Three men have admitted conspiring "in the name of white supremacy" to attack power grids throughout the U.S. as part of a plan to cause a race war, officials said.
The three men pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in Columbus to domestic terrorism charges.
The men, who are from Ohio, Indiana and Texas, believed that attacking and damaging regional power substations would lead to economic turmoil and civil unrest, said Timothy Langan who is assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division.
“These defendants conspired to use violence to sow hate, create chaos, and endanger the safety of the American people,” U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker said in a statement.
Two of the men – 20-year-old Christopher Brenner Cook of Columbus and Jonathan Allen Frost, 24, of Katy, Texas – met in 2019 in an online chat group, according to court documents.
Frost shared the idea of attacking a power grid with Cook, and within weeks they began recruiting others to join in the plot, the documents say. As part of the recruitment process, Cook circulated a list of readings that promoted white supremacy and Neo-Nazism, the documents say.
Eventually, officials said 22-year-old Jackson Sawall of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who is a friend of Cook’s, joined the conspiracy.
Their plan was to attack the substations with rifles, and each was assigned a substation in a different region of the U.S. The men believed it would cost the government millions of dollars and cause unrest, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The men discussed the possibility of the power being out for many months, possibly causing “a race war", or the “next Great Depression," the DOJ said in a statement.
Officials said the men met in Columbus in February 2020 to train. Frost allegedly provided Cook and Sawall with "suicide necklaces" filled with fentanyl they could ingest if they were caught by law enforcement.
In Columbus, Sawall and Cook painted a swastika under a bridge at a park with the caption, “Join the Front,” the DOJ said. The men had other plans for their time in Ohio, officials said, but those were derailed when law enforcement pulled over their vehicle for a traffic stop and Sawall swallowed his suicide pill. He survived.
The men face a maximum of 15 years in prison.
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