February was to be Brandon Russell’s moment: facing federal charges of conspiring to blow up a series of power stations around Baltimore and trigger a citywide blackout, the neo-Nazi figurehead decided to take his case to trial and mount an entrapment defense against the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It did not work. Russell, a 29-year-old native of the Bahamas, had thrown away a promising future involving a college degree at the University of Florida and a national guard position to become a dedicated far-right figurehead previously imprisoned in 2017 over a murderous spat between comrades in the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi guerrilla group he had founded that was involved in five murders and a number of bomb plots before federal agents dismantled it in 2020.
Instead of seeing the FBI as baiting Russell into a violent plot, a jury of 12 Marylanders last week took less than an hour to hand down a guilty verdict that could land Russell back in federal prison for 20 years.
His trial pulled back the veil on the Biden administration’s assault on violent rightwing extremists (that will almost certainly end with the current regime), the role of a controversial private intelligence firm in the FBI’s investigation, and the depth of Russell’s involvement with the Terrorgram Collective propaganda network. Terrorgram was listed as a foreign terrorist organization in one of the last actions taken by Biden’s state department. United Kingdom proscribed the Terrorgram Collective last May as an extremist organization, while Australia has imposed counter-terrorism financial sanctions on it.
There are currently more than two dozen Terrorgram-related cases active in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and South America. The group is accused of inspiring the 2022 mass shooting in Slovakia, a knife attack in Turkey, and recent school shootings in Madison, Wisconsin, and Antioch, Tennessee. The justice department views the Terrorgram Collective as a “tier one” terrorism priority, its highest such classification.
The sabotage plot with brought Russell down also involved his Baltimore-based neo-Nazi girlfriend Sarah Clendaniel (who pleaded guilty last fall and is serving an 18-year sentence), and an FBI confidential source who posed as an extremist under the handle “TeddyK” – shorthand for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
The informant, a former federal contractor who testified under the alias “Jackson” while wearing a disguise of fake glasses, nose and mustache along with short-cropped hair tinged with gray dye, was put in contact with Clendaniel by Russell following extensive conversations via Telegram and Wire about sabotaging electrical grid infrastructure, particularly six substations around Baltimore.
If successful, the attacks could have blacked out significant portions of the city and caused nearly $70m in damage to the electrical transformers alone. During the course of the trial, three government witnesses testified under aliases and in similar disguises.
Russell’s inspiration for attacking power stations appeared to come from an issue of the Green Anarchist/neo-Luddite pamphlet Garden, which described in detail the unsolved 2013 “Metcalf sniper” attack near San Jose, California, where 17 electrical transformers were disabled by gunfire. The issue also lists dozens of critical electrical substations around the United States, writing that successful attacks on those sites would likely caused a “chaotic blackout” encompassing much of the United States.
“We believe this would be the beginning of a real anti-tech revolution. We believe that this revolution is possible. We believe it is necessary,” the pamphlet reads, closely mirroring language in the Terrorgram Collective’s 2022 screed The Hard Reset, which exhort far-right radicals to commit mass shootings and acts of industrial sabotage, including shooting up power transformers.
Evidence presented in court showed Russell forwarded that document along with open-source maps of power infrastructure and a series of six power substations supplying Baltimore to Clendaniel and the informant. He also helped Clendaniel find a rifle to purchase for the attack, and when that failed due to her prior felony conviction, worked with the FBI informant to figure out how to 3D-print a ghost gun for the attack.
The trial took place amid heightened secrecy and security, exacerbated by two of Russell’s Terrorgram Collective comrades being caught last fall by federal agents trying to identify witnesses and government agents set to testify against him. The two extremists, Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, are facing material support for terrorism charges in federal court in Sacramento, California.
Members of the public were required to lock their electronics up outside the courtroom and were searched by security officers before being permitted to enter. A white-noise machine was also used to obscure dozens of sidebar discussions between the judge and both sets of attorneys, who carried out their sidebar conversations via a headphone system.
In addition to Jackson, two more government witnesses testified under aliases and in disguise – including an employee of the Site Intelligence Group, a private contractor that attracted criticism during the “war on terror” for exaggerating potential terrorist threats and has recently pivoted towards tracking extreme rightwing groups.
Site’s head of information technology testified at Russell’s trial in disguise and under alias about providing the FBI with exports of the Terrorgram Collective’s Telegram channels, including a post of Russell’s where he told another user: “I wish that people would go for substations, like the Metcalf sniper attack.”
Over the summer, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project intervened on Russell’s behalf to try and disclose evidence obtained by the government through section 702, the warrantless wiretapping authority that typically indicates the involvement of the National Security Agency or its close allies in the “Five Eyes” alliance.
Though their challenge was ultimately unsuccessful, the US government’s “cannot confirm or deny” response, the UK government’s May 2024 decision to formally ban the Terrorgram Collective as an extremist collective, and the group’s mid-January state department designation as a foreign terrorist organization, as well as Five-Eyes marked intelligence documents about the propaganda network, all point to how how Russell and his fellow extremists ranked on the priority lists of western security services.
Testimony, screenshotted conversations (including supposedly deleted messages reconstructed by the Cellebrite software suite), and hours of audio recordings taken by “Jackson”, the FBI informant who plotted the never-realized power station attack with Clendaniel, spelled out the bulk of the state’s evidence against Russell.
The informant, who advised the US government on economic sanctions when he was recruited by the FBI and now works at an unnamed extremism research organization, also appears to have been deeply enmeshed in deeper neo-Nazi circles online.
One message shown in court that he wrote to Russell referred to a Terrorgram Collective publication that advocates murder, sabotage and other acts of domestic terrorism. Older Telegram posts not shown in court show that Jackson was also listed as an administrator of the “White Lives Matter” chapter in Maryland. For his work, Jackson said the FBI paid him $70,000 over four years.
The power station plot was not the only instance where Russell pushed attacks on power infrastructure. Thomas Smith, an FBI employee who also engaged with Russell online via Telegram and Wire while posing as another nihilist neo-Nazi, testified about conversations where the Atomwaffen Division founder urged him to shoot up power stations and walked him through an attempt to send mylar balloons into power lines.
In those conversations, which were screenshotted and introduced as evidence in court, Russell discussed prior attempts of his own to similarly sabotage power lines and specific tips to ensure the balloons made contact with the overhead wires.
Lax conditions of supervised release imposed on Russell for his 2018 federal explosives conviction out of Tampa allowed the founder of Atomwaffen to contact, socialize with and meet fellow extremists once he finished serving his time in the Bureau of Prisons.
“Here in Florida, I can go anywhere in this fucking state and hang out with cool NS [national socialist] people I know,” Russell messaged an undercover FBI agent on 24 January 2023, less than two weeks before he and Clendaniel were arrested. He had already deepened his radicalization while imprisoned at FCI Terre Haute’s communications management unit along with other designated extremists.
Despite warnings from extremist experts about Russell’s likelihood to reoffend, and direct contact made with Russell’s probation officer, no modified restrictions on his associations were made by the government.
Evidence presented at court and photographs from social media channels run by ex-Atomwaffen Division comrades show Russell had a steady stream of neo-Nazi visitors while serving his supervised release in Florida.
There were also indications Russell and Clendaniel were involved with far-right ideologies even more sinister than neo-Nazism or “Esoteric Hitlerism”.
Among the evidence recovered from Clendaniel’s apartment and displayed in court was a blood-soaked piece of paper replete with drawings of a septogram and the symbols represented six “Dark Gods” comprising the pantheon of the Order of Nine Angles, a vicious Satanist tendency that often overlaps with the most depraved strains of the extreme right wing.
Clendaniel’s handle on Telegram was “Nythra”, one of the O9A demons in her pact, and in Telegram conversations obtained by the Guardian, Russell pushed Order of Nine Angles literature on fellow neo-Nazis.
In the UK, legislators have debated proscribing the Order of Nine Angles as an extremist group for years after the ideology surfaced in a series of terrorism prosecutions.
Russell’s sentencing hearing will be held on 17 June. He remains in custody at the Chesapeake detention center.
