A Massachusetts woman who traveled to D.C. last year and admitted that she planned to kill Scott Bessent, who was about to be confirmed as President Donald Trump’s secretary of the treasury, was sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison.
Federal prosecutors said Riley English hatched a plan “to use a Molotov cocktail to burn a Cabinet member nominee to death in a political assassination,” at a time of rising civil unrest in which Trump has faced multiple assassination attempts and other political figures have been killed.
English, 26, admitted in court documents that she was carrying a folding knife, a lighter and two miniature bottles of vodka, each affixed with a gray cloth that had been soaked with alcohol-based hand sanitizer, when she arrived at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 27, 2025. She turned herself in before carrying out an attack, about two hours before the Senate confirmed Bessent to the Cabinet post.
“What are you doing here today?” a Capitol Police officer asked.
“I was going to kill Scott Bessent,” English responded, according to court records filed in connection with her guilty plea in March to charges of unlawful possession of firearms and carrying a knife on Capitol grounds.
She told law enforcement after her arrest that she had “been thinking of this for a while because of Luigi Mangione,” according to court records. Mangione admitted in federal court last week that he fatally shot Brian Thompson, then the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, in an ambush-style attack in 2024 because of Mangione’s travails with the U.S. health care system.
Federal public defenders argued that English, who is transgender, had experienced mental health challenges stemming from her upbringing in a religious family, substance abuse and the death of her partner in 2023.
“The constant news about the current administration’s anti-transgender agenda became a source of fear for Ms. English and another form of rejection,” the public defenders said in a court filing. “Not only did her family not support her identity, but now the country did not either. Her guilt about her significant other’s death also created a misguided mission to somehow help the transgender community.”
They described her as someone “who was in desperate need of help, but who had no realistic plans or desires to hurt anyone,” adding that the two 50-milliliter vodka bottles “would never have had the capability of being ignited.”
In her interview with police, English said she did not want to hurt the senators who were considering Bessent’s nomination.
“I don’t want to kill the random Democrats and Republicans who are in the Senate voting and talking,” English said. “I just want the evil, the truly head honchos.” She also said during that interview: “I don’t want to hurt people. That’s why I turned myself in.”
Bessent is one of the few high-ranking Trump administration officials who are openly gay.
The treasury secretary wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who handed down the sentence, that his young children had been spooked by the incident and “robbed of their innocence.”
“Every defendant has an excuse,” Bessent wrote. “The defendant may have mental health issues; the defendant’s plan may have been ill-conceived and unlikely to work; the defendant may have surrendered to authorities at the last moment. But far more relevant is the defendant’s goal of murdering a cabinet official and the grave harm of the defendant’s conduct to our social compact.”
English has been in custody since her arrest about 20 months ago. Her legal team requested a sentence of time served.
“Ms. Riley English pled to the lesser offense to avoid harsher potential penalties if convicted of the original charges in the indictment,” public defender Maria Jacob said. “I do think the sentence was excessive in light of the fact that she turned herself in and the significant mitigating circumstances present.”
In a court filing, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office recapped a list of assassinations and attempts to use violence for political ends in recent years. There have been three attempts on Trump’s life since the 2024 presidential campaign, according to the Justice Department. Pirro asked the judge to send English to prison for a decade.
“If you come to our nation’s capital intending to harm a public official because of political dissent, we will find you, arrest you, prosecute you, and send you to prison,” Pirro said in a statement posted on X.
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