July 28, 2024
According to the government, the men ‘prepared, and trained to attack America’s power grid in order to advance their violent white supremacist ideology.’
The three men who plotted a white supremacist attack on an energy facility in Idaho or its surrounding states were sentenced on July 25, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.
According to United States Attorney General Merrick Garland, “As part of a self-described ‘modern day SS,’ these defendants conspired, prepared, and trained to attack America’s power grid in order to advance their violent white supremacist ideology. These sentences reflect both the depravity of their plot and the Justice Department’s commitment to holding accountable those who seek to use violence to undermine our democracy.”
Paul James Kryscuk, a 38-year-old from Boise, Idaho; Liam Collins, a 25-year-old from Johnston, Rhode Island; and Justin Wade Hermanson, a 25-year-old from Swansboro, North Carolina, were all sentenced in connection to their roles in the plot.
Kryscuk received six years and six months in prison for a charge of conspiracy to destroy an energy facility, Collins received 10 years for aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms, and Hermanson received one year and nine months in prison for conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate.
According to USA Today, federal officials did not specify where the targeted facility was located, but court documents indicated that agents seized a list consisting of approximately a dozen locations in Idaho and surrounding states that held “a transformer, substation, or other component of the power grid for the Northwest United States.”
According to Attorney General Garland, the men met on a now-closed neo-Nazi forum called the “Iron March” where they discussed and researched previous attacks on power grids. The Justice Department contends in a 2021 indictment of five defendants that the group spent time between 2017 and 2020 amassing supplies for the attack, including stealing military equipment, manufacturing firearms, and getting informed about toxins and explosives in preparation for the attack.
Collins and another co-defendant in the indictment, Jordan Duncan, also from North Carolina, used their status as Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune to Illegally obtain military equipment and information. They also wanted to use 50 pounds of explosives to destroy transformers.
According to a DOJ memo, “In October 2020, a handwritten list of approximately one dozen intersections and places in Idaho and surrounding states was discovered in Kryscuk’s possession, including intersections and places containing a transformer, substation, or other component of the power grid for the northwest United States.”
Attacks such as the ones plotted by these three men have become an area of elevated concern for the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security. According to a 2019 paper authored by scholars from the University of Chicago and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, “Most energy infrastructure is extensive, relatively easy to attack, and difficult to protect, which reduces the cost of attacking.”
This reduced cost is likely attractive to white supremacist groups, who according to High Country News, have been historically active in the Western United States. These groups have increasingly been implicated in plots or attacks on energy substations in the United States, including three men who were arrested at a Las Vegas Black Lives Matter protest with Molotov cocktails in their car.
According to Bennett Clifford, an extremism researcher who is the co-author of a 2022 report on extremism for George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, “Extremists are seizing on the fact that other individuals are conducting successful attacks and perceived successful attacks on the energy grid.” He told High Country News, “They see all of these things as putting one more grain of sand in a big bucket, and to mix my analogies here, one of those things, in their view, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
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