Summary
Brandon Russell, leader of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, was convicted of conspiring to attack Maryland’s power grid in a terrorist plot.
Prosecutors say Russell recruited Sara Beth Clendaniel to shoot at multiple Baltimore-area substations, aiming to cause mass blackouts and societal disruption.
Clendaniel, who took a plea deal, received 18 years in prison. Russell previously served five years for possessing explosives.
Officials estimate the planned attack would have caused $75 million in damages and widespread outages. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
This is a really strange fucking case.
He was inspired by an instruction manual that definitely had ties to formal intelligence, rather it be ours, Russia’s or somebody else’s.
There was also a Christmas day power grid attack back in 2022 in Washington state that appears connected to that specific instruction manual, but essentially all information regarding that case is wiped.
But going back to this guy the article is about, a few years prior he made contact with an older gentleman who wrote published white terror manifestos. This case forced the FBI to reveal that the older gentleman had been an FBI source since the 1970s and had even funded the publishing of some of his nazi material.
This case is terrifying and the more people who learn about it the better.
What does it mean to be “an FBI source”?
A informant?