Whitmer Case: Jury Acquits Harris & Caserta, Unable to Reach Verdict on Fox & Croft
Stunning victory for the Defense!
April 8, 2022 — In what can only be described as a stunning victory for the defense in the Michigan “Whitmer Kidnapping Plot” case, aka the USA vs. Fox, et al two of the defendants have been declared NOT GUILTY and acquitted of the charges against them. Defendants Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris were freed today after almost two years in jail. The jury was unable to come to a decision regarding defendants Adam Fox and Barry Croft, who will remain in jail as the government decides its next move.
BREAKING: Jury makes unanimous agreement in following counts in Whitmer kidnapping trial: Harris: NOT GUILTY on all counts (kidnapping conspiracy, weapon of mass destruction, destructive device, rifle possession) Brandon Caserta: NOT GUILTY on conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
You can hear cries of relief in the courtroom as Caserta's verdict is read. As for the plot ringleaders Adam Fox and Barry Croft, no verdict is found and the judge has declared mistrials. - News Channel 3, Michigan
This has been a long time coming for those of us who have followed the case since its inception and have been reporting on the unprecedented FBI misconduct. This was one of the largest “domestic terror” cases for the government in the past 10 years.
As you know from my prior reporting, the three lead FBI agents in the case were removed from the government witness list after their misconduct was exposed. FBI Special Agent Henrik Impola was accused of committing perjury in a prior case. FBI Special Agent Richard J. Trask – the agent who signed off on the initial criminal complaint was arrested in a drunken stupor after beating his wife and almost killing her because she didn’t want to cuck him at a swingers party. He was subsequently fired from the Bureau. Special Agent Jayson Chambers was discovered operating a “private intelligence company” called Exeintel, that was seeking a multi-million dollar contract with the federal government to consult on domestic terror cases, a clear conflict of interest.
According to the Detroit News:
“Best birthday gift ever,” Caserta told supporters as relatives yelled “Happy Birthday” inside the federal courtroom in downtown Grand Rapids.
The trial lasted 20 days, including 13 days of testimony and approximately 38 hours of jury deliberations spanning five days. Jurors — six men, six women, all white — heard hours of closing arguments and instructions last week after testimony and a multimedia case from the government.
Earlier Friday, jurors indicated they had reached a verdict on some counts in the case but were locked on others. Jonker announced the development just before 11 a.m. and encouraged the jurors to keep deliberating in hopes of reaching a unanimous verdict.
“It is not unusual to come back somewhere along the line of deliberations and say ‘we tried, but couldn’t get there,'” the judge said. “At least not on everything.”
Around 2 p.m., the jury reemerged before Jonker to indicate they remained at an impasse. Jonker instructed them to return to the jury room to confirm the impasse and fill out forms to indicate what charges they were in agreement on if so. They returned minutes later to reveal their verdicts. – Detroit News
Adam Fox and Barry Croft are probably in danger at this moment, and we should keep them in our prayers.
Julie Kelly of American Greatness reports:
A roster of FBI agents and experts took the stand during the three-week trial, which was temporarily delayed due to one participant’s COVID diagnosis; Dan Chappel, the lead informant and government’s star witness known as “Big Dan,” explained how he brought the makeshift group of alleged “militia” members together after he was hired by the FBI in March 2020. Chappel created encrypted chat groups and organized excursions for field training and surveillance of Whitmer’s cottage. (He, along with other FBI informants, posed as leaders of two “militia” groups, at least one of which was created by the FBI.)
For his work over a six-month period, Chappel, a truck driver for a U.S. Postal Service subcontractor, was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI in cash and gifts such as a new laptop, tires, and a smart watch.
Prosecutors mostly relied on conversations secretly recorded by FBI assets as evidence of wrongdoing; two men charged in the same indictment had pleaded guilty and testified for the government in exchange for lighter prison sentences.
Jurors heard defendants make inflammatory, and on some occasions, violent comments about the Democratic governor, who is up for re-election this year. Foxl lived at the time in the dilapidated cellar of a Grand Rapids vacuum repair shop with no running water or toilet; Chappel texted Fox at least 1,000 times between June and early October, cultivating a close relationship with the otherwise friendless and sparsely-employed outcast. On at least five occasions, Chappel offered Fox a $5,000 credit card, which Fox repeatedly refused.
In his closing remarks last Friday, assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler dismissed defense arguments that the evidence merely amounted to “crazy talk” by disgruntled misfits high on marijuana. “In America, there’s a lot of things you can do. You can criticize the government publicly, absolutely,” Kessler told jurors. “If you don’t like elected leaders, you can vote them out at the ballot box. What you can’t do is kidnap them, kill them, or blow them up. It wasn’t just talk.” – American Greatness
The trial wrapped up much quicker than I had anticipated, without hearing from the second main FBI informant Steven Robeson.
Ken Bensinger of Buzzfeed has done yeoman’s work on this case, and without his reporting we would not know key details of the case. Ken writes:
Despite the government’s extraordinary efforts to muzzle the defense, a jury in Grand Rapids federal court on Friday acquitted two men on charges including conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the other two who had been charged.
As a result, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta are now free men, while Adam Fox and Barry Croft return to jail and await a decision by the Justice Department on whether to try them a second time.
The outcome of the trial is a stunning rebuke to the prosecution, which at times appeared to view the case — one of the most prominent domestic terror investigations in a generation — as a slam dunk. The split verdict calls into question the Justice Department’s strategy, and beyond that, its entire approach to combating domestic extremism. Defense attorneys in the case, along with observers from across the political spectrum, have argued the FBI’s efforts to make the case, which involved at least a dozen confidential informants, went beyond legitimate law enforcement and into outright entrapment.
It may also leave the two defendants who chose to plead guilty and testify for the government, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, wondering whether they made the right choice.
To make their case, federal prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence: hundreds of audio clips, videos, and text messages, many of which show the men describing violence they would personally like to inflict on the governor, plus the testimony of a confidential informant, two undercover FBI agents, and two defendants who had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
But the most striking thing about the closely watched 15-day trial might be what the jury never got to see.
Both before and during the trial, prosecutors went to extraordinary lengths to exclude evidence and witnesses that might undermine their arguments, while winning the right to bring in almost anything favorable to their own side. As a result, defense attorneys were largely reduced to nibbling at the edges of the government’s case in hopes of instilling doubt in the jurors’ minds, and to making claims about official misconduct with vanishingly few pieces of evidence to support them.
Over and over during the course of the trial, the prosecution objected to any attempts by defendants to provide context for the often shocking soundbites and text messages shown in court — objections sustained by a judge who agreed that such material risked confusing the jury.
The result was, at least from the defense’s point of view, a stunningly one-sided presentation that left the preponderance of evidence out of court and gave jurors precious little to balance against the Justice Department’s claims.
‘The government controls the evidence,’ Fox’s attorney, Chris Gibbons, said in his closing statement last Friday, ‘and they can play whatever they want.’
They said it was a case of entrapment and that they had hundreds of recordings, text messages, and Facebook posts that would shine a very different light on the government’s narrative. They included exhibits showing informants smoking cannabis with the defendants, plying them with offers of cash, and working them up into a lather with anti-government talk of their own. There was evidence of informants and FBI agents discussing ways to lure more suspects into the case, and extensive audio of defendants discussing absurd schemes involving stolen Blackhawk helicopters, 300-strong armies, and newly minted silver currencies that the defense believed showed the men were simply fantasizing.
But on Feb. 2, Judge Robert J. Jonker ruled that most of the evidence the defense hoped to present could not even be mentioned in court, let alone shown to the jury. Though the exhibits were direct audio recordings or transcriptions, just like much of the prosecution’s evidence, the judge dismissed the material as irrelevant hearsay..
He also ruled that defendants could not inquire about the past conduct of several FBI agents, though the government would be allowed to question the defendants about episodes in their own past.
Five days before trial, Jonker handed the defense a rare victory, by ruling that if two undercover FBI agents appeared as witnesses, they had to use their real names. After all the preceding decisions, it was hard to overlook the irony.
“It is time for all guise and pretense to end and for the prosecution to present the evidence in an open forum,” the judge wrote. “Making it crystal clear to the jury and the public that inside the Courtroom, nothing is undercover and everything is out in the open will best ensure fairness during trial and eventual acceptance and respect for whatever the jury ultimately decides.”
On the 13th day of the trial, a stream of potential witnesses arrived in the courtroom. They had all been subpoenaed by the defense. But addressing them one by one, the government warned them to think very carefully before testifying.
One of the prosecutors asked a woman named Taya Plummer pointed questions about her boyfriend, who plays no role whatsoever in the kidnapping case, but is a member of an armed militant group in another state. The prosecutor, Jonathan Roth, noted that he wasn’t aware that Plummer herself was in any trouble with the law, but he left the unavoidable impression that could change if she made the wrong decision. As for how things would play out, “I’d leave that to her,” Roth added ominously.
If it was meant as a threat, it worked. Plummer said she would invoke her constitutional right against self-incrimination. Judge Jonker released her subpoena and excused her.
Under similar pressure from the government, six other potential defense witnesses — including Stephen Robeson, the FBI informant at the heart of the investigation — announced that they, too, would prefer to remain silent. And defense attorneys told Judge Jonker that several additional witnesses intended to do the same, so they decided against even calling them to court. At least one of those individuals, a retiree from Virginia named Frank Butler, had been sent a letter by the Justice Department telling him he was the target of an investigation.
The prosecutors’ tactics were so heavy-handed that they could easily have backfired, causing the jury to wonder why it was so important to shut people up.
But the jury never saw any of it. They had been removed from the courtroom before these thinly veiled threats were made. All the jury saw was the result: a piteously threadbare defense.
There were only three witnesses — who collectively testified for scarcely 30 minutes — to bolster the case, compared to the relentless stream of undercover agents, cooperators, informants, experts, associates, and even Barry Croft’s weeping girlfriend that the government was allowed to parade before the jury.
It was so thin, it was almost no defense at all. The prosecution had closed off so many of the defense’s options that last Thursday, Daniel Harris, a 24-year-old ex-Marine with a boyish face and a goofy sense of humor, took the unusual step of testifying in his own defense, a risky move that, surprisingly may have paid off.
In the end — and in ways that may be unsatisfying to many of the parties — the case that was tried in Grand Rapids will inevitably reach far beyond the evidence shown in court or even the partial verdict delivered on Friday afternoon.
In a Jan. 26 order, Judge Jonker wrote that one of the challenges of the trial would be ensuring the jurors ignore “extraneous” information about the FBI and its tactics, and focus only on the specific facts of the case. The reality, however, is that other than the prosecutions flowing out of the ongoing Capitol riot probe, the Michigan case stands as the most ambitious and closely watched investigation of domestic extremism in a generation.
Whether they crossed the sharply defined line into entrapment is a matter of legal definitions. But the tactics employed by the FBI to develop its case against the defendants — despite the Justice Department’s best efforts to keep those tactics secret — conform to a growing popular conception of government overreach.
Manipulating people into committing crimes is “unacceptable in America,” Blanchard said in closing arguments carefully calibrated to press that hot button. “That’s not how it works. We don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”
Blanchard was mistaken. Using swarms of informants to push suspected radicals toward violence is in fact exactly how it works: The FBI has been doing it for at least half a century, from the Black Panthers in the 1970s to Muslim groups in the wake of 9/11. But because the targets in this case were conservative white men, those tactics touched a nerve with a swath of the population that had never seriously considered the issue before.
The message that law enforcement wanted to send when it announced the sensational arrests back in October 2020 was, as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan put it in a press conference, that “our state and federal governments are working together to keep us all safe.”
Friday’s verdict, though not conclusive, suggests that the takeaway for many people has a distinctly different tone, one that could reverberate throughout federal law enforcement for years to come. As much as Fox, Croft, Harris, and Caserta were on trial, so were the FBI and the Department of Justice. On the eve of trial, even Judge Jonker conceded as much.
“This case is not about the role of government generally,” he wrote in an order on the Friday before jury selection. But, he added, it will “undoubtedly touch on how the defendants felt about the function of government and about the decisions of government actors.” – Ken Bensinger, Buzzfeed
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Roth took a heavy handed and aggressive tone with defendant Daniel Harris when he took the stand and I speculated at the time that may backfire on him.
Of course the DOJ will retry the case all over again; they are embarrassed and they are used to winning and getting their way.
Revolver News’ Darren Beatie brought up Michael D’Anuono, the head of the FBI Detroit field office, who was promoted to D.C. shortly after the arrests in the Whitmer case:
Indeed, what is Christopher Wray hiding as well?
The US District Attorney was seething after the verdict, attempting to make the claim they had proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt which is laughable.
This is absolutely true, we know that the FBI had a pole camera at her lake house that was recording in real time everything happening on the “ride along” and “surveillance” of her cottage. There was a team of FBI agents nearby also and in the vehicles themselves.
It was good to see people in high spirits after the verdict. The case dragged on since the arrests back in October of 2020 and it has been an uphill battle to get the truth out there. The mainstream media and the federal government should be ashamed of themselves. I hope the defendants sue the government for violating their civil rights and are properly compensated for the hell they were put through.
We will continue to follow the retrial of Fox and Croft and will keep you updated.