(Reuters) -The founder of a neo-Nazi group was sentenced on Thursday to 20 years in federal prison, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, for plotting to sabotage Baltimore's power grid, the U.S. Attorney's Office for Maryland said.
Brandon Russell, 30, of Orlando, Florida, was found guilty at trial earlier this year of conspiring to damage or destroy an energy facility. Senior U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore handed Russell the maximum sentence for that offense.
His convicted co-conspirator in the plot, Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 37, of Catonsville, Maryland, pleaded guilty and received an 18-year prison term in September 2024.
Prosecutors said the conspiracy targeting several electrical substations around Baltimore, which is predominantly Black and ranks as Maryland's largest city, was aimed at furthering a white supremacist ideology that sought the collapse of American society.
"Russell allowed hatred to drive him and his co-conspirator to plot a dangerous scheme that could have harmed thousands of people," U.S. Attorney Kelly Hayes said in a statement announcing Thursday's sentencing.
Evidence presented at trial showed that between November 2022 and his arrest in February 2023, Russell hatched a plan to simultaneously attack five substation transformers with gunfire in an attempt to cause a cascading city-wide power failure.
Prosecutors said such an attack, had they been carried out, would have caused more than $75 million in damage.
Russell's lawyer, Ian J. Goldstein, had argued that Clendaniel was “the more culpable of the two defendants” and was seeking a lesser sentence than she received.
“We will be filing an immediate appeal,” Goldstein said in an email to the New York Times on Thursday. “There are significant appellate issues relating to what we believe to be the unlawful warrantless surveillance of Brandon Russell, a United States citizen protected by the Constitution.”
Reached by text message on a plane, Goldstein told Reuters he was accurately quoted by the Times.
Russell founded a neo-Nazi group called the Atomwaffen Division, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks U.S. hate groups.
He was previously sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to possession of an unregistered destruction device and the improper storage of explosive materials in connection with an alleged plot to attack power lines in Florida.
A confidential informant helped lead the FBI back to Russell while he was still under supervised release from the Florida case, linking him to encrypted internet messages from a user known as "Homunculus" urging attacks on electrical substations, according to federal authorities.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
