BALTIMORE (WGHP) — A co-founder of a violent neo-Nazi sect has been found guilty of plotting to attack electrical infrastructure.
On Feb. 4, Brandon Clint Russell was found guilty of conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.
He had been indicted in February 2023 along with a woman identified in documents as his girlfriend, Sarah Beth Clendaniel.
Clendaniel pleaded guilty to conspiracy to destroy an energy facility and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. She was sentenced in September of 2024 to 18 years in prison for the conspiracy charge and 15 years on the firearm charge. Those sentences will run concurrently, and, upon release, she will be subject to supervised release for life.
An additional count of conspiracy to destroy an energy facility was dismissed upon her guilty plea.
Russell’s case went to trial, where a jury found him guilty of his single conspiracy charge. He will be sentenced in June.
Background
Upon their arrest in 2023, FBI called Russell and Clendaniel “ethnically motivated extremists,” who were “taking steps to fulfill their threats,” according to CBS Baltimore.
Russell is one of the founders of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center says is trying to “usher in the collapse of civilization.” Atomwaffen Division rebranded itself “National Socialist Order” after Russell and his roommate were arrested.
Russell served prison time after being convicted of unlawful storage of explosive material in 2018. His roommate, who was charged in the murders of two other people they lived with, told investigators at the time that Russell and his roommates had been planning to attack infrastructure, including power infrastructure and a nuclear plant in Florida. He was initially sentenced to five years in prison.
According to documents, Clendaniel and Russell believed that attacking five substations in the Baltimore area would spark “cascading failures” around the city and would ultimately “destroy the whole city,” according to alleged conversations between Clendaniel and an informant.
On Jan. 31, 2023, the informant had a conversation with Russell in which they talked about the specific locations chosen in Maryland to attack. They were all mostly close to Baltimore, except one near the Pennsylvania border, which the informant questioned.
Russell provided a video captioned “Gunfire vs. Grid” and titled “What Really Happened With the Substation Attack in North Carolina.” In the video, a YouTuber discusses the attacks on Moore County substations from an engineering point of view, explaining the damage and how the electrical substations are linked together. According to the documents, Russell told the informant that this video would help him understand their choice of substations to hit in Maryland.
Russell is among a long list of avowed neo-Nazis who have been convicted of plotting to attack electrical infrastructure across the nation, including here in North Carolina. Neo-Nazis and other white supremacist accelerationists believe that significant damage to infrastructure will hasten a societal collapse and, to some, kick off a race war.
The FBI is still seeking information about the shooting of multiple North Carolina substations: Jones County, Moore County and Randolph County. A woman died as a result of a multi-day outage in Moore County after two substations were attacked.
Recently, two people accused of running an online collective known as “Terrorgram,” who also wrote extensively about attacks on substations, were federally indicted.
Source: Fox 8 News Channel
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