Three men — including two former Marines — were convicted of a white supremacist-linked scheme to blow up the power grid in the northwestern United States, prosecutors said.
The years-long plot — hatched by defendants Paul James Kryscuk, 38; Liam Collins, 25; and Justin Wade Hermanson, 25 — was part of a larger, violent extremist plan that sought to destroy the energy facility, according to ABC 6.
Federal prosecutors said Collins and Hermanson were part of the same US Marine unit at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, when they cooked up the conspiracy.
Collins had been an active poster on an online neo-Nazi forum he’d been using to recruit for a paramilitary group that he claimed would be a “modern-day SS,” prosecutors said.
He’d joined the Marines to further his cause, and claimed he would use his earnings to fund the group, according to the indictment.
In 2017, he met Kryscuk, a New York resident, through the forum — and the two discussed the idea of forming a guerrilla organization that would “slowly take back the land that is rightfully ours” through acts of domestic terrorism, the outlet said.
“We will have to hit the streets and strike as many blows to the remaining power structure as we can to keep it on the ropes,” Kryscuk said in a message included in the indictment.
The toxic twins recruited others, including Hermanson, and studied another armed group’s past attack on another power substation, the Department of Justice said.
The aspiring terrorists also got into the illicit arms trade, illegally making and selling guns as they stole other military gear between 2017 and 2020.
Four years ago, they met up in Boise, Idaho, for live-fire weapons training that included “Heil Hitler” salutes, assault weapons and skull masks associated with the Atomwaffen Division, another group of wannabe-Nazis, according to videos of the affair.
Authorities eventually found a handwritten note penned by Kryscuk that detailed 12 spots in Idaho and other states that had a transformer, substation or other critical power infrastructure, the feds said.
Kryscuk — who was seen near several Black Lives Matter protests that summer — also spoke to another conspirator about shooting protesters, according to the indictment.
The three men were arrested in late 2020 and early 2021, and later pleaded guilty, ABC said.
Last Thursday, they were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their crimes.
Collins will spend the next decade behind bars for aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms.
Kryscuk was hit with a six-and-a-half year sentence for conspiracy to destroy an energy facility, and Hermanson was sentenced to just under two years for conspiracy to manufacture and ship firearms between states.
Two others — Joseph Maurino, 25; and Jordan Duncan — have also pleaded guilty to crimes associated with the plot, ABC said.
