The men “planned and trained to attack America’s power grid to advance their violent white supremacist ideology,” the government said.
A press statement from the Department of Justice says that the three men who planned a white supremacist attack on an energy plant in Idaho or one of the states nearby were sentenced on July 25.
Attorney General Merrick Garland of the United States said, “As part of a self-described ‘modern-day SS,’ these defendants planned, trained, and conspired to attack America’s power grid to advance their violent white supremacist ideology.” These terms show how evil their plan was and how committed the Justice Department is to holding those responsible who try to use violence to weaken our democracy.
Three men were given sentences for their parts in the plan. They are Paul James Kryscuk, 38, from Boise, Idaho; Liam Collins, 25, from Johnston, Rhode Island; and Justin Wade Hermanson, 25, from Swansboro, North Carolina.
Six years and six months in prison were given to Kryscuk for plotting to destroy an energy facility, ten years to Collins for helping to move unregistered firearms across state lines, and one year and nine months to Hermanson for planning to make guns and ship them across state lines.
USA Today said that federal officials did not say where the targeted facility was located. However, court documents showed that agents took possession of a list of about a dozen places in Idaho and nearby states that had “a transformer, substation, or other component of the power grid for the Northwest United States.”
Attorney General Garland says the men got together on the “Iron March,” a neo-Nazi forum that is no longer active, to talk about and study past attacks on power grids. According to a 2021 indictment of five suspects by the Justice Department, the group spent the years between 2017 and 2020 getting ready for the attack by doing things like stealing military equipment, making guns, and learning about poisons and explosives.
Collins and Jordan Duncan, another co-defendant in the indictment who is also from North Carolina, got military tools and information illegally while they were Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune. They also planned to destroy transformers with 50 pounds of explosives.
A DOJ memo says, “In October 2020, Kryscuk was found with a handwritten list of about twelve intersections and places in Idaho and surrounding states. The list included intersections and places with a transformer, substation, or other part of the power grid for the northwest United States.”
There is a lot of worry in the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security about attacks like the ones these three guys planned. A 2019 paper from the University of Chicago and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland says, “Most energy infrastructure is widespread, relatively easy to attack, and hard to protect, which lowers the cost of attacking.”
White racist groups, which have been active in the Western United States in the past, are likely to be interested in this lower price. More and more, these groups are being linked to plans or attacks on energy substations in the US. For example, three men were caught at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas with Molotov cocktails in their car.
Bennett Clifford, an extremism researcher and co-author of a 2022 report on extremism for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, says, “Extremists are taking advantage of the fact that other people are attacking and thought to be attacking the energy grid successfully.” He told High Country News, “They see all of these things as adding another grain of sand to a big bucket. To mix my metaphors, they think one of these things will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”