Jury gets case of two charged in plot to kidnap governor

Two men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s governor wanted to grab Gretchen Whitmer and hang her, prosecutors said during a stark closing argument Monday as the government tried for a second time to get convictions in an alleged plot to trigger a revolution in 2020.

The jury got the case around noon after a morning of final remarks, including a fiery challenge by defense lawyers who accused the FBI of manufacturing the scheme. Prosecutors, however, called that a phony narrative.

“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?”

After a nine-day trial, 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.

It was Kessler’s effort to get the jury to reject a defense argument that Fox and Croft were entrapped by the government every step of the way.

“‘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.

Fox, 39, and Croft, 46, 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.

The jury heard secretly recorded conversations and read violent social media posts. Two undercover agents and an informant testified for hours, explaining how the men trained in a “shoot house” in Wisconsin and Michigan and visited Elk Rapids to see Whitmer’s home and a nearby bridge that could be blown up.

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, Croft and their allies were furious about COVID-19 restrictions and generally disgusted by government, according to trial evidence.

DAVID EGGERT/AP FILE Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was the target of a plot to kidnap her and trigger a revolution, the government charged.