Brandon Russell is seen on this mugshot from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office via AP
An admitted neo-Nazi and a Maryland woman were arrested and charged with plotting to attack several electrical substations within the Baltimore area, federal authorities announced Monday.
Prosecutors said the admitted neo-Nazi, Brandon Clint Russell, 27, and 34-year-old Sarah Beth Clendaniel conspired to commit the attacks “in furtherance of Russell’s racially or ethnically motivated extremist beliefs.”
Russell is currently on supervised release after a federal conviction related to possessing an unregistered destructive device, which occurred after a former roommate told authorities that Russell’s neo-Nazi group was planning to attack electrical and nuclear power infrastructure in Florida.
Clendaniel allegedly boasted that if the electrical substations were all attacked on the identical day, it “would completely destroy this whole city,” in keeping with a newly unsealed criminal criticism against her and Russell.
A “good 4 or five shots through the middle of them,” Clendaniel allegedly stated, in keeping with the criticism.
A lady believed to be Sarah Beth Clendaniel in a DOJ document
Source: DOJ
Maryland U.S. Attorney Erek Barron in a press release said, “This planned attack threatened lives and would have left hundreds of Marylanders within the cold and dark.”
“We’re united and committed to using every legal means obligatory to disrupt violence, including hate-fueled attacks,” Barron said.
Russell, who lives in Orlando, Florida, is as a result of appear in federal court in that city on the costs Monday afternoon.
Clendaniel, a resident of Catonsville, Maryland, is as a result of appear in Baltimore federal court on Monday afternoon.
Each defendants are charged with conspiring to destroy an energy facility. They face a maximum possible prison sentence of 20 years if convicted.
Russell had previously admitted to police in May 2017 to having began a neighborhood National Socialist group in Tampa, Florida, called the “Atomwaffen,” which included three of his roommates in that city, in keeping with the criminal criticism.
That interview was conducted after Devon Arthurs, a roommate of Russell’s in Tampa, killed their two other roommates, the criticism said. Arthurs last yr was ruled competent to face trial within the killings. He stays held without bond in a Florida jail.
Arthurs told law enforcement authorities on the time “that he had recently converted from Neo-Nazi beliefs to Islam,” the criticism said. “Arthurs stated that he murdered his roommates because they bullied him over being a Muslim.”
Arthurs also told authorities that “Russell was the leader of the Neo-Nazi group to which he and his roommates had belonged,” the criticism said.
“Arthurs stated that, before he killed his roommates, they’d been planning to attack U.S. infrastructure, to incorporate power lines along ‘Alligator Alley’ (a nickname for the a part of Interstate 75 that crosses South Florida) in addition to a Florida nuclear power plant.”
In the course of the investigation of the killings, authorities found neo-Nazi paraphernalia, an image of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and “the highly explosive hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (“HMTD”) and, amongst other items, quite a few explosive precursors that belonged to Russell,” in keeping with the criticism.
Russell pleaded guilty to possession of an unregistered destructive device and improper storage of explosive materials, the criticism noted. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Clendaniel has a criminal history that features a conviction for felony robbery, the criticism said.
