Mainstream media is covering every nuance as best they can since this is being spun by Democrats as a way to blame President Trump for extremism. But one important detail from the bond hearings has been buried or altogether omitted from reporting. It’s the type of detail that has conspiracy theorists asking more questions.
Gary Springstead, a former FBI special agent turned criminal defense attorney, urged caution in accepting information from confidential sources in the plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Other attorneys suggested informants pushed their clients into criminal activity.
“I think that … it’s difficult when you’re dealing with confidential sources because as much as the federal government, or state, local law enforcement want to control their behavior, they don’t control it,” Springstead said, outside of U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids.
“They give them rules regulations and tell them what they should and shouldn’t do but ultimately, they’re not there to control it, their every move.”
Defense lawyers contend that there was no probable cause to arrest and charge the suspect, arguing, among other things, that the suspects had no operational plan to do anything, were engaged in all legal activities — including talking in encrypted group chats and practicing military exercises with lawfully owned guns — and that it was the informants and undercover agents who “pushed” others to do illegal things.
Defense attorney Scott Graham was grilling FBI special agent Richard Trask about his testimony that at least 13 self-described militia members plotted to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation home and do one of two things: either take her on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan and leave her there, or, take her to Wisconsin and try her for treason.
Graham asked agent Trask how the suspects planned to get Whitmer to Wisconsin.
The agent had no specific answer, beyond saying there were audio recordings of the suspects discussing a plan to take Whitmer to another state, among them Wisconsin.
Graham then asked the agent what the suspects planned to do with Whitmer after they left her in the lake. The agent had no specific answer, beyond testifying that the accused ringleader, Adam Fox, wanted to “take her out on a boat and leave her in the middle of Lake Michigan.”
FBI Director Chris Wray warns Congress about the dangers of “white supremacist groups.”
And then two weeks later the FBI arrests a group of middle-class gun nuts and patriots and accuses them of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
And now we find out days later that there is an alleged FBI informant who pushed the entire plot?
