A Maryland woman who pled guilty to a neo-Nazi plot to assault multiple energy substations near Baltimore was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison and life supervision upon her release, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland.
Sarah Beth Clendaniel pled guilty in May to federal conspiracy and weapons counts.
Clendaniel conveyed her plans to use a high-powered rifle to shoot through crucial infrastructure at five substations, which the US government calculated might have caused approximately $75 million in damage if the conspiracy had not been halted, prosecutors said.
Clendaniel and a co-defendant, Brandon Russell, who co-founded the neo-Nazi group AtomWaffen, believed that destroying the substations would result in a “cascading failure” of Baltimore’s electrical grid, which would “permanently completely lay this city to waste,” according to federal prosecutors.
Russell was detained when the two first met, following a 2018 conviction for possessing an unregistered dangerous device, according to officials.
Prosecutors described the scheme as a racism-fueled plot to cause widespread havoc in the predominantly Black city.
“If we can pull off what I’m hoping… this would be legendary,” Clendaniel said to the informant, according to criminal documents.
Clendaniel agreed that if she had carried out the attacks, the overall cost of repairing the energy facilities would have exceeded $100,000, according to court filings.
According to the documents, the pair planned to shoot up the five substations while both were on probation in 2022, when Russell began contacting a confidential FBI source about his desire to attack vital infrastructure sites.
According to court records, Russell allegedly told the informant that “putting holes in transformers… is the greatest thing somebody can do,” and that they should launch an attack “when there is the greatest strain on the grid” to cause widespread disruption. Russell also told the informant about Clendaniel and his alleged collaboration with her to target an energy facility, offering to connect the two to coordinate their strikes to “maximize impact.”
Clendaniel informed them in early 2023 that she anticipated dying of a terminal illness in a few months and that she wanted to get a rifle as soon as possible so that she could assault five substations in Baltimore on the same day, according to prosecutors.
“[Clendaniel] described how there was a ‘ring’ around Baltimore and if they hit a number of them all in the same day, they ‘would destroy this whole city,'” according to the declaration.