Many of the men were recorded making offensive remarks

In October 2020, the FBI revealed a plot by members of the far right to kidnap Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer.  It sounded serious.

But then, as the case proceeded, it began to fall apart.  There were all sorts of procedural issues.  It became apparent that many, if not most, of the conspirators were actually FBI agents or FBI informants.  This began to seem to be more than entrapment.  It took on especial salience when various protest anniversary dates of January 6th ended up being better attended by the FBI than any putative far right conspiracists.  It was especially salient when it began to appear as if some of the key individuals involved in the January 6th protests were also either FBI agents or FBI informants.

But as with so many complicated stories, especially complicated stories that reveal governmental malfeasance or misreporting by the mainstream corporate media, the story receded from the headlines.  The more difficulties arose, the less it was reported.

So I was somewhat surprised this morning to read the results of a trial for four of the identified far-right conspirators.  There was a trial going on?  Who knew?

The New York Times plays it reasonably straight.  They don't make it clear that the majority of the participants seem to have been FBI agents of informants but they do acknowledge that there never was an actual plan for the crime, that one FBI agent was fired for domestic violence and another was found to have been launching a security services firm while working for the FBI on the kidnapping case.  

This judgment by the jury was a clear defeat for a narrative which seemed far more about suppressing political dissent than about prosecuting an actual crime.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — It was one of the country’s highest-profile domestic terrorism cases: An alleged plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, eliminate her security detail and perhaps touch off a civil war. But after a trial in which prosecutors portrayed the four defendants as threats to democracy, jurors on Friday acquitted two of the men and said they were unable to reach verdicts for the two others.

The result was a major blow to the Justice Department, which during the Biden administration has made domestic terrorism one of its top priorities in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

But not entirely straight. 

The defendants in the Michigan trial were arrested weeks before the 2020 election, and the case was seen by some as revealing increasingly combative discourse among certain right-wing groups. But a series of missteps during the investigation, and the eventual failure to win any convictions against the men who went to trial, raises questions about the ability of federal law enforcement, when it infiltrates right-wing groups, to develop convincing cases without infringing on the rights to speak freely and own weapons.

Misteps?  They were not acquitted because of a technicality.  They were acquitted because there was so little evidence as the article later makes clear.  And why is it a concern of the New York Times that natural rights enshrined in the Constitution in the First and Second Amendments are an obstacle to prosecution.  That is why we have those rights explicitly articulated - to prevent repressive and arbitrary prosecutions by the government.  Of course the government should not bring cases which cannot respect the constitutional rights of free speech, free assembly and the right to bear arms.  What is the FBI doing investigating citizens who appear only to have been exercising their constitutional rights?

Prosecutors built their case on a trove of audio recordings and encrypted texts from 2020 in which some of the men vented about Covid-19 restrictions, spoke about political violence and debated the best way to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, from her vacation home in northern Michigan.

Yet the very existence of those recordings and text conversations underscored defense lawyers’ theory of the case: that the supposed plot had been conceived and nudged ahead by a network of F.B.I. agents and informants who preyed on the worst instincts of their loose-lipped targets. The defense lawyers described the men on trial as big talkers who were never going to commit any kidnapping.

[snip]

Issues with the actions of some F.B.I. agents also loomed over the trial, though little of that was discussed explicitly in front of jurors. One F.B.I. agent was fired last year after being charged with domestic violence. Another agent, who supervised Mr. Chappel, tried to build a private security consulting firm based in part on some of his work for the F.B.I., according to a BuzzFeed News report.

“The jury, even though they didn’t get all of it, they smelled enough of it,” said Michael Hills, a lawyer for Brandon Caserta, who was acquitted of the only count against him.

So two were found not guilty of the charges brought and two were undecided, leading to a mistrial.  0-2-2.  Not a good record for cases which ought to have been air-tight given the amount of time, attention and focus brought by the FBI.

During weeks of testimony at the federal courthouse in Grand Rapids, prosecutors showed jurors inflammatory social media posts and chat messages from the defendants, and presented audio secretly recorded by Mr. Chappel and other informants. One former co-defendant who pleaded guilty testified that he hoped to set off a chain of events that would prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being elected president and would perhaps foment a civil war.

“That was the whole plan: They wanted to kick that off by kidnapping the governor,” Nils Kessler, a federal prosecutor, said during closing arguments.

But the prosecution’s case was hampered by a lack of clarity on what exactly the men were accused of plotting. No attack ever took place and no final date for an abduction was set, testimony showed. The details of the alleged plan sometimes differed drastically from prosecution witness to prosecution witness.

The F.B.I. informant, Mr. Chappel, said he believed that the group planned to kill Ms. Whitmer, whose handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had infuriated the men. Mr. Garbin, who earlier pleaded guilty in the case, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Mr. Franks, who also pleaded guilty, told jurors that he had hoped to die in a shootout with the governor’s security detail.

“There was no plan to kidnap the governor, and there was no agreement between these four men,” Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, said in closing arguments. He said the government tried to conjure up a conspiracy by using a network of informants and undercover agents, and that “without a plan, the snitches needed to make it look like” there was movement toward a plan.

A classic summary of the case below.  "Before you arrest somebody and bring the charges, you’d better be darned sure that you’ve got a locked, tight case."  Well, yes.  That is supposed to be what the FBI and Justice Department does.  It is not enough to bring charges because people made offensive remarks.  

Legal observers questioned after the verdict whether the F.B.I. might have moved in too early to make the arrests, before the men tried to carry out any abduction or even set a date for an attack. On the day of the arrest, testimony showed, some of the defendants thought they were going to get free gear from an undercover F.B.I. agent before lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings. Instead, a phalanx of F.B.I. agents took them into custody.

“I think the message that it shows to law enforcement is, before you arrest somebody and bring the charges, you’d better be darned sure that you’ve got a locked, tight case,” said Matthew Schneider, who served as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Michigan during Mr. Trump’s presidency, and who said he was involved in the early stages of the investigation. “Did they have to arrest them at that time? Could they have waited?”

R. Michael Bullotta, a defense lawyer who previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, said that he, too, wondered whether the arrests were premature. Mr. Bullotta also said that the sheer quantity of informants might have hampered the case.

“I don’t know that they needed to have as many informants as they had,” Mr. Bullotta said. “That almost made it look like it was a government party as opposed to just having one informant reporting to the F.B.I.”

There is a remaining reality that there are likely real domestic terrorism plots out there that need to be investigated rigorously and charged appropriately.  The challenge with thin cases like this which turn into a debacle is that the Department of Justice and the FBI come off as both incompetent and as instruments intending to illegally constrain civil rights.  Neither of which is a good look.