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Whitmer Kidnapping Conspirators Found Guilty
DerekJohnson
Administrator, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 63,636 
in Tug Tavern
A jury has found defendants Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. guilty of conspiring in 2020 to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.
After about nine hours of deliberation over two days, the jury convicted Fox and Croft of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Croft was also convicted of possession of an unregistered destructive device.
This was the pair’s second trial before U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jonker.
Their first trial in April ended with the jury unable to arrive at a unanimous verdict.
During the first trial, two other defendants were found not guilty.
Two other men pleaded guilty and testified against Fox and Croft in both trials.
Eight more men are facing state charges.
In the second trial, federal prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of the two plea-bargaining confessors, as well as that of undercover FBI operatives, text messages, and secretly recorded conversations, to make their case.
The defense unsuccessfully contended that Fox, 39, and Croft, 46, were lured into the scheme and were aided in making preparations by FBI agents and paid informants.
Defense attorneys tried to characterize their clients as inept, pot smoking, braggarts who were all talk and no action.
No attempt was made to carry out the plot.
Neither Fox nor Croft testified during the nine-day trial.
In his closing statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler focused the jury on the defendants’ words.
He portrayed Fox and Croft as dangerous revolutionary extremists determined to carry out the kidnapping of Whitmer.
Fox’s lawyer, Christopher Gibbons, told jurors that the defendants had no serious plan, just a lot of crazy ideas and big talk.
Josh Blanchard, Croft’s attorney, reminded the jury that the prosecution did not have a single recording in which Croft agreed to take part in the plot.
The convictions carry with them a possible sentence of life in prison.
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https://ace.mu.nu/
Jury Returns Guilty Verdicts In Government's Do-Over of Fednapping Case
—Ace
The FBI gets its frame in the 2020 fednapping hoax.
A jury on Tuesday convicted two men of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, in a plot prosecutors described as a rallying cry for a U.S. civil war by anti-government extremists.
The jury also found Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. guilty of conspiring to obtain a weapon of mass destruction, namely a bomb to blow up a bridge and stymie police if the kidnapping could be pulled off at Whitmer's vacation home.
Croft, 46, a trucker from Bear, Delaware, was also convicted of another explosives charge.
It was the second trial for the pair after a jury in April couldn't reach a unanimous verdict. Two other men were acquitted and two more pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors.
The result was a victory for the government following the shocking mixed outcome last spring.
The federal prosecutors begged the judge to give the jury different instructions regarding what entrapment was from the instructions given in the first trial.
The judge also limited how long defense attorneys could question government witnesses, bizarrely ruling that they could only question them for as long as the government questioned them. Even though it takes far, far longer to impeach a witness's story than to merely elicit the story he wants to tell and has been coached to tell.
Julie Kelly wrote about the Detroit FBI office and its motto a couple of weeks ago.
"We have a saying in my office. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story."
So said FBI supervisory agent Henrik Impola to one of the FBI informants working the FBI-inspired, organized, and executed scheme to "kidnap" and "assassinate" Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
That comment, made in December 2020, just a few months after several men were arrested for their alleged role in the plot, was repeated by a defense attorney during opening statements Wednesday morning in the retrial of two remaining defendants in the federal case.
...
Impola's warning should be the FBI's new motto; he also could be the poster boy for the modern-day FBI. Not only did he handle the main informant in the Whitmer operation, Impola worked out of the Detroit FBI field office when a man named Steven D'Antuono was in charge. The purpose of the caper, one with D'Antuono's fingerprints all over it, was to produce negative news coverage for Trump while millions of Americans were voting for president in 2020; the president was accused of inspiring "white supremacist right-wing militias" to take out one of his most loathed political adversaries.
One week after the arrests in the Whitmer plot were announced on October 8, 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray invited D'Antuono to take over a plum assignment--head of the FBI field office in Washington, D.C. The promotion gave D'Antuono control of the most powerful FBI office in the country several weeks before the events of January 6.
D'Antuono currently handles the criminal investigation into the Capitol protest, which so far has resulted in the arrest of more than 850 Americans on mostly nonviolent offenses. D'Antuono's agents also participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago on Monday evening.
Impola, for his part, was removed as a government witness in the Whitmer fednapping trial amid accusations he committed perjury in a separate trial.
Impola, Wray, and D'Antuono are just a few of the actors responsible for the agency's "good story" related to Donald Trump. For six years and running, the bureau has portrayed Donald Trump as a public menace who must be destroyed at all costs. Trump and those around him are the villains in the FBI's "good story" while any number of FBI officials and assets--James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Christopher Steele, Michael Sussmann to name a few--are victims and martyrs.