Jurors overseeing the trial for the men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer heard closing arguments on Monday as the government tried for a second time to secure convictions in an alleged plot to trigger a revolution in 2020.
After a nine-day trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler repeatedly urged jurors to also focus on what Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. were saying months before the FBI placed undercover agents and informants inside the group that summer.
"These defendants were outside a woman’s house in the middle of the night with night-vision goggles and guns and a plan to kidnap her," Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said. "And they made a real bomb. That's far enough, isn't it?"
Fox and Croft are on trial for a second time in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after a jury in April couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict but acquitted two other men.
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During the second trial, the jury heard secretly-recorded conversations and read violent social media posts. Two undercover agents and an informant testified for hours, explaining that the men trained in Wisconsin and Michigan and visited Elk Rapids to see Whitmer’s home and a nearby bridge that could be blown up.
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"'Which governor is going to be dragged off and hung for treason first?'" Kessler said, quoting Croft's own words.
"Any governor would do," Kessler said. "By the end of June, he was telling people Michigan's government is a target of opportunity, and God knows the governor needs to be hung. He didn't just want to kidnap her. He wanted to have his own trial and execute her."
The ultimate goal: a second American Revolution, "something called the boogaloo," the prosecutor said.
Croft, 46, is from Bear, Delaware. Fox, 39, was living in the basement of a vacuum shop in the Grand Rapids area.
Whitmer, a Democrat, has blamed then-President Trump for stoking mistrust and fomenting anger over coronavirus restrictions and refusing to condemn hate groups and right-wing extremists like those charged in the plot.
The "strongest witnesses in the whole case" were the defendants' own words, Kessler told the jury.
Other critical witnesses: Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, who pleaded guilty, and informant Dan Chappel, an Army veteran who said he went to the FBI after joining a Michigan paramilitary group and hearing plans to kill police.
Fox and Croft were furious about COVID-19 restrictions and generally disgusted by government, according to trial evidence.
Defense lawyers, however, have portrayed Fox and Croft as "big talkers," a bumbling, foul-mouthed, marijuana-smoking pair exercising free speech and incapable of leading anything as extraordinary as an abduction of a public official. They say FBI agents and informants fed their outrage and pulled them into their web.
"In America, the FBI is not supposed to create domestic terrorists so that the FBI can arrest them," Fox attorney Christopher Gibbons told the jury. "The FBI isn't supposed to create a conspiracy, so the FBI can stand up and claim a disruption."
Gibbons said there was "fantastical talk" from Fox and others — about storming Mackinac Island, getting helicopters and boats and maybe escaping through the St. Lawrence Seaway.
He said Fox was "isolated, broke, homeless," living in the basement of a vacuum store in the Grand Rapids area.
"Somebody really cool is showing him attention, who wants to be his friend," Gibbons said of Chappel.
Croft's attorney, Joshua Blanchard, offered a similar assessment in a scathing attack on the FBI's techniques. He reminded the jury that two more informants with recording devices were in the group but were never called as government witnesses, including a woman who shared a hotel room with Croft and traveled with him from the East Coast.
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"You don't have to agree with Barry’s politics. I surely don't," Blanchard said. "But we should all agree that the principles of truth and justice are the foundation that our country is built upon. The FBI has told us the truth doesn't matter to them. ... You have the power to put a stop to that today."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
