A propaganda video produced by neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division showing supporters on a shooting exercise at a white supremacist “training camp.” Photo: Screenshot.

US federal prosecutors in Maryland have convicted 29-year-old Brandon Russell, co-founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, for planning to strike the state’s power grid in hopes of sparking a racial war.

On Monday, after an hour of deliberation, a jury found Russell guilty of one count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, the Associated Press reported. He had developed the plan to use a sniper rifle to shoot at electrical substations around Baltimore with his girlfriend Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, who a judge sentenced on Sept. 25, 2024 to 18 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release after her acceptance of a plea deal.

Russell faces as much as 20 years imprisonment; his defense attorney Ian Goldstein said they plan to file an appeal and that his client’s conviction was a result of “a setup from the very beginning.” Prosecutors said that had Russell’s plot succeeded, the damage could have topped $75 million.

In 2017, Russell pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered destructive device and unlawful storage of explosive material. The following year, while incarcerated, he and fellow inmate Clendaniel began a correspondence which led to a romantic relationship following their releases.

Former US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time of Clendaniel’s sentencing that “those who seek to attack our country’s critical infrastructure will face the full force of the US Department of Justice.” He added that Clendaniel “sought to ‘completely destroy’ the city of Baltimore by targeting five power substations as a means of furthering her violent white supremacist ideology.”

Russell and Clendaniel embraced the neo-Nazi “accelerationist” ideology, which advocates for violence in order to provoke societal collapse. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described the word as “a term white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it. The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms. We have also recently seen tragic instances of its manifestation in the real world.”

The antisemitism watchdog group also explained that Atomwaffen Division is “one of several new neo-Nazi groups whose rise paralleled the post-2015 growth of the alt right segment of the white supremacist movement. Atomwaffen distinguishes itself by its extreme rhetoric, influenced by the writings of a neo-Nazi of an earlier generation, James Mason, who admired Charles Manson and supported the idea of lone wolf violence.”