Robert R. Doggart, a former candidate for Congress in Tennessee, was charged Tuesday with plotting to burn down a mosque in a New York town with a large Muslim population, NBC News reported. Doggart, 63, was indicted by a federal grand jury and accused of soliciting others to destroy religious property, a civil rights violation. Doggert wrote on Facebook that his target — a mosque near Hancock, a community known as Islamberg for its large Muslim population — "must be utterly destroyed in order to get the attention of the American people," according to court documents. He was arrested in mid-April and agreed to plead guilty, but the judge rejected the proposed plea as legally insufficient.
