Who is doing real reporting these days? Not legacy media it seems.

From The FBI-Tainted Whitmer 'Kidnap Plot' You've Heard Next to Nothing About by Julie Kelly.  The case has been ongoing for a couple or three years but only episodically reported in the mainstream media.  For at least the past couple of years, it has appeared that the whole scenario of a threat to kidnap and assassinate the governor of Michigan was actually initiated by FBI agents and informants as a means of enticing targeted individuals into criminal acts.

The case was suspect from early on when it emerged that there were more FBI agents, undercover agents and FBI informants involved than there were actual purported conspirators.  Over time it became even more suspect as an increasing number of those FBI agents and informants were themselves either fired or indicted for crimes unrelated to the kidnapping "conspiracy" they were orchestrating.  

But it has always been a slow burn case which has only been lightly reported in the mainstream media and often reported from a slant.  You had look hard and question hard to get a good sense of the status quo.  Sometimes it seemed as if the FBI was merely comically inept.  Other times it seemed as if they were criminally motivated.  Other times it could seem as if there were really a conspiracy by white supremacists to kidnap the governor.

Over two years it has teeter-tottered between interpretations but the longer the case has gone on and the more the evidence has emerged, increasingly it seems as if a bunch of naive bellyachers were entrapped by the FBI to participate in a plan that for all intents and purposes appeared to have been hatched by the FBI and was being led by members of the FBI and which only survived by the efforts of the FBI.  

It has taken on particular salience in the context of the January 6th hearings because some of the FBI agents involved in the earlier kidnapping conspiracy were also involved in FBI activities at the Capitol on January 6th.  

So what is the scorecard at this late stage?  Kelly:

In the years since the election, the national press has given little attention to the case since the initial arrests, even though court documents have recast the episode as something more sinister. Instead of a heroic effort by the FBI to safeguard the country from domestic terrorists, it now appears to have been a broad conspiracy by law enforcement to entrap American citizens who held unpopular political views.

[snip]

But things went downhill for the government after that. Richard Trask, one of the main FBI investigators on the case, who signed the complaint against the federal defendants, was criminally charged in July 2021 for brutally assaulting his wife after a swingers’ party in Kalamazoo. Police body cam video showed a partly clothed, bloody, and apparently intoxicated Trask talking with police during his arrest. Reporters also found profane anti-Trump posts on Trask’s social media account.

Trask was removed from the case and fired by the FBI in September 2021.

Prosecutors removed Chappel’s two primary FBI handlers, Henrik Impola and Jayson Chambers, from the government’s witness list after defense attorneys accused Impola of committing perjury in a previous case and discovered that Chambers was moonlighting as head of a security firm on the side and posting inside information about the pending arrests on social media as a way to attract business.

Robeson and his wife, Kimberly,  were charged with fraud  in December 2021 for convincing a couple to purchase a used SUV and donate it to the Robesons’ nonexistent charity, a crime committed while Robeson was working the Whitmer plot.

Robeson also was charged separately with illegally purchasing a firearm as a felon; he threatened to plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, so he also was not called as a witness.

[snip]

The acquittals represented another blow to the overall case and a poor showing for the government; of the 10 defendants who went to trial, five were found not guilty and two were convicted after a second trial. Four others pleaded guilty—outcomes that represent a poor showing for both the DOJ and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Nessel was so infuriated by the acquittals for the Null brothers and Molitor that she publicly criticized jurors as coming from “a very, very right-leaning county (were) seemingly not so concerned about the kidnapping and assassination of the governor.”

Read the whole thing for a reasonably detailed of what seems a massive abuse of police authority by the FBI.  Inept entrapment, bad management of bad apple FBI agents and FBI informers, targeting sad sack reprobates for a political show trial and failure to actually make their case. 

Of the ten charged, five have been found not guilty.  The two so far convicted have appeals which seem likely to succeed.  The only success has been four plea deals which are always suspect given the imbalance of power and resources between those charged and those charging them.  Getting low level and fringe participants to plea out in return for testimony while failing to actually get convictions against the primary members charged has all the signs of a miscarriage of justice.

A very worthwhile update from Kelly.  I had missed a couple of recent developments and as it stands now, it appears ever more certain that this was a travesty, an abuse of power and a miscarriage of justice for political ends.

It caught my eye partly as a useful update but also as it represents an emerging pattern.  Kelly is part of the Real Clear constellation of news which is both a news aggregator but also does meaningful investigative reporting in a much more independent fashion than we now get from the traditional legacy mainstream media.  

Off the top of my head I can think of some half dozen or more complex stories over the past couple of years which needed persistent and detailed journalistic investigation to get to a real appreciation for what actually happened.  Stories which required investment and real journalism.  None of these are fully proven yet but all of them are far closer to resolution in a way opposite to how they were initially reported.  

And, significantly, the stories have all been developed and revealed primarily through the investigative work of new news sites, independent reporters, and independent citizens doing the investigation and research that mainstream media no longer does.  

1) Covid-19 lab leak origins

2) Hunter Biden laptop

3) Hunter Biden corruption

4) Joe Biden corruption

5) Elite university support of antisemitism

6) Elite university sacrifice of standards to DEI

7) Michigan "conspiracy"

8) January 6th 

9) Absence of science for masking

10) Absence of science for lockdowns

11) Psychological, health, and economic costs to government response to Covid.

12) DEI prevalence in K-12 and Universities despite denials.

OK.  A dozen.  And were I to sit and mull, it might be two dozen.  

Perhaps as striking is my inability to answer the mirror question.  What major stories have been broken by legacy mainstream media in a fashion different from and more revealing than the first cut versions?  I am stumped.  Follow-up reporting and refinements, sure.  Revelatory reporting?  I can't think of any.