by Julie Kelly
At this point, perhaps the Justice Department should pray that the judge
rules in favor of the defense and dismisses the case before the FBI is
further embarrassed—and exposed.
The U.S. Department of Justice
received an unwelcome Christmas gift from defense attorneys representing
five men charged with conspiring to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen
Whitmer in 2020: a motion to dismiss the case.
The Christmas Day filing
is the latest blow to the government’s scandal-ridden prosecution;
defense counsel is building a convincing argument that the FBI used
undercover agents and informants to entrap their clients in a
wide-ranging scheme that resulted in bad press for Donald Trump as early
voting was underway in the key swing state last year. What began as
random social media chatter to oppose lock down policies quickly morphed
into a dangerous plan to abduct Whitmer as soon as the FBI took over.
A Michigan judge delayed the trial,
now set for March 8, so defense attorneys could investigate the
misconduct of FBI special agents handling at least a dozen government
informants involved in the caper.
As I reported
last week, the lead prosecutor recently informed the judge that three
of the FBI’s top agents involved in the case will not take the stand as
government witnesses. Richard Trask, the FBI special agent who signed
the initial criminal complaint against six men facing federal
charges—one man pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities—was
removed from the case and fired by the FBI after he physically assaulted
his wife last summer in a drunken rage following a swingers party at a
hotel near their home.
And it isn’t just FBI agents causing
headaches for the government. Stephen Robeson, a convicted felon and
longtime FBI informant who planned several kidnapping-related outings
including a militia conference in Ohio, recently pleaded guilty
to illegally purchasing and possessing a sniper rifle in 2020. The
government offered Robeson a sweetheart deal—time served on a felony
charge with a potential 10-year prison term, two years probation, and
$100 fine—and he will be sentenced in February, a month before the
Whitmer trial is scheduled to begin.
The Justice Department won’t confirm
whether Robeson will testify; given his central role in the plot and
criminal history, including statutory rape, and the misconduct of his
FBI handlers, it’s hard to see how Robeson’s testimony would help the
government’s case.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, insist the
suggestion that the FBI was responsible for the Whitmer kidnapping plot
is a factless fantasy peddled by the same people who claim January 6 was
an inside job. “The conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated the
January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to entrap otherwise
law-abiding citizens has been actively promoted by certain media
outlets,” the government sneered in a recent motion, referring to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
And therein lies the government’s
biggest headache of all. If a trial showcases all the ways in which the
FBI orchestrated the Whitmer kidnapping plan from start to finish—and
the defense features the lowlife agents and informants who made it
possible—the public will demand a similar reckoning about the FBI’s role
in January 6.
At this point, perhaps the Justice
Department should pray that the judge rules in favor of the defense and
dismisses the case before the FBI is further embarrassed—and exposed.
The agents who managed the day-to-day
activity of the case’s lead informant also will not testify. FBI agent
Jayson Chambers ran a security consulting business on the side; an
anonymous Twitter account claiming to represent his firm, Exeintel,
dropped hints of pending arrests in the Whitmer case, calling into
question his motives as a lead investigator. His partner, FBI agent
Henrik Impola, has been accused of committing perjury in a separate
case.
“The government does not plan to call
Impola, Chambers, or Trask as witnesses,” Assistant U.S. Attorney
Andrew Birge notified the court on December 17. “[The] government
requests the Court exclude evidence relating to Exeintel, the unfounded
allegations against SA Impola, and Richard Trask’s domestic assault
charges or alleged social media posts.”
Now the judge will consider defense
counsel’s latest motion to drop the kidnapping conspiracy charges
against Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Kaleb Franks, Dan Harris, and Brandon
Caserta; in the April 2021 superseding
indictment,
which defense attorneys cite in the motion, the Justice Department
described the defendants as domestic terrorists who attempted “to affect
the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or
kidnapping.”
But the real conspiracy—as court
documents, testimony, and communications between FBI handlers and their
informants show—was concocted by federal operatives working inside and
outside the FBI Detroit field office.
“In this Case, the undisputed
evidence, as demonstrated in forty-four pages of statements already
submitted to the Court, establishes that government agents and
informants concocted, hatched, and pushed this ‘kidnapping plan’ from
the beginning, doing so against defendants who explicitly repudiated the
plan,” the five defense attorneys wrote in the December 25
motion.
“When the government was faced with evidence showing that the
defendants had no interest in a kidnapping plot, it refused to accept
failure and continued to push its plan.”
The FBI funded and organized two
“militia” conferences in the summer of 2020 to lure would-be kidnappers;
handled all expenses so indigent defendants could attend surveillance
and training excursions, which were photographed by the government to
use as evidence; and paid cash to numerous informants, including at
least $50,000 to the lead informant, known as “Big Dan” to the unwitting
suspects.
A footnote in the 20-page filing
explained how “Big Dan” and other informants acted as the monetary
pass-through between the FBI and the Whitmer defendants. “The government
was not going to be deterred by the fact that the defendants did not
have the money to travel throughout the Midwest in order to play along
with the CHSs and undercover agents. CHS Dan, while often claiming
poverty, always had the resources to drive, feed, and house others whom
he hoped to pull into the government plan. Another CHS convinced many
that he would finance operations through a 501(c)(3) charity and would
even provide debit cards to others, drawing on his accounts. So while
the defendants had no interest in profit . . . the government’s
exploitation of its virtually unlimited resources, poured into its
investigation, further underscores entrapment as a matter of law.” This
included informants’ picking up the tab for food, lodging, and gas among
other expenses.
