The Gov. Whitmire Kidnapping Plot

 4/8/22 NY Times:

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.

Rimshot

Shall Not Be Questioned pointed me to this National Review article:

In April 2014, America was transfixed by an armed standoff in the Nevada desert. On one side was a collection of dangerous, out-of-control armed men who were deliberately provocative, prone to saying unhinged things in a single-minded quest to destroy their enemies, and who lied time and again to cover their misdeeds.

On the other side was Cliven Bundy.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455263/cliven-bundy-case-dismissed-judge-gloria-navarro-cites-flagrant-federal-misconduct-bureau-land-management?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-01-09&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

The JFK Files are Positively X-Files

CBS Miami reports documents show CIA considered false flag terrorist attacks in Miami to blame on Castro. http://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/10/27/jfk-files-cia-plotted-kill-castro-stage-bombings-miami/  This is huge.

Remember This Picture?

We have a more powerful example.  12/16/16 ABC News:

Widely-circulated videos showing Denver police confiscating blankets and tents from the homeless in freezing temperatures are shining a spotlight on the national issue of policing homelessness.

The two videos, posted on Facebook on Nov. 28 and Nov. 29, show police officers taking away survival gear, including blanks and tents, from homeless individuals in Denver and issuing citations for unauthorized camping. The Denver Police Department released a statement Thursday defending its officers and explaining the situation shown in the videos, saying the blankets were collected as “evidence.”

I don't disagree that homeless camping in wrong places are a crime in need of enforcement.  Many of the homeless are mentally ill and part of the blame is on them for not taking advantage of available shelters.   But taking away tents and blankets are evidence?  Arrest them so they aren't going to freeze to death.  And this is after all, a Democrat controlled city.

A Horrifying Reminder of Federal Abuse of Power

It's a documentary titled Dinosaur 13 about the legal battle over possession of the largest, most complete T. rex fossil yet found, and how the people who found and excavated it were sent to prison for doing so.  I was terrified of how to summarize this travesty of justice while verifying the accuracy of what the film presents, but Roger Ebert's review does it well without any spoilers:

For 17 days, his small team used picks and shovels in 115-degree heat to free Sue and haul her away for safekeeping at their facility. There, they painstakingly cleaned and restored her for two years, with plans to build a nonprofit natural history museum in Hill City where Sue would be the main attraction. Invaluable archival footage from this period captures such hold-your-breath moments as when workers gingerly separate Sue’s fragile head from her pelvis.

But the community’s dreams for Sue quickly crumbled in 1992, after a battalion of FBI agents and National Guard soldiers descended upon the institute. Claiming that the dinosaur was stolen from federal land, officials ordered that she and countless other fossils stored there be seized and carted away to a university in Rapid City that was 30 miles away. There they would sit until a 1995 trial would eventually determine their ultimate fate.

Larson is the most obvious hero, especially after he and some of his colleagues faced a 153-charge, 39-count federal indictment ranging from conspiracy to custom violations. As he angrily says in the film, “If you add up the time served for each of those counts, it comes to 353 years for me–which is longer than Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to prison for, and he killed and ate, like, 15 people.”

But there are a few possible villains lurking about. The state’s grand-standing U.S. attorney. A vindictive judge who took offense when Larson’s defenders tried to have him dropped from the case. The best candidate for Paleontology Enemy No. 1 would be Maurice Williams, a Sioux who owned the area where Sue was found. Larson wrote him a check for $5,000 at the time and they sealed the deal with a handshake. Turns out, it was tribal property held in trust by the Department of Interior. Williams muddied matters more by denying the money was for Sue but to compensate him for having disturbed his land.

When you get watching the film and reading Judge Battey's (apt name, that) decision  that a fossil is real estate, not an separable artifact, you will understand why so many Americans regard the federal government with contempt, even aside from the madness of sending a paleontologist to SuperMax federal prison (where Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber were locked up). Millions of dollars spent on a criminal trial with 153 criminal counts, resulting primarily in misdemeanor convictions.