July 28th 2024.
Three men were recently sentenced for plotting a white supremacist attack on an energy facility in Idaho and its surrounding states. The Department of Justice announced their sentences on July 25, reflecting the severity of their actions and the government's determination to hold them accountable for using violence to promote their hateful ideology.
USA Today reports that the three men, Paul James Kryscuk, Liam Collins, and Justin Wade Hermanson, were all involved in the plot and received varying sentences. Kryscuk, from Boise, Idaho, was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for conspiring to destroy an energy facility. Collins, from Johnston, Rhode Island, received a 10-year sentence for aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms. Hermanson, from Swansboro, North Carolina, received one year and nine months for conspiring to manufacture firearms and ship them across state lines.
The targeted facility's exact location was not disclosed, but court documents revealed that the men had compiled a list of about a dozen potential locations in Idaho and neighboring states. These locations included transformers, substations, and other crucial components of the power grid in the Northwest United States.
According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the men first met on a now-defunct neo-Nazi forum called the "Iron March." They shared their violent beliefs and researched previous attacks on energy grids, as stated in a 2021 indictment of five defendants. The group spent three years gathering supplies and knowledge for their planned attack, including stealing military equipment, manufacturing firearms, and learning about explosives and toxins.
Collins and another defendant, Jordan Duncan, used their positions as Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune to illegally obtain military equipment and information. They even planned to use 50 pounds of explosives to destroy transformers at the targeted facility.
The DOJ also discovered a handwritten list of potential locations in Kryscuk's possession in October 2020. These intersections and places were specifically chosen because they contained crucial components of the power grid in the northwest United States.
Attacks on energy infrastructure have become a major concern for the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security. A 2019 study by scholars from the University of Chicago and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland highlighted the vulnerability of energy infrastructure to attacks, making them an attractive target for extremist groups.
According to High Country News, white supremacist groups have a long history of activity in the Western United States. These groups have increasingly been linked to plots or attacks on energy substations, such as the three men arrested with Molotov cocktails in their car at a Las Vegas Black Lives Matter protest.
Extremism researcher Bennett Clifford, co-author of a 2022 report on extremism for George Washington University's Program on Extremism, believes that extremists are encouraged by the success of previous 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."
This disturbing trend highlights the urgent need for action to prevent future attacks on vital infrastructure and combat the rise of violent extremism in our country.
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