That's very possible, but we'll never really know exactly how it went down. I just wish they'd do their core job.
If anyone is interested, here is the link I found that
@NC_Canes_11 posted back in October by Esquire (which is left/liberal)...
In 2020, six men were arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. Were they a grave threat to democracy, a bunch of inept misfits—or something else entirely?
www.esquire.com
It's really long but a few tidbits from the article...
As I did so, I found myself somewhat taken aback to be contemplating thoughts I hadn’t expected to entertain. For instance, it became increasingly apparent to me that, despite all the surveillance and recording over many months before these men were arrested, the connective tissue of the purported conspiracy seemed perplexingly elusive. By cherry-picking and stitching together disparate statements, incidents, and circumstances, you could certainly fashion an argument that such a conspiracy may have existed—just as the prosecution maintained—but it did seem surprising that the kinds of sustained conversation you might have assumed would be there, in which the principal participants sat around and discussed both the broad scope and the practical minutiae of what they intended to do, didn’t appear to exist.
It was also perplexing to see how much of the connective tissue that did exist involved people who were acting on behalf of the FBI. Take, for instance, what seemed, at first glance, to be one of the more damning events in the alleged narrative of this conspiracy. It is one thing to be told that, on the night of September 12, 2020, Adam Fox and Barry Croft, who according to the prosecutors were the plot’s de facto ringleaders, conducted a nighttime reconnaissance of Whitmer’s Elk Rapids vacation home, driving around the area after first stopping to inspect the underside of the bridge on Highway 31, where they might plant explosives. But it is perhaps another to piece together that the truck in question, a Chevy Silverado, had five people in it. And that Fox and Croft were in the backseat, Croft in the middle, next to a man who turned out to be an FBI informant. And that the truck was being driven by its owner, Dan Chappel, who had been at the center of everything that had or hadn’t been happening for several months. And that he was also an FBI informant. And that next to him up front was another man, whom Chappel had introduced to the group as an explosives expert. And that this man was not an FBI informant. He was an FBI agent.
In the buildup to the trial, there were other developments that seemed more screenplay than reality. In July 2021, Richard Trask, the FBI agent whose account had formed the central narrative of the initial complaint, was arrested, having viciously assaulted his wife after they returned home from a swingers’ party, and subsequently fired. The following month, BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison
broke the news that a Twitter account describing itself as run by the CEO of a cyber-intelligence firm called Exeintel had, ahead of the Whitmer kidnapping arrests, tweeted coded celebratory tweets about this impending law-enforcement triumph. According to the story, one of the firm’s listed owners was another FBI agent, Jayson Chambers, a man so integral to the investigation that, according to one defense attorney, between March and October 2020 he had allegedly exchanged 3,236 messages with the embedded informant Dan Chappel. These potential FBI misdeeds would be adjudged inadmissible in court, but even if you weren’t minded to believe the most extreme conspiracy theories—that the whole kidnapping plot had been fabricated by people within the FBI, say, to draw attention and business to this private company—it all felt very untoward and disconcerting.
Even so, I found it difficult to imagine that the defendants wouldn’t be found guilty. For one thing, even if the FBI’s immersive role might offend an everyday sense of fairness, I knew that, legally, the bar to using entrapment as a successful defense was generally a high one. Likewise, what was required to establish guilt on the main charge of conspiracy to kidnapping was slighter than you might assume. Whether the plan was confused or impractical, or in all likelihood would never have been carried out, was irrelevant. What was required was that two or more people conspired or agreed to commit the crime of kidnapping, that anyone involved joined knowingly and voluntarily, and that at least one member of the conspiracy committed a single overt act to advance or help the conspiracy. That’s it. The indictment detailed nineteen such acts, and the jury need only be convinced of one.
And at the end... after Barry and Cox (who previously were found not guilty) were found guilty in the 2nd trial he wrote this...
The Department of Justice put out a press release in which Andrew Birge said, in words that seemed to balance triumph and relief, “Today’s verdict confirms this plot was very real and very dangerous.” The tone of much of the media coverage suggested that sanity and stability had belatedly prevailed.
That’s not how I felt. I can’t tell you with any confidence that none of these men would ever have done anything terrible. I can’t tell you with any confidence that, allowed the chance, none of them ever would. But neither can I tell you that I’m comfortable with any sense that an authentic and terrible threat has been satisfactorily and appropriately dealt with, its damage finally contained. What I can tell you is that, as our world evolves in ways that unnerve us, we might thank ourselves to be as careful as we can, every one of us, not to act as though we know for sure what we may not know in the least. And I can tell you this: If everything you knew about these men is what you heard on October 8, 2020, you knew almost nothing at all.
