Prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence the Catonsville woman who conspired with neo-Nazis to knock out Baltimore’s power grid to 18 years imprisonment and three years of supervised release.
Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, a Catonsville woman who admitted to scheming with a neo-Nazi accelerationist leader to “lay this city to waste” by attacking power stations around Baltimore, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 25 in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Prosecutors made the request for prison time in recently filed federal court documents.
Prosecutors described Clendaniel as “an unrepentant, violent white supremacist and recidivist who is a true danger to the community” in their sentencing memo. She pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to damage an energy facility and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.
A public defender for Clendaniel did not return a request for comment.
Prosecutors intend to call three witnesses to the sentencing, they said: a ballistics expert, a senior engineering manager from BGE and an FBI agent.
The plot Clendaniel confessed to being a part of targeted energy stations around Baltimore, in areas including Reisterstown and Perry Hall. In a recorded phone call, Clendaniel said the attacks would have to “destroy” the cores of transformers, “not just leak the oil.”
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“Like it would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste,” she said, according to a transcript of the call. “If we could do that successfully, like, this is big tier, like nothin’ like this big has ever been accomplished.”
Documents related to her sentencing include information from BGE that lays out how much damage to the transformers would cost, if they had been attacked, and a report from the ballistics expert that lays out how much damage the types of weapons Clendaniel had discussed would do to those transformers.
The expert, Denver Gallardy, concludes in his report that the bullets used would have “successfully perforated” substation transformers at four of the five power station locations targeted.
And a damage assessment report from BGE says that a bullet penetrating a transformer would cause a “complete failure” of it and require replacement of it because “there is no ability to repair the inner core and components of a transformer.”
The damage assessment from BGE senior manager of substation engineering design and standards Patrick Carberry says replacing the transformers that were targeted in the planned attack would cost, at a minimum, $75 million. That estimate does not include labor or other project-related costs.
“It also does not include the obvious extensive economic losses that the residents, businesses, hospitals and countless other entities served by those substations would have experienced due to the loss of power for an extended period of time,” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors used that damage assessment to calculate how much imprisonment time to ask for. They also argued that locking Clendaniel up for nearly two decades will serve as general deterrence for others who have similar views as she does.
They called the need for general deterrence in this case “particularly acute” because “the online community of white supremacists and accelerationist adherents, here in this country as well as around the world, is closely following this prosecution.”
Brandon Russell, the founder of the Atomwaffen Division, an influential and violent neo-Nazi terrorist group, was charged as Clendaniel’s co-conspirator. He’s scheduled to stand trial in November.
