Latest News

Neo-Nazi leader sentencesd to 20 years in prison for plotting to sabotage Baltimore's power grid

The U.S. Attorney's Office for Maryland announced that the founder of a neo Nazi group, who plotted to sabotage Baltimore's electric grid, was sentenced to 20 years of federal prison and a lifetime of supervised freedom on Thursday.

Brandon Russell, 30, from Orlando, Florida was found guilty of conspiracy to damage or destroy a energy facility at a trial held earlier this year. James Bredar, senior U.S. district judge in Baltimore, handed Russell the maximum penalty for this offense.

Sarah Beth Clendaniel of Catonsville in Maryland, his co-conspirator convicted in the plot, pleaded to guilty and was sentenced to 18 years in prison in September 2024.

The conspiracy to target several electrical substations in Baltimore, a predominantly Black city that is the largest in Maryland, was said by prosecutors to be a way of promoting a white supremacist agenda which sought the destruction of American society.

In a statement released Thursday, U.S. attorney Kelly Hayes stated that Russell and his co-conspirator were driven by hatred in order to plan a dangerous plot which could have caused harm to thousands of people.

The evidence presented at the trial revealed that Russell had devised a plan between November 2022 until his arrest in February of 2023 to fire on five transformers in a substation simultaneously in order to cause an all-out power outage in the city.

The prosecution said that if such an attack had been carried out it would have caused damage of more than 75 million dollars.

Ian J. Goldstein was Russell's attorney. He argued that Clendaniel had been "the most culpable" of the two defendants and sought a lower sentence than what she received.

Goldstein told the New York Times in an email on Thursday that "we will be filing an immediately appeal." There are important appellate issues regarding what we consider to be unlawful warrantless surveillance on Brandon Russell, an American citizen protected by Constitution.

Goldstein, who was reached by text on a flight, said he had been accurately quoted by The Times.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (a civil rights group that tracks hate groups in the United States), Russell founded a neo Nazi group called Atomwaffen Division.

After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to five-years in prison for possession of a destruction device that had not been registered and improper storage of explosives in connection with a alleged plot in Florida to attack powerlines.

According to federal authorities, a confidential informant led the FBI back towards Russell, while he was under supervised release for the Florida case. The informant linked him to encrypted messages on the internet from a user called "Homunculus", who encouraged attacks on electrical substations. Reporting by Steve Gorman, Los Angeles. Editing by Lincoln Feast.

(source: Reuters)