BALTIMORE | A Maryland woman who’s held white supremacist views for decades and recently conspired with a neo-Nazi leader to plan an attack on Baltimore’s power grid was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison for her role in the plot.
The high-profile case ultimately came to focus on the defendant’s past trauma and her mental state as she struggled with addiction and embraced increasingly radical, racist views. Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, pleaded guilty to planning the attack in May.
Clendaniel was working with Brandon Russell, who co-founded a small, Florida-based neo-Nazi group, to plan a series of “sniper attacks” on Maryland electrical substations that could have caused significant damage to the regional power grid. It was meant to create chaos in the majority-Black city, according to federal prosecutors.
“It’s true, your honor, I do still hold National Socialist beliefs,” Clendaniel told the judge during her sentencing hearing Wednesday in Baltimore federal court, saying she adopted the ideology at age 13. She pledged to never again act on those beliefs.
“I know there’s a line there that I can’t cross,” she said.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar said he wanted to believe that Clendaniel wouldn’t have actually carried out the plot, which he called “extreme in every respect.”
“I think that’s a huge question, but who can take that risk?” he said, before sentencing her to 18 years in federal prison — the sentence prosecutors had recommended — and lifetime supervision upon release.
In explaining his decision, Judge Bredar noted new information from prosecutors that Clendaniel had recently been placing jail calls to a white supremacist leader in California. Those calls show Clendaniel was unrepentant and undeterred, prosecutors said.
“This is something that is very much a part of her,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen O’Connell Gavin said during the hearing.
Clendaniel was charged last year along with Russell, a Florida resident who co-founded the group Atomwaffen Division. His case hasn’t gone to trial yet. Russell previously served five years in prison after pleading guilty to explosives charges that stemmed from a deadly shooting at an apartment that he shared with Atomwaffen’s other founder.
Clendaniel and Russell began exchanging letters around 2018 while they were incarcerated in different facilities. They developed a romantic relationship that continued after they were released from prison, court records show.
Clendaniel pleaded guilty in May to two counts: conspiracy to damage electrical facilities and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
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