Jury selection started Tuesday in the retrial of two alleged ringleaders in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 over her restrictive COVID-19 policies.
A federal judge ordered a retrial for Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. after a jury failed to reach a verdict during their first trial in April. Two other defendants, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta, were found not guilty, renewing questions about the conduct of the more than a dozen confidential FBI informants who were embedded in their anti-government militia groups during the alleged conspiracy.
“I don’t know if you feel like you won the lottery or just got called to the principal’s office. But either way, welcome,” U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker told dozens of prospective jurors at a federal courthouse in Grand Rapids, the Associated Press reported.
“This is not a political forum,” Jonker said, adding that jurors must not convict or acquit the defendants based on “whether you like Gov. Whitmer or dislike Gov. Whitmer.”
WHITMER KIDNAPPING TRIAL COLLAPSES: TWO NOT GUILTY, TWO WALK FREE AFTER MISTRIAL
“It’s not if you think masking mandates or vaccine mandates or any other response was good or bad policy,” Jonker said. “It’s not a proxy for any of those things.”
Defense attorneys argued during the April trial that their clients were high all the time when the alleged plot was hatched during the summer of 2020 and that they would never have conspired to kidnap Whitmer had they not been pushed into doing so by government informants.
Attorneys for Fox and Croft are expected to continue using their entrapment defense during the retrial.
However, prosecutors revealed during the first trial that the FBI seized flexible plastic handcuffs, a tactical vest, three firearms, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the basement Fox was living in prior to his October 2020 arrest.
The government’s star witnesses, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, who had pleaded guilty to their involvement in the kidnapping plot before the trial, detailed the meticulous planning that went into the alleged plot during the April trial.
Garbin recounted a pivotal meeting that occurred at a co-defendant’s house in July 2020 in which the plotters discussed candidly that they were soon reaching the “point of no return.” He said Fox referred to Whitmer as the “asset” in their planning discussions.
Defense attorneys argued during the April trial that Garbin and Franks lied on the stand to avoid long prison sentences.
“I think we tried to make it very clear that the snitches Garbin and Franks were inconsistent,” Caserta’s attorney, Mike Hills, told reporters in April. “They were actually lying — it was more than inconsistent. They were lying, and they were doing so for time, which is the most precious thing you can have. I’m hoping it impacted the jury.”
Garbin and Franks are expected to testify during the retrial.
The FBI weathered a string of embarrassing stories involving agents and informants linked to the kidnapping investigation.
FBI special agent Jayson Chambers, who served as a handler for the informant known as “Big Dan” during the investigation, owned a private security company that allegedly tried to parlay his FBI experience into multimillion-dollar contracts.
A second FBI handler involved in the case, Henrik Impola, was accused of committing perjury on the witness stand in another case.
And prosecutors accused a key FBI informant involved in the case, Stephen Robeson, of being a “double agent” for not following FBI instructions during the investigation.
The FBI said Robeson violated his agreement to avoid committing “unsanctioned crimes,” specifically, for using his charity to purchase weapons and offering his drone to the kidnapping plotters to aid in acts of domestic terrorism. All the while, Robeson failed to record “pertinent conversations and events” related to the investigation, prosecutors said.
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Robeson invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when called to the stand during the first trial in April.
Jonker barred defense attorneys from discussing the FBI’s alleged misconduct during the trial in April.
