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- The FBI says its agents thwarted a plan to take out Maryland's power grid.
- The FBI said the people accused of planning the attack blabbed to an FBI informant online.
- Sarah Clendaniel and Brandon Russell were charged with conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.
FBI agents said they thwarted a plan by a neo-Nazi and his girlfriend to take out Maryland's power grid after the couple blabbed to an informant in an online chat room.
The Department of Justice filed charges in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland on Monday against Sarah Beth Clendaniel and Brandon Clint Russell. Clendaniel and Russell were charged with conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.
"This alleged planned attack threatened lives and would have left thousands of Marylanders in the cold
and dark," Maryland US Attorney Erek L. Barron said in a press release shared with Insider. "We are united and committed to using every legal means necessary to disrupt violence, including hate-fueled attacks."
In a probable cause affidavit, the FBI detailed the accusations against Clendaniel and Russell and alleged that the couple planned an attack on an "encrypted communication application."
Russell, who the FBI said admitted to subscribing to Nazi beliefs during an interview, "made statements in direct messages to [an FBI informant] throughout much of 2022 regarding conducting critical infrastructure attacks, including statements about sniper attacks against substations, and how conducting a small number of attacks on electrical substations could cause a 'cascading failure,'" the affidavit said.
"The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is evolving and persistent," FBI Special Agent in Charge Thomas J. Sobocinski said.
The FBI alleges that starting in September of last year, Russell encouraged the informant to plot their own infrastructure attack before including the informant in his planned attack on the Maryland electrical grid.
Russell told the informant he "wanted to 'maximize impact' and '[w]ould love to coordinate to get multiple [substations] at the same time,'" the FBI alleges in the affidavit.
The FBI alleges that Clendaniel was brought in on the plan in January 2023, telling the informant she wanted to "accomplish something worthwhile" before her death. Clendaniel said the plot would be "legendary" if they pulled it off, the FBI alleges in the affidavit.
The FBI alleges that Clendaniel was very specific about the weapons she would need to carry out the attack, engaging with the informant in a two-hour call during which she listed her requests for weapons and detailed weapons she already possessed and what the informant should use.
According to th affidavit, by the end of January, the couple had finalized the locations they wanted to attack and requested more weapons from the informant.
"If we can pull off what I'm hoping... this would be legendary. This is MAJOR tier, and definitely doable," Clendaniel said, according to the affidavit. "It would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully."
Russell and Clendaniel have been linked since at least 2018, the FBI said. History of Clendaniel's Amazon account showed she sent Russell a lock-picking kit in May 2022, the FBI said.
The number of power grid attacks or incidents of vandalism on high-voltage power equipment nearly doubled in 2022, Insider previously reported. Electrical substations are a tempting target for neo-Nazis, including so-called accelerationists who believe that causing chaos through power outages could lead to race war.
The power industry has taken steps to protect important substations that could prompt cascading outages if damaged. But most of the more than 40,000 transformer stations throughout the US are protected by little more than chain-link fences.
Perpetrators behind most attacks aren't apprehended. And some of them aren't right-wing or even ideologically motivated; two men accused of causing $3 million in damage to four substations and cutting power to some 14,000 people were trying to cut power to a business they planned to rob, an FBI agent said in court papers.
But the arrests of Russell and Clendaniel are the latest example of federal authorities pointing the finger at far-right extremists. Last year, three men between the ages of 20 and 24 pleaded guilty to making plans to try to knock off substations across the US to instigate a race war or an economic catastrophe.