Two men have been found guilty of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov Gretchen Whitmer in a 2020 plot that government prosecutors said was designed to spark a second US civil war.
A jury found Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr guilty of not just conspiring to kidnap Ms Whitmer, but also to obtain a weapon of mass destruction — a bomb they planned to use to blow up a bridge to hold off police if they were able to kidnap Ms Whitmer at her vacation home in northern Michigan.
The plot ultimatley failed. The FBI infiltrated the paramilitary group that planned the kidnapping, using both informants and undercover agents to foil the plot against Ms Whitmer in one of the highest profile domestic terrorism investigations the bureau has been responsible for in recent years.
This trial represented prosecutors’ second attempt to convict Fox and Croft for their roles in the plot. A different federal jury could not agree on a verdict following a trial this spring. Two other men have been acquitted of charges relating to the plot, while two others have plead guilty and cooperated with the government.
This latest trial was staged at a particularly charged moment. Ms Whitmer, a Democrat, is running for re-election as Michigan governor while the FBI has faced a deluge of criticism from conservatives for seizing documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
A number of prominent figures on the political right have accused the bureau of operating in a partisan manner, and defence attorneys for Fox and Croft made criticism of the FBI’s investigation a central piece of their case — arguing that FBI agents effectively entrapped their clients by goading them into reckless and illegal behavior. FBI agents, for instance, accompanied Fox, Croft, and others on a scouting mission to Ms Whitmer’s vacation home.
“In America, the FBI is not supposed to create domestic terrorists so that the FBI can arrest them,” Christopher Gibbons, a lawyer for Fox, said during his closing argument.
The jury ultimatley did not agree with that interpretation of events. It instead handed a victory to prosecutors who praised the FBI’s work, arguing that the bureau successfully prevented what would have been a major political crisis in the buildup to the 2020 election.
A number of observers linked the plot to kidnap Ms Whitmer to a rise in right-wing political violence that culminated in the Capitol riot on January 6 of the following year.
Mr Trump, who was president during the kidnapping attempt and has spent plenty of time in recent weeks criticising the FBI, said during a recent speech that the plot was “fake” and that “Gretchen Whitmer was in less danger than the people in this room right now, it seems to me.”
Ms Whitmer, for her part, said she was not closely following the trial. She is favoured to win a second term as governor in November against an opponent who recently claimed that being forced to have a baby can help rape victims experience “healing.”
