A federal jury has convicted neo-Nazi leader Brandon Russell of planning to attack electric substations in Baltimore in hopes of sparking a cascading failure that would “completely destroy [the] whole city.”
Brandon Russell was found guilty of conspiracy to damage an energy facility after a six-day trial. The jury’s verdict form was filed Feb. 4, according to court records, although a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice said the verdict was returned Feb. 3.
Russell was charged in February 2023 along with his accomplice, Sarah Beth Clendaniel. (See Feds Charge Two in Alleged Conspiracy to Attack BGE Grid.)
Clendaniel pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge and being a felon in possession of a firearm in September 2024 and was sentenced to concurrently serve 18 years for conspiracy and 15 years for the firearm charge, plus three years of supervised release for the latter charge. The conspiracy conviction also includes a lifetime of supervised release for Clendaniel after her prison term.
Russell — the founder of Atomwaffen Division, which DOJ considers a “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist” group inspired by Nazi beliefs — first became acquainted with Clendaniel in 2018 while both were incarcerated at separate facilities, according to the criminal complaint. Russell, a resident of Orlando, Fla., was in prison for possessing explosive material that he intended to use to attack electric infrastructure in his home state.
Prosecutors said the two began actively conspiring no later than November 2022, working with a third person who was an informant for the FBI. Clendaniel identified five substations she planned to target, all operated by Baltimore Gas and Electric, a subsidiary of Exelon.
She and Russell hoped to cause “a significant interruption and impairment of the … regional power grid,” DOJ said. The department calculated that the monetary loss from their planned attacks “would have exceeded $75 million.”
Russell compared the planned attack to the rifle attacks in Moore County, N.C., when unknown perpetrators damaged two Duke Energy substations and caused more than 54,000 customers to lose power, DOJ said. (See Duke Completes Power Restoration After NC Substation Attack.) Clendaniel hoped that the cascading failure resulting from the destruction of the substations “would be legendary” and “completely destroy” Baltimore.
“Today’s verdict reinforces [that] there is no tolerance for those who seek to harm our communities and use violence to further hate-filled beliefs,” FBI Special Agent William DelBagno said in the DOJ statement. “I am proud of the tremendous work by FBI Baltimore’s Joint Terrorism Task Force which led this investigation.”
Russell’s sentencing date has not been scheduled. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Electric utilities have become increasingly concerned about defending their facilities from violence as the incidence of attacks has risen in recent years.
A common thread is politically motivated assaults on power stations. FBI agents arrested a 24-year-old from Tennessee in November 2024 for plotting to rig a drone with explosives and fly it into a substation near Nashville to disrupt power, cause civil unrest and spark a civil war; the defendant in that case has also claimed to have ties to Atomwaffen. (See Feds Accuse Tenn. Man of Substation Attack Plot.)
Similarly, three men with neo-Nazi associations pleaded guilty in 2022 to conspiring to damage substations with rifles after being arrested in Ohio. The men admitted they planned to damage the grid in order to cause racial unrest and were sentenced to 12, 60 and 92 months in prison.
