west. He got arrested in Los Angeles County on June 27, 2021, when highway patrol cops found three guns, plus bags and jars labeled “Tannerite” in his car.
“Tannerite is a brand of exploding targets,” Rodriguez’s statement of offense said. “Exploding targets can be detonated via a high velocity impact from a projectile such as a bullet.”
A sculpture of Chairman Mao and a Chinese wall
The Gao brothers, artists from mainland China, made a shiny sculpture of a tiny Mao Zedong, China’s 1949-76 Communist Party Chairman, balancing on a gargantuan head of Russian revolution and Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin. They called the piece “Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head.”
The sculpture was brought to San Antonio in March 2022 and, eight months later, sat in the courtyard of the Texas Public Radio building. Though the sculpture made fun of Chairman Mao and communism, the sculpture apparently didn’t hit Rodriguez as satire.
According to his statement of offense, Rodriguez rented a car for the 10-hour Pensacola-to-San Antonio drive and headed for Texas Public Radio in the first hours of Nov. 7, 2022. At around 2:25 a.m., Rodriguez “scaled an 8-foot fence to enter the courtyard where Miss Mao was located,” his statement said. “He then walked to the sculpture and placed two canisters at the base of the sculpture. The canisters contained some quantity of exploding target explosive material.”
Rodriguez left over the fence as he came, then got onto a rooftop overlooking the courtyard and exploded the canisters with a rifle shot.
“The explosion caused significant damage to the Miss Mao sculpture,” his statement admitted.
Just under 11 months later, Rodriguez decided to make a direct symbolic strike at China on their (sort of) soil.
Rodriguez drove from Panama City to the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, then used a burner phone to call a cab (the Metro subway line stops running at midnight) for a ride to into Washington D.C., getting dropped off near the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China around 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 25, 2023.
Rodriguez’s statement of facts says he put a backpack with about 15 pounds of explosives next to a streetlight and about 12 feet from the embassy’s back wall and fence, technically China government property.
“Rodriguez then attempted to detonate the explosives contained within the backpack by shooting at the backpack with a rifle,” the statement said. “He missed his target, and the device did not detonate.”
Rodriguez’s lawyer, Kramer, wrote in the sentencing memorandum that Rodriguez didn’t, “intend to influence either U.S. or Chinese government conduct by his actions, and he was also not retaliating against specific actions. He wanted to raise awareness. He wanted to bring people’s eyes towards the presence of Chinese Communist Party spies in the United States and raise awareness about what he believed to be a significant national security threat.”
