GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Four men on trial and accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer didn’t just talk about wanting to kidnap and kill Michigan's governor, they planned, prepared and armed themselves to spark a second Civil War, a federal prosecutor said during closing arguments Friday.
“In America, there’s a lot of things you can do. You can criticize the government publicly, absolutely," Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler told jurors. "If you don’t like the government’s policies, you can protest them. If you don’t like elected leaders, you can vote them out at the ballot box. What you can’t do is kidnap them, kill them, or blow them up.
"It wasn't just talk."
But defense lawyers Friday urged jurors to acquit their clients and pinned blame on FBI agents and informants, including "Big" Dan Chappel. He orchestrated the conspiracy, manipulating the defendants from spring 2020 and into the fall, they argued.
“When I look at what happened in this case, I am ashamed of the behavior of the leading law enforcement agency in the United States,” said attorney Josh Blanchard, who represents accused plotter Barry Croft of Delaware. “The investigation was an embarrassment. There was no plan and there was no agreement.”
Jurors were excused from the courtroom Friday afternoon and will start deliberations Monday after defense lawyers finished delivering closing arguments that followed a 14-day trial in federal court in Grand Rapids. The trial is one of the largest cases of domestic terrorism in U.S. history and has focused attention on violent extremism that flared ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Friday's arguments followed weeks of testimony and a multimedia presentation from the government that included secret recordings of the defendants building bombs in Wisconsin, firing weapons in rural Michigan, going on a night surveillance run past the governor's cottage and griping about tyrannical government officials during a hotel meeting in Ohio.
Jurors also listened to recordings and read texts that suggested ways to assassinate Whitmer — everything from posing as a pizza-delivering assassin to hog-tying the governor and leaving her on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan.
There was no boat and there was no plot, defense lawyers reiterated Friday. Just tough talk from men on the fringes of society, including defendant Adam Fox of Potterville, who was so poor he lived in the basement of a vacuum shop, so disrespected that even though prosecutors call him a ringleader, other accused plotters called him Captain Autism. This group, defense lawyers argued, was manipulated by a rogue government team that entrapped the men and orchestrated a conspiracy.
“The evidence shows, clearly, those plans belong to the government,” Fox’s lawyer, Christopher Gibbons, told jurors Friday.
He portrayed Fox as a friendless, poor, “vulnerable adult" and faulted government agents for plying Fox with marijuana.
Jurors stared often at Fox on Friday as he sat across from them, wearing a black-on-black suit and slicked-back hair while sucking on lozenges.
Meanwhile, relatives in the courtroom clung to one another, some shaking their heads and making comments during the government’s closing argument whispering, “everything he said is a lie.”
“Adam Fox is not a leader," Gibbons said in his 90-minute argument. "He’s a shill for the government.”
He blamed FBI Special Agent Jayson Chambers and Chappel, the informant, for orchestrating the case. In one text, Chappel told the agent: “If you need it to happen, I make it happen.”
“That’s manipulation,” Gibbons told jurors.
What the government calls a conspiracy was just talk, Gibbons said.
“The only people moving and the only people trying to make it happen, it all starts and ends with Jayson Chambers and Big Dan,” Gibbons said.
Lake Orion resident Daniel Harris, the only defendant to testify, told jurors Thursday he did not plot to kidnap Whitmer or attack the state Capitol.
"Absolutely not," said Harris, 24.
Harris is standing trial alongside Croft, 46, Fox, 38, and Brandon Caserta, 33, of Canton Township. The group was arrested in early October 2020 and accused of hatching the plot due to distrust of the government and anger over restrictions imposed during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. They face up to life in prison if convicted of kidnapping conspiracy.
“They were filled with rage, paranoid, armed to the teeth and making homemade bombs. They could have hurt themselves or an innocent bystander like Croft’s 12-year-old daughter,” Kessler said.
The trial coincided with jurors in federal court in Washington, D.C., hearing the first cases involving people charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Together, the trials provide the first tests of federal laws being used to punish extremist behavior that erupted nationally in 2020 and 2021 around the presidential election and pandemic.
The Whitmer kidnap trial has featured tense moments and dramatic confrontations.
The government's two star witnesses — convicted plotters Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks — testified the group conceived of the plot, not FBI agents.
Harris called the star witnesses liars on Thursday.
"And they are," his lawyer, Julia Kelly, said Friday.
Chief U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker addressed the entrapment issue during jury instructions Friday. He told jurors that in order to find the defendants were entrapped, there must be undisputed evidence that government agents induced them to commit the crime and that Fox, Croft, Harris and Caserta were not predisposed to commit kidnapping conspiracy.
On Friday, the prosecutor recounted the group’s motivation. Croft was driven by vanity and viewed himself as the country’s “re-founding father,” Kessler said.
Croft's lawyer used a mantra throughout his closing argument Friday, telling jurors the FBI used "smoke and mirrors" to make it appear there was a kidnapping conspiracy. Croft was a "stoned crazy pirate" in a trademark tricorn hat but he was not a kidnap plotter, his lawyer told jurors.
Blanchard also criticized the FBI for using rogue "snitch" Stephen Robeson of Wisconsin who was later fired by the bureau, indicted for illegally buying a sniper rifle and accused of working as a double agent.
“Yet this is who they decided was OK to investigate Barry Croft,” Blanchard said.
As the lawyer spoke, Croft's daughter started crying and shaking in the second row of the courtroom gallery.
Meanwhile, prosecutors said Fox was motivated by wanting to humiliate Whitmer for his own shortcomings, telling co-defendants his life on the edges of society, in a makeshift apartment without a working toilet or water was the fault of that “tyrant b----,” the prosecutor said.
“In the world Adam Fox wanted, the person with the biggest muscles and guns makes the rules,” Kessler said.
Harris, meanwhile, never saw combat as a Marine.
“Maybe he wanted to see it now,” the prosecutor said.
And Caserta was filled with conspiracy theories about international Zionist bankers pulling the strings of government, Kessler said.
“He wanted to live in a world where nobody could tell him what to do,” he said.
Some of the toughest talk jurors heard during the trial came from Caserta, who was captured on a secret recording talking about killing COVID-19 contact tracers.
"Not great," his lawyer Michael Hills told jurors Friday. "But it's not about kidnapping or killing the governor of Michigan."
Caserta did not participate in surveillance at the governor's home, did not plan any training events and never paid for bombs to be used in an attack, his lawyer told jurors.
"There is no agreement with my client and anyone else to kidnap the governor of Michigan," Hills said. "Zero. It ain't there."
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