A Baltimore County woman who planned attacks on Baltimore’s power grid as part of a white-supremacist scheme was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison.

U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar handed down the punishment to 36-year-old Sarah Beth Clendaniel, of Catonsville, who in May pleaded guilty to one count of participating in a conspiracy to damage an energy facility and one count of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. Bredar also ordered lifetime supervision of Clendaniel upon her release.

Driven by “white-supremacist ideology” and “accelerationism,” Clendaniel plotted with neo-Nazi leader Brandon C. Russell, of Florida, to shoot and destroy several electrical substations surrounding Baltimore, federal prosecutors said in court documents.

“This plot was audacious, outrageous, terrifying,” Bredar said.

The judge said he was not sentencing Clendaniel for her beliefs, even if he and others believed them to be “reprehensible,” but primarily because of the danger she presents to public safety.

“The court has no choice but to impose a lengthy period of incarceration solely to incapacitate the defendant,” Bredar said.

A BGE expert determined it would have cost at least $75 million to replace the power stations Clendaniel and Russell planned to destroy, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum for Clendaniel, describing the calculation as an “extremely conservative estimate.”

“A massive, unexpected loss of electrical power for an extended period of time likely would have led to the deaths of one or more persons with serious medical conditions who depended on electronic medical devices to keep themselves alive at home,” added the government’s sentencing memorandum, urging Bredar to sentence Clendaniel to 18 years in prison.

Federal authorities arrested Clendaniel and Russell following an extensive investigation that involved a confidential FBI informant in whom the pair confided, many times on phone calls investigators were listening to, about their plan. Prosecutors included quotes from those recorded conversations in charging documents.

If they carried out their plan, Clendaniel said in one call with the informant, it would cause a “cascading failure” of the electrical grid that would “permanently completely lay this city to waste,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo.

“Such cowardice, designed to disrupt and endanger the lives of Maryland’s citizens, will not be tolerated,” Barron said in a statement following the hearing.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and William J. DelBagno, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office, also touted the sentence in statements Wednesday.

“Clendaniel sought to ‘completely destroy’ the city of Baltimore by targeting five power substations as a means of furthering her violent white supremacist ideology. She will now spend the next 18 years in federal prison,” Garland said. “The Justice Department will continue to aggressively counter, disrupt, and prosecute those who seek to launch these kinds of hate-fueled attacks that target our critical infrastructure, endanger entire cities, and threaten our national security.”

Russell has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to damage an energy facility and is slated to go to trial in November. Prosecutors asked a judge to conceal the names of undercover witnesses who are expected to testify against Russell by allowing them to use pseudonyms in court.

Assistant Federal Public Defender Sedira Banan asked Bredar to sentence her client to 10 years in prison, citing “the most profound trauma history I have ever encountered.”

Banan said Clendaniel’s history of abuse left her susceptible to manipulative people, adding that she believed her client was “preyed upon” by Russell. The pair met by exchanging letters while they were incarcerated in different jails, eventually developing a romantic and ideological relationship, a prosecutor said at the sentencing hearing.

Bredar said he considered that Clendanial was “victimized in almost the worst ways imaginable as a child,” beginning with abuse by her parents, continuing with other adults and then manipulative partners in adulthood. He said that history undoubtedly contributed to Clendaniel living alone as a child in the elements and under bridges.

“Your client presents as dangerous,” the judge said. “That’s the fundamental problem.”

The public defender also sought to diminish her client’s role in the plot.

“She actually didn’t take additional steps to carry this through,” Banan said. “It’s a lot of talk.”

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Gavin, chief of her office’s National Security and Cyber Crime Section, countered that Clendaniel worked to obtain a high-powered rifle capable of piercing and disabling the electrical substations. She never obtained that gun, and instead was charged with having a shotgun federal agents took from her when they arrested her in 2023.

Describing Clendaniel’s actions as “extremely serious” crimes involving “extensive planning,” Gavin said she believed “Ms. Clendaniel was just as culpable as Mr. Russell.”

Investigators listened to calls Clendaniel made during her detention pending trial, and Gavin said Clendaniel had been in touch with a leader of what the Justice Department describes as a white supremacist “transnational terrorist group” who was arrested last year in California.

“She is not repentant in any way,” Gavin said of Clendaniel.

According to Bredar, Clendaniel had the highest criminal history category possible under federal sentencing guidelines. Among other crimes, in 2016 she was sentenced to five years in prison for armed robbery after wielding a large butcher knife at several Cecil County convenience stores.

Her crimes, Bredar said, were “not elaborate bank robberies with automatic weapons,” but “efforts to get food, snacks from convenience stores.”

Banan told the judge Clendaniel committed most of the crimes while “on drugs” or otherwise “failing” in life.

During her opportunity to address Bredar, Clendaniel said it was never her plan to hurt anyone during the robberies.

She said she still holds the “national socialist beliefs” she began to develop as early as 13, but that the plot to attack Baltimore’s power grid was “the first time I’ve ever done anything based on those beliefs, and will certainly be the last.”

“I’m actually grateful that I got arrested when I did,” Clendaniel told the judge.

While she doesn’t believe she would’ve carried out the attack, she acknowledged “it’s possible” that she would have.