The FBI has foiled a domestic terrorist plot to bring down the U.S. power grid, the Associated Press reports. The group of white supremacists had planned the attack to punish the country for not re-electing President Donald Trump, the FBI said in a briefly unsealed affidavit.
AP’s reporter Amy Forliti writes that in an affidavit that was “mistakenly unsealed,” the FBI alleges that white supremacists wanted to fast-track their plot in retaliation for Trump’s defeat.
NBC News added to the report that an Ohio-based teenager and informant “was in a text group with more than a dozen people in the fall of 2019 when he introduced the idea of saving money to buy a ranch where they could participate in militant training, according to the affidavit, which was filed under seal along with a search warrant application in Wisconsin’s Eastern U.S. District Court in March. The documents were inadvertently unsealed last week before the mistake was discovered and they were quickly sealed again.”
Forliti notes that the teenager “also shared plans with a smaller group about a plot to create a power outage by shooting rifle rounds into power stations in the southeastern U.S. The teen called the plot ‘Lights Out,’ and there were plans to carry it out in the Summer of 2021, the affidavit states.”
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According to the report, the teenager allegedly received a text from a white supremacist in Texas who said, “Leaving the power off would wake people up to the harsh reality of life by wreaking havoc across the nation.”
“The affidavit says the Ohio teen also spoke numerous times about creating Nazi militant cells around the country like those of the neo-Nazi network the Atomwaffen Division,” Forliti explains. “Atomwaffen Division members have promoted ‘accelerationism,’ a fringe philosophy espousing mass violence to fuel society’s collapse. More than a dozen people linked to the group or an offshoot called the Feuerkrieg Division have been charged with serious crimes in recent years.”
Jennifer Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Ohio, told NBC News that she couldn’t offer more information about the plot but said, “we want to emphasize that there is no imminent public safety threat related to this matter.”
The Trump era has emboldened domestic terrorists and white supremacists and they want him to remain in power or else.
