Three men with white supremacist ties received prison sentences of up to 10 years late last month for plotting to destroy a generating station in the northwestern United States, in what the U.S. Department of Justice called a “racially motivated scheme to attack a power grid,” the New York Times reports.
The trio, two of them U.S. Marines, met in early 2017 through an online forum for neo-Nazis. They used an encrypted messaging app to keep in touch and recruit others after the forum was shut down later that year.
A man from Johnston, RI received the longest sentence for aiding and abetting the transport of unregistered firearms across state lines, the Times writes. A resident of Boise, Idaho, who was “found in October 2020 with a handwritten list of about a dozen places in Idaho and surrounding states that were home to components of the power grid for the northwestern United States,” got 6½ years for conspiring to destroy an energy facility. A third man from Sansboro, NC was sentenced to a year and nine months behind bars for conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate.
As it developed, the plot included manufacturing firearms, stealing military gear, training exercises in the desert near Boise, and researching a previous attempt to attack the grid. Others involved with the scheme “produced a propaganda video of their training, which featured masked individuals firing assault-type rifles, and ended with a Nazi symbol and the words ‘Come home white man’,” the Times says.
Two other conspirators had already pleaded guilty by the time the other three were convicted and sentenced.
“This is not the first time a white supremacist group has targeted power grids,” the Times writes. “A 2022 study [pdf] by George Washington University researchers found that between 2016 and 2022, 13 individuals associated with white supremacy groups were charged with planning attacks on the energy sector.”
The news story cites three men who pleaded guilty in 2022 to planning to attack power grids across the country in hopes of instigating a race war. Two others were charged in 2023 with conspiring to destroy Baltimore’s power grid in yet another “racist scheme”.
