Acquittals in MI Governor Kidnapping Case
Image: Jake May/The Flint Journal
On Friday, a federal jury failed to convict four men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer due to Covid restrictions she imposed early in the pandemic.
- Two men were acquitted, while the jury couldn’t reach verdicts in the other two cases, resulting in mistrials.
📅 Background: Thirteen men were arrested in October 2020 on allegations of formulating plans to kidnap Whitmer as part of a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen.
- Six faced federal charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison – the four mentioned above, along with two others who pleaded guilty before the trial.
- One was sentenced to 75 months, while one is awaiting sentencing.
- The other seven are still awaiting trial on state charges of providing material support for terrorist acts, among other things.
⚖️ In this month's case… Lawyers for the defense asserted that the government entrapped the four men by orchestrating the kidnapping plot, which wouldn’t have advanced as far as it did without the support of an FBI informant.
- The source in question – a military vet who reached out to the FBI after joining the Wolverine Watchmen – testified that he eventually rose to the role of second-in-command, helping with training, organizational and tactical operations.
🧗♀️ The crux: According to the defense, it was around this time the informant and his two FBI handlers encouraged the group to plan a kidnapping that none of them would have taken up without him.
- The prosecution argued they only needed to show that the four men were predisposed to commit the crime – any encouragement provided by government agents was fair game.
👀 Looking ahead… Federal attorneys indicated they plan to retry the two defendants who had hung juries.
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From the Left
🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: These opinions take 1.93 minutes to read.
“Defense lawyers have argued that the government entrapped politically outspoken but otherwise law-abiding men who were simply exercising their First and Second amendment rights to speak freely and collect weapons. Typically, entrapment is extremely hard to prove; [defendants must] essentially admit to the allegations, then prove that undercover agents or informants deceived them into the activities.
Nonetheless, the pleadings of defense attorneys got mainstream coverage during the long period between arrests and trial and were enthusiastically amplified by the larger right-wing messaging machine. There is a bigger goal here. By eroding trust in law enforcement, the far right can continue to claim the Jan. 6 insurrection was nothing more than an exercise in free speech.
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s three-part documentary, “Patriot Purge,” went so far as to allege the attack on the U.S. Capitol could have been a false-flag operation devised by the so-called deep state to frame, trap and “purge” Trump voters in a “new war on terror”...
Carlson, a backer of the police’s thin blue line if there ever was one, has been ridiculing and downplaying the seriousness of the alleged plot for more than a year. He has given a platform to a variety of activists who have made a cottage industry of comparing the Michigan case to what they now call the “entrapment operation” of the Capitol insurrection. Such claims are amplified across the right-wing echo chamber…
The rise of menace and political violence from the right in America has [become] normalized. Formerly true-blue supporters of police officers and veterans have — shockingly — turned apologists for a clan of heavily armed men who at the very least fantasized about an outrageous act of political terror.”
“More than any story other than the attempted right-wing coup d’état of Jan. 6, the conspiracy to assassinate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer illustrates the escalating threat of political violence, the diminution of America’s civil society and the growing menace of a Republican Party willing to excuse, diminish, and at times, even encourage extralegal extremism as a means to achieve its political ends…
The contemporary landscape features Donald Trump’s Jonestown-like personality cult, brazenly white nationalist Republican members of Congress, and right-wing pundits, like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, who sound like street-corner skinheads. As a consequence, it is hardly a surprise that threats of violence against public officials have become alarmingly routine.
In only a small sampling of districts, Reuters found 220 examples of death threats against school board members. Similarly, the Brennan Center for Justice reports that one in six election officials have received direct threats against themselves and their families since November 2020. Hopped up on their own “stop the steal” supply, right-wing activists have become vicious and devoted to the point that USA Today reports political intimidation might “jeopardize the 2022 midterms,” due to widespread resignation of election officials…
It is difficult to discern how exactly to describe a society that can no longer unite against fascistic campaigns to murder sitting governors and overthrow elections, but the words “democratic” and “healthy” don’t spring to mind.
A tornado is forming overhead, and many Americans have decided to fly a kite.”
From the Right
🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: These opinions take 1.87 minutes to read.
“Prosecutors are inevitably going to lose some cases in our jury system, but they should win the big ones or confidence in honest justice declines. That explains the surprise, if not shock, on Friday when a federal jury failed to convict four men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
The prosecutions made national headlines in 2020 as supposed evidence that political polarization may have been driving Americans to violent extremism. The indictments fit a popular media narrative, fed by Democrats, that right-wing radicals were prepared to commit terrorist acts…
The jurors may explain their doubts to the press, but one possibility is that they believed the defense claim that the Federal Bureau of Investigation entrapped the men into taking steps toward a kidnapping that they never intended to carry out.
The FBI has lost cases on entrapment grounds in the past, and it’s true that the line between entrapment and genuine intent can be narrow. Agents have to be careful not to let a plot be carried out, but that can lead to unfair or premature arrest.
Prosecutors said they plan to retry Messrs. Fox and Croft, but you have to wonder what will be different the next time. Evidence of criminal intent should be clear and convincing to bring this kind of case.
All the more so given Attorney General Merrick Garland’s high-profile announcement that investigating domestic terrorism is a Justice Department priority. The Whitmer acquittals are a black eye for the department that shouldn’t be repeated.”
“Fourteen men have been charged with crimes, based in part on evidence reportedly supplied by at least 12 confidential informants — meaning that the F.B.I. had almost one informant involved for every defendant…
One of these informants, an extremely colorful felon named Stephen Robeson, appears to have been a crucial instigator of the plot. He is alleged to have used government funds to pay for meals and hotel rooms, encouraged people “to vent their anger about governors who enacted Covid-19 restrictions” and “to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials” and followed up aggressively, calling potential plotters “nearly every day”...
It’s reasonable to wonder whether Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds.
And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country…
The overall picture is genuinely complex — at least as complex, let’s say, as the informant-riddled plot against Gretchen Whitmer. And as with that conspiracy, it’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own — or in their alarm are helping to invent it.”
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