A neo-Nazi who planned to attack five Baltimore Gas & Electric substations to disable power to the city has been found guilty of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday.
Florida resident Brandon Russell faces up to 20 years, according to the agency. He is scheduled to be sentenced in June.
“Russell conspired to carry out attacks against critical infrastructure, specifically transformers located within electrical substations, in furtherance of his racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist beliefs,” DOJ said in a statement. “Russell posted links to open-source maps of infrastructure, which included the locations of electrical substations, and he described how a small number of attacks on substations could cause a ‘cascading failure.’ Russell also discussed maximizing the impact of the planned attack by hitting multiple substations at one time.”
Sarah Beth Clendaniel, who was recruited by Russell to carry out the attacks, was sentenced in September to 18 years in prison.
“The intended monetary loss associated with the planned attacks would have exceeded $75 million,” according to DOJ. The pair intended to attack substations with a firearm to “completely destroy this whole city,” the agency said, quoting Clendaniel.
Planning for the Baltimore attack took place between November 2022 and February 2023, according to DOJ. The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the case.
Generally, the electric grid is designed so that the loss of a single piece of equipment should not cause a widespread outage. But attacks on multiple points can disrupt the flow of power, and the Baltimore conspiracy could have resulted in lengthy outages, experts said.
The federal government has been sounding the alarm for years over the potential for domestic terrorists to attack the U.S. power grid. Physical attacks on North American power grid spiked 10% in 2022, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
