Julie Kelly: How the G-Men Got Their Patsies in the Whitmer Fednapping Case

How they put together the frame.

[U.S. District Judge Robert] repeatedly scolded Gibbons and Blanchard for what he viewed as wasting the jury's time on "crap" lines of questioning. Before the testimony of government witnesses last Wednesday, Jonker took the unprecedented step of limiting the amount of time for cross examination. Blanchard accused Jonker of openly favoring prosecutors while frequently interjecting and interrupting defense counsel. "Limiting us is unfair and it's unconstitutional, and it doesn't aid the jury in the search for the truth," Blanchard told Jonker on August 17 after the jury had been dismissed for the day. "It's creating a perception of how this case ends."

The Justice Department also sought a narrower definition of entrapment, essentially asking Jonker to make it harder for the jury to conclude the defendants were set up by the FBI.

...

Joshua Blanchard, Croft's public defender, noted the government collected 1,000 hours of recorded conversations between FBI assets and defendants but played less than two hours of clips for the jury; one clip was only four seconds long. "The FBI doesn't exist, it should not exist, to make people look like terrorists when they aren't," Blanchard said during his closing. "This whole thing has been a big FBI charade. This isn't Russia, this isn't how our country works."

The agents and informers they'd assigned to entrap Croft and Fox had failed, so they brought in "Big Dan" Chappel to create a fake militia and then a fake fednapping plot.

And then arrest people for the feds' own scheme.

Known as "Big Dan" to the government's targets, Chappel gradually stitched the group together and specifically solicited Fox, at the time living in the dilapidated cellar of a vacuum repair shop in a Grand Rapids strip mall. During two days of testimony last week, Chappel admitted he offered Fox a credit card with a $5,000 limit at least four times and suggested Fox could use the card to purchase weaponry to execute the kidnapping scheme. (Fox refused to accept the cards.) Fox and Chappel communicated daily for nearly four months, sometimes several times a day.

The government compensated Chappel roughly $60,000 in cash and reimbursements for personal items including a laptop computer, smart watch, and new tires for his vehicle. In December 2020, two months after the caper ended, the FBI gave Chappel an envelope containing $23,540. Blanchard accused the FBI of allowing Chappel to violate FBI rules by advancing the alleged conspiracy and taking an oath as the commanding officer in an FBI-created militia.

Five FBI informants were tasked with surveilling Croft, who has been on the FBI's radar since 2019 for "anti-government" comments on social media. During an event in Wisconsin, Jenny Plunk, the primary FBI informant assigned to Croft, shared a hotel room with her target. When the group began to splinter in late summer amid concerns over Croft's wild talk, Plunk's FBI handler urged her to remind the others of Croft's value. "Show them they were brought together by Croft and he has good ideas. Keep working to solve the differences in the group," FBI special agent Christopher Long texted Plunk on August 10, 2020. For her services, Plunk was paid at least $8,000.

posted by Ace at 03:10 PM

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