The FBI filed a criminal complaint against a group of men accused of a conspiring to attack and kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
President Trump’s name appears nowhere in the 15-page court document filed on Thursday.
I am guessing you know where I’m going with this.
The filing tells of a shoddy, months’-long attempt by disaffected misfits — a “militia,” that scary word that is always supposed to mean “white supremacists” and, by extension, Trump — who raged against Whitmer’s economic lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. “The group talked about creating a society that followed the U.S. Bill of Rights and where they could be self-sufficient,” the document says.
The liberal Huffington Post began its story on the plot with this line: “A Michigan militia was plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has come under fire from President Donald Trump.”
Just couldn’t resist throwing him in there, could they?
As a member of the political party that celebrates fake victimhood, Whitmer is loving it. “Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups,” she said during a televised press conference. (She was ready for her close-up.) “Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry, as a call to action.”
Again, there is nothing in the FBI’s complaint against the group that makes a link to the president. I know he’s a Republican who called on states, including Michigan, to relax their restrictions. But that is not the same as encouraging people to kidnap a governor and start up their own utopia.
This isn’t really a new thing, though. Every uncovered plot — the FBI finds them all the time — gets blamed on Trump. It’s like last year when Maryland man Christopher Hasson was taken into custody after he was found to have stockpiled a bunch of ammunition and written in a diary about his dreams to create his own white city, which, he said, would only be possible if just about everyone else died.
Hasson had mentioned Trump, not due to admiration or support, but in the context of impeachment, an event that he thought would spark chaos and aid in his broader goal of taking down our entire society.
There was no Trump connection in that case, and no Trump connection in the Whitmer case, either.
