By SDCN Editor
After a six-day trial, a jury found a 29-year-old white supremacist leader guilty of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, the Department of Justice announced.
According to evidence presented at trial, from November 2022 to Feb. 3, 2023, Brandon Russell of Orlando, Florida conspired to carry out attacks against critical infrastructure, specifically transformers located within electrical substations, in furtherance of his racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist beliefs. Russell posted links to open-source maps of infrastructure, which included the locations of electrical substations, and he described how a small number of attacks on substations could cause a “cascading failure.” Russell also discussed maximizing the impact of the planned attack by hitting multiple substations at one time.
Russell recruited a Maryland-based woman, Sarah Beth Clendaniel, to carry out the attacks in Baltimore and elsewhere. They planned to damage energy facilities involved in the transmission and distribution of electricity and to cause a significant interruption and impairment of the Baltimore regional power grid. The intended monetary loss associated with the planned attacks would have exceeded $75 million. Clendaniel identified five substations to target, and Russell attempted to secure a weapon for him. Clendaniel stated that if they hit several substations all in the same day, they “would completely destroy this whole city,” and that a “good four or five shots through the center of them . . . should make that happen.” She further added, “[i]t would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully.”
Russell, who faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for conspiracy to damage an energy facility, is scheduled to be sentenced on June 17.
On Sept. 25, 2024, Clendaniel was sentenced to 18 years in prison, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, for conspiring with Russell to damage or destroy an energy facility. Clendaniel was also sentenced to 15 years in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm and 3 years of supervised release.
The FBI investigated the case.
