Brandon Russell, the founder of a neo-Nazi group, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, for conspiring to sabotage Baltimore's power grid, the US Attorney's Office for Maryland announced on Thursday, according to Reuters.
Russell, 30, of Orlando, Florida, was convicted earlier this year of conspiring to damage or destroy an energy facility. Senior US District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore handed down the maximum sentence for the offense.
Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 37, of Catonsville, Maryland, who was involved in the plot, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 years in prison in September 2024.
Prosecutors revealed that the conspiracy targeted several electrical substations around Baltimore, a majority-Black city, as part of a plan to advance a white supremacist ideology aimed at destabilizing American society.
Evidence at trial revealed that Russell, between November 2022 and his arrest in February 2023, devised a plan to simultaneously attack five substation transformers with gunfire, aiming to cause a cascading city-wide power failure. Prosecutors stated that the planned attack could have caused more than $75 million in damage.
Russell's attorney, Ian J. Goldstein, contended that Clendaniel was "the more culpable of the two defendants" and was seeking a reduced sentence for her. "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."
Russell, who founded the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, had previously served a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to possession of an unregistered destruction device and improperly storing explosive materials in a separate plot to attack power lines in Florida.