The days of the FBI running entrapment plays on citizens might be coming to an end. Juries aren't buying it anymore. Total humiliation. Since we are told right wing domestic terrorism is the greatest threat to America, the FBI had to contrive something, but it wasn't enough.
I'm not sure what all went on here but entrapment is a concerning issue. Every so often you'll see a case and wonder, "That's not entrapment?" Activists and civil rights experts have argued that the FBI has frequently overstepped boundaries, essentially egging on people to participate in plots and locking up people for crimes that they would never have committed had it not been for the intervention of law enforcement. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ap-case-terrorists-fbi-dupes-gretchen-whitmer
The retrumplicans celebrating a legal victory for white nationalists that plotted to kidnap and kill a sitting governor including the use of explosives to slow law enforcement response. btw, the one defendant that testified called another of the four the "ringleader"... hard to understand how the FBI could be blamed for entrapment...
I wish you cared when it happened to Muslims in the US. A close family friend had a son that is still in prison today due to these practices. But I don't think you care unless it's your tribe.
I think their credibility only falters when they target "real America" aka right wing extremists. Because the people who have disproportionate clout in this country will defend these type of people. The FBI did the exact same today with a Muslim American, I can guarantee they will get away with it along with people like you cheering.
@SamFisher https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/fbi-michigan-kidnap-whitmer The FBI Investigation Into The Alleged Plot To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Has Gotten Very Complicated The case seemed like a lock — until an informant and one FBI agent were charged with crimes, another was accused of perjury, and a third was found promoting a private security firm. And that wasn’t all.
Careful reminder to the op that these guys are Boogaloo Boys or a subchapter of the far right extremist group who have called for a race war and study the same ideological inspiration such as the Turner Diaries that non other than Timothy McVeigh was inspired by. Some Boogaloo Boys are also self proclaimed Neo Nazis. So you praising a hung jury in a case against white nationalists trying to start a race war in America really says a lot about you. Yes even Neo Nazis have free speech rights, but so do American ISIS supporters. Please answer me this @Commodore, @basso , if a follower of ISIS had a trial here for an accused crime that ended up having a hung jury and got acquitted, would you two be celebrating their freedom today and be demeaning the FBI for arresting under weak evidentiary claims?
Of Course not. Those white nationalists are part of their tribe and is the ONLY reason they are crying "entrapment". People like @Commodore couldn't give two ***** about law enforcement abuses that happen to people that aren't part of their tribe. The FBI has a history of using entrapment practices and I am not surprised they probably tried to entrapment these white nationalists also. It's a horrible practice. Solving the white nationalist problem in this country isn't going to be solved through the heavy handed approach of law enforcement. It will be solved by having average Joes like @Commodore not defending them at every corner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/us/verdict-whitmer-kidnapping-case.html 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. 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. 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. “Words hurt you? Words scare you?” Daniel Harris, who was acquitted of all the charges against him, had said when he took the stand in his own defense. Mr. Harris insisted that he never joined any plot, and he referred derisively to an F.B.I. informant, Dan Chappel, who had testified earlier in the trial that he feared the group’s antigovernment and anti-law-enforcement rhetoric would escalate into violence. ... The jury of six men and six women, which deliberated for nearly a week, did not reach any verdict on the charges against two defendants, Barry Croft and Adam Fox, whom prosecutors portrayed as having a leadership role. A judge declared a mistrial for those men and ordered them held in jail. Others have also been charged in connection with the investigation. Two men, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty before the trial to kidnapping conspiracy and testified against the defendants in the federal case. Eight other men were charged with related crimes in state court. Outside the courthouse, Andrew Birge, the top federal prosecutor in western Michigan, did not respond when asked directly whether his office would seek a second trial for Mr. Croft and Mr. Fox. But he said in a statement that he was limited in what he could say because “two defendants now await re-trial.” “Obviously we’re disappointed in the outcome,” Mr. Birge said. He added: “We still believe in the jury system, and really, there’s not too much more I can say at this time. I appreciate the time the jury put in. They listened to a lot of evidence, deliberated quite a bit.” 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. ... 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.” As some of the defense lawyers acknowledged in court, many of the men were recorded making offensive remarks, or statements advocating violence, about law enforcement officers, Ms. Whitmer or politicians in general. One F.B.I. agent testified that Mr. Caserta had posted on social media that the Second Amendment gave people the right to “kill agents of the government when they become tyrannical.” The chief tension of the case was whether speech like that crossed a line into criminal activity. “If I don’t like the governor and it’s rough talk, I can do that in our country,” Mr. Hills said after the verdict was announced and his client left the courthouse.
I think it's become obvious that the FBI has a common practice of finding disaffected/lonely men who might say some outlandish things online, and then encouraging them to commit or plan crimes via CIs or unduercover agents. Then arresting them for the things they were encouraged to do by the FBI. They did this with "homegrown" Muslim extremists and also in this case. The FBI may have had more credibility from the public after 9/11 on stuff like this, where everyone was concerned about copycat attacks and perceived the threat as real. But no longer.
BS. These guys (you are celebrating) openly discussed kidnapping and killing a sitting governor because they didn't like her COVID-19 response... and also as part of some bizarre idea of overturning the presidential election. They talked about blowing up a bridge to deter law enforcement. They tried to come up with money to purchase explosives. Man in Gov. Whitmer kidnap plot: No one twisted our arms https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-...lth-michigan-aff035ce3331139a029b052a77279962
Yes the FBI did do this with "Islamic Terrorists" There was the case of the "Liberty City Seven" who FBI informants posing as members of Al Qaeda had gotten them to plan attacks on various targets in the US. It turned out that these people really were very incapable of launching attacks but the FBI informants had not just pushed them but also supported the financially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_City_Seven The New Yorker also did a recent article on stash house stings that LE frequently uses. There informants or undercover LEO convince people to join them in a raid of a drug house and when the people show up they are arrested. In many cases the people convinced to do the raid are relying upon the informants and under cover agents to arm them and provide the means to do the raid. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...e-stings-carry-real-penalties-for-fake-crimes
If someone says to you and/or your group "let's do some crimes" and your first response is not to contact law enforcement but instead to go along with it for an extended period of time, you're a s**tbag and belong in prison.
The New Yorker article goes into detail about this. The people who often get caught up in these type of stings are often poor are desperate for money. In several cases the people who got them involved were trusted, such as a relative who actually was doing so in exchange for a lighter sentence on another charge or just for money.
This seems to describe Trump's role in the insurrection pretty well, minus the use of CIs or undercover agents.
