According to a criminal complaint filed by the FBI, Sara Clendaniel 34, and Brandon Russell, 27, planned to simultaneously attack five electrical substations in the Baltimore area using rifles as part of an effort to “completely destroy” the majority-Black city.
“If we can pull off what I’m hoping … this would be legendary,” Clendaniel told an FBI informant on January 29, according to the filing. The informant was having similar discussions with Russell, who was looking for others to carry out simultaneous actions.
“I think you should wait until like a week after it starts snowing for that other thing we talked about,” an internet user identified as Russell in the complaint wrote to the informant. The user said the “goal is for when most people are using max electricity” and that “follow on [attacks] could lead to cascading failure costing billions of dollars.”
“It would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully,” Clendaniel also told the informant.
The Maryland port city of 576,000 is 62% Black and has been the focus of regular segments in conservative media in recent years as part of an effort to claim that crime is skyrocketing under the Biden administration as a consequence of left-wing demands for greater police accountability. Baltimore was the site of major protests in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, in police custody.
The two told federal informants they had acquired weapons and planned to act “before June.”
“The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is evolving and persistent,” Thomas J. Sobocinski, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Baltimore field office, said in a Department of Justice release announcing the duo’s arrests. Their charges could put them in prison for 20 years.
Russell is well-known to the DOJ, having only been released from prison in August 2021 after serving five years for possession of bomb-making materials. He is founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, which is known for its terrorist attacks and assassinations of Jews and LGBTQ people in an effort to spark a race war in the United States.
Clendaniel is also on probation, having been previously imprisoned for robbing convenience stores with a machete. The two met while behind bars.
The planned attacks were modeled on another attack in central North Carolina in December 2022. Gunfire damaged two electrical substations, knocking out power for 35,000 people for nearly a week. While the FBI has not given any indication about a possible motive for the attack, some have speculated there to be a connection between the attack and several right-wing protests in the area aimed at shutting down a drag performance that night.
A second attack last month targeted a substation about an hour away, but failed to trigger an electrical outage. The FBI does not believe the two North Carolina attacks to be connected, but has issued a $25,000 reward for information about either incident.
There have also been similar electrical grid attacks in Oregon and Washington state in recent months.
Last July, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that a so-called “accelerationist handbook” was being circulated among “extremist Telegram channels” that had been inspired by a 2013 rifle attack against Metcalf transmission substation near San Jose, California. It encouraged white supremacist groups to carry out similar attacks against power stations and other infrastructure in lieu of shooting attacks against minority groups.
Calling substations “sitting ducks, worthy prey,” the pamphlet argues that “so long as the power turns on, the status quo, the downward decline of our [white] race, and the increase in nonwhites in our lands will carry on unhindered.” It calls on adherents to carry out “more fruitful acts that will REALLY harm the system and brings us closer to the collapse that is needed for our race to once again thrive on this planet.”