Two Men Convicted in Plot to Kidnap Michigan’s Governor
The trial came months after a different federal jury did not return any convictions in the case, one of the country’s highest-profile domestic terror prosecutions.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A federal jury in Michigan found two men guilty on Tuesday of plotting to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, ending one of the highest-profile domestic terrorism cases in recent history and providing a measure of vindication to prosecutors who brought the case to trial a second time after a previous jury declined to convict.
Prosecutors presented the men, Barry Croft and Adam Fox, as threats to democracy who planned to capture Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at her vacation home in 2020, detonate explosives to disrupt the police response and perhaps touch off a civil war in the process.
“You can’t just strap on an AR-15 and body armor and snatch the governor,” Nils Kessler, a federal prosecutor, said during closing arguments.
But proving the case meant persuading jurors to trust a sprawling F.B.I. investigation that embedded several federal operatives around the group. Among them were an informant who became second-in-command of a militia and an undercover agent who offered to provide explosives. Earlier this year, another jury failed to reach verdicts for Mr. Croft and Mr. Fox, and acquitted two of their co-defendants.
“In America, the F.B.I. is not supposed to create domestic terrorists so that the F.B.I. can arrest them,” Christopher Gibbons, a lawyer for Mr. Fox, said during closing arguments.
Defense lawyers repeatedly criticized the investigation, arguing that their clients were big talkers whose worst instincts were preyed upon by undercover F.B.I. personnel who pretended to befriend them.
Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, blamed the government for luring his client, a truck driver, from his home in Delaware to events in Michigan and other Midwestern states where a plan was discussed. Mr. Blanchard told jurors that “the F.B.I. has told us that the truth doesn’t matter to them” and that “this isn’t Russia.”
“They weren’t about to let the truth get in the way of the story they want to tell,” Mr. Blanchard said.
This trial played out amid a charged political environment, with Ms. Whitmer campaigning for re-election and F.B.I. agents searching former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home during the week of opening arguments. Many conservatives denounced that search as a weaponization of the Justice Department and an example of F.B.I. overreach.
Mr. Trump, who was president when the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Croft and Mr. Fox, has personally cast doubt on the prosecution. In a recent speech at a conservative conference, he appeared to allude to the Michigan case, calling it “fake” and saying “Gretchen Whitmer was in less danger than the people in this room right now, it seems to me.”