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."
Jury deliberations are expected later Friday once defense lawyers have delivered closing arguments that followed a 14-day trial in federal court in Grand Rapids. The trial is one of the most closely watched domestic terrorism investigations in decades that has focused attention on violent extremism that flared ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Jurors listened to and watched 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 that captured defendants mulling ways to torture or kill 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 argued during the trial. Just tough talk from men on the fringes of society, including Potterville resident Adam Fox, who was so poor he lived in the basement of a vacuum shop, so disrespected that even though prosecutors call him a ringleader, the 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 blamed FBI Special Agent Jayson Chambers and informant "Big" Dan Chappel 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 Friday.
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 security guard Daniel Harris, the only defendant to testify, told jurors Thursday he did not plot to kidnap Whitmer or attack the state Capitol.
"Absolutely not," Harris, 24, said.
Harris is standing trial alongside Barry Croft, 46, of Delaware and 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.
The trial coincide 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.
"Liars," Harris testified Thursday.
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.
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.
Accused ringleader Adam Fox purchased an 800,000-volt Taser to use in kidnapping Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, according to the FBI.
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.
Kessler countered several “red herrings” mentioned by defense lawyers. The defendants were not simply engaged in a “juvenile soldier fantasy” or cosplay, or merely talking tough while high or drunk during a roughly five-month investigation.
“Do you know anybody who is stoned for five straight months?” Kessler asked jurors.
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