Three plead guilty to terrorism charges in white supremacist plot to disrupt U.S. power grid, start race war

Three men have pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges for plotting to attack the U.S. power grid, hoping that the ensuing electricity outages would stir civil and economic unrest that could lead to a race war, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Christopher Brenner Cook, 20, of Columbus, Ohio; Jonathan Allen Frost, 24, of Katy, Texas, and West Lafayette, Ind.; and Jackson Matthew Sawall, 22, of Oshkosh, Wis., sought to assault power grids with "powerful rifles," federal officials said. The three have pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and face up to 15 years in prison.

"The defendants believed their plan would cost the government millions of dollars and cause unrest for Americans in the region," the Justice Department said in a news release. "They had conversations about how the possibility of the power being out for many months could cause war, even a race war, and induce the next Great Depression."

In the fall of 2019, Frost and Cook met in an online chat group, and Frost raised the idea of attacking a power grid, according to the Justice Department. Within weeks, the two started recruiting others. Cook circulated a list of readings that promoted neo-Nazism and white-supremacist ideology as part of the recruitment process, the agency said, and Sawall, already a friend of Cook, quickly joined.

A few months later, in February 2020, the trio gathered in Columbus, Ohio. There, Frost supplied Cook with a rifle, which the two took to a shooting range for training, the Justice Department said in the news release. It said Frost also gave out "suicide necklaces" filled with fentanyl, which depresses the central nervous system and can cause death. The three agreed to take the drug should they be caught by law enforcement, the release said.

At one point during the Columbus gathering, Cook and Sawall were "derailed during a traffic stop" after spray-painting a swastika under a bridge with the caption "Join the Front," the Justice Department said, adding that Sawall swallowed his suicide pill but survived.

The following month, Cook and Frost drove to Texas, and "Cook stayed in different cities with various juveniles he was attempting to recruit for their plot," according to the Justice Department.

In August 2020, FBI agents searched the residences of the three men and found "racially motivated violent extremism Nazi material" and weapons, according to court documents. In Frost's bedroom, the FBI found chemicals and components that were "consistent with someone attempting to test and assemble an explosive device."

The men held "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist views," Timothy Langan, assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, said in the news release.

U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Parker, who oversees the southern district of Ohio, said the three had "conspired to use violence to sow hate, create chaos, and endanger the safety of the American people."

"As this case shows, federal and state law enforcement agencies are dedicated to working together to protect this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic," Parker said.

Samuel Shamansky, the attorney for Frost, said in a phone interview that his client had "improved immensely" in the past year with the help of mental counseling and has "completely disavowed" his past racist views. "He understands how hurtful and immoral those positions were and are," Shamansky said.

Peter Scranton, an attorney for Cook, declined to comment, while the attorney for Sawall didn't immediately reply to a request for comment late Thursday. The Justice Department prosecutors declined to comment.

Frost graduated from Purdue University in 2020 with a degree in computer information and technology, according to the Purdue Exponent, a student newspaper. Little could be learned about Frost’s alleged co-conspirators, though two 2018 articles in the Florida Today newspaper describe a man similar to Sawall’s profile as having gone missing in Melbourne, Fla., before turning up “alive and well” in Montana several days later.