A jury in Michigan will begin its deliberations Monday after days of testimony in the trial of four men accused of hatching a plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
can be found guilty of conspiracy, even if it wasn't possible to pull off the kidnapping in fall 2020, U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker said during jury instructions.A key factor, if the jury finds it, would be a “mutual understanding either spoken or unspoken” between two or more people in the group, the judge said.“Deciding what the facts are is your job, not mine,” Jonker told the jury.
Prosecutors said the plot was simmering for months, leavened by anti-government extremism and anger over Whitmer's COVID-19 restrictions. With undercover FBI agents and informants embedded in the group, the men trained with a crudely built “shoot house” to replicate her vacation home, prosecutors allege.
There is no dispute that the alleged leaders, Fox and Croft, traveled to Elk Rapids, Michigan, to scout the governor's property and a nearby bridge that same weekend in September 2020.and testified against the four men, were on the same road trip, along with covert investigators.to create a civil war and stop Joe Biden from winning the presidency. Much of the government's case came from secretly recorded conversations, group messages and social media posts.
“You heard them in their own voices over and over again,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler told jurors, “talking about kidnapping her, murdering her, blowing up bridges and people and anybody who could get in their way. And it wasn't just talk.”Defense lawyers, especially those representing Fox and Croft, attacked the government's investigation and the use of a crucial informant, Dan Chappel.
Whitmer, a Democrat, rarely talks publicly about the plot, though she referred to “surprises” during her term that seemed like “something out of fiction” when she
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