FBI
A Maryland woman was sentenced to 18 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release “for conspiring to destroy the Baltimore region power grid,” the US Justice Department announced yesterday. Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, admitted as part of a plea agreement in May to conspiracy to damage energy facilities.
“Sarah Beth Clendaniel sought to ‘completely destroy’ the city of Baltimore by targeting five power substations as a means of furthering her violent white supremacist ideology,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said. The planned shooting attacks were prevented by law enforcement.
Family members of Clendaniel spoke to the media last year about her beliefs. “She would have no problem saying she’s racist,” her nephew Daniel Clites told the Associated Press. “She wanted to bring attention to her cause.”
Clendaniel and her alleged co-conspirator, Florida resident Brandon Russell, “became acquainted by writing letters to each other beginning in about 2018, when both were serving prison sentences in different institutions,” the plea agreement said. “At some point, they developed a romantic relationship that continued after their respective releases from incarceration.”
The plea agreement’s stipulation of facts that Clendaniel admitted to said she “and Russell espoused a white supremacist ideology and were advocates of a concept known as ‘accelerationism.’ To ‘accelerate’ or to support ‘accelerationism’ is based on a white supremacist belief that the current system is irreparable and without an apparent political solution, and therefore violent action is necessary to precipitate societal and government collapse.”
Defendant is “unrepentant, violent white supremacist”
In a sentencing memorandum, US attorneys said that Clendaniel “engaged in the conspiracy to attack critical infrastructure in Maryland in furtherance of that accelerationist goal. If not thwarted by law enforcement, Clendaniel and her co-conspirator would have permanently destroyed a significant portion of the electrical infrastructure around Baltimore.”
Clendaniel was sentenced in US District Court for the District of Maryland by Judge James Bredar, who accepted the United States government’s recommendation of 18 years. She was also sentenced to 15 years for being a felon in possession of a firearm; the sentences will run concurrently. Clendaniel received credit for time served since entering federal custody in February 2023. She was previously convicted of robberies in 2006 and 2016.
“Quite simply, the defendant is an unrepentant, violent white supremacist and recidivist who is a true danger to the community,” US attorneys wrote of Clendaniel. “In light of her extensive criminal history, there is no reason to expect that a lighter sentence would have any deterrent or rehabilitative effect upon this defendant.”
Russell was “an active and founding member of a neo-Nazi group,” the Justice Department said in January 2018 when he was sentenced to five years in prison for possessing an unregistered destructive device and for unlawful storage of explosive material. Russell is now awaiting trial on the charge of conspiracy to damage or destroy electrical facilities in Maryland.
The Justice Department said that Clendaniel and Russell used encrypted messaging applications but were caught because, over several weeks in January 2023, they communicated their plans to commit an attack to an informant, referred to as CHS-1 (Confidential Human Source). On February 3, 2023, law enforcement agents executed a search warrant at Clendaniel’s home in Catonsville, Maryland, and found “various firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.”