SerpApi.Org
Remember that 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that looked suspiciously like entrapment by federal agents, leading to several key figures walking?
Well, not only does it turn out that the whole plot was hatched by dolts, it was prosecuted by them, too.
According to The Associated Press, two of the men who were convicted of providing material support for a terrorist act in the case had their convictions dismissed due to the fact that, according to a Michigan appeals court, the state law does not define kidnapping as a violent crime.
Pete Musico and Paul Bellar had their convictions overturned Monday, one month after another person convicted on the same charge, Joe Morrison, had his conviction overturned by a 3-0 vote.
When Morrison's conviction was overturned, the AP said that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel was "livid" about the move, saying that the court's reasoning was "completely and irredeemably nonsensical, outrageous and irresponsible."
This time, she only called it "linguistic gymnastics." In the five steps of grief, I guess Nessel has moved from anger to bargaining, since she plans to take the cases before the Michigan Supreme Court.
Bellar, Morrison, and Musico weren't the primary figures in the shambolic plot to kidnap Whitmer, which (depending on your view) was either led by a paramilitary group honcho named Adam Fox or ended up hatching the plot based off of some goading by a significant number of informants and undercover federal agents in the operation.
Fox, the head of the so-called Wolverine Watchmen, is currently serving a 16-year sentence for conspiracy, so judges and juries apparently found the first view most plausible.
The kidnapping plot itself was farcically improbable by a group that one of the biggest watchdogs of radicals and wing-nut militias -- the George Washington University's Program on Extremism -- said was so small it "flew under the radar."
"This is simply not a big group that we'd ever heard of," Jon Lewis, a research fellow with the program, told The Detroit News in 2020.
Well, that was probably because the plot was hatched out of the basement of a Grand Rapids, Michigan vacuum repair shop, where Fox was both employed and living because he was extremely poor.
Nevertheless, he apparently thought he had the wherewithal and resources to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home and blow up all the bridges to it so that emergency responders couldn't get there, as CBS News reported.
While these aren't fantastic people, or at least weren't back in 2020 (I claim no knowledge where they are today, morally or spiritually), they probably also hadn't the slightest hope of even dreaming this up -- resources-wise, at the very least -- without some support and goading from the feds. The description of the plot still belies parody; a vacuum-repair shop? That's where they were going to plan something out of "Raid on Entebbe" from?
And now, not only does it seem the details of the plot were parody-proof, so too was the prosecution of ancillary figures under state terrorism guidelines that apparently weren't even read.
That's led to three convictions overturned in just two months. Six years after the plot, mind you, which is six years that these guys will never get back -- but six years nonetheless.
All of this is done, too, at a safe remove from the wider political implications of the original case, which served as a microcosm of politics in the Donald Trump era for the Democrats.
After Fox and Barry Croft Jr. were convicted in 2022, Whitmer released a statement saying that "we must also take a hard look at the status of our politics" in the wake of the verdicts.
"Plots against public officials and threats to the FBI are a disturbing extension of radicalized domestic terrorism that festers in our nation, threatening the very foundation of our republic," she said.
Well, what happens when the FBI is part of the plot and public officials are charging people with stuff that gets thrown out when an appeals court gets around to it?
This entire episode was little more than an attempt to paint right-wingers as terrorists while left-wing groups like antifa could run amok without consequence. Protecting Americans was not the weaponized FBI’s primary goal at that time. Providing evidence, no matter how dubious, for the anti-MAGA narrative was their primary goal. How are we supposed to believe it still isn't?
