Defense claims entrapment in the Whitmer kidnapping plot case
The defense is saying the alleged Whitmer conspiracy kidnap plotters were entrapped by the FBI. I can’t find the actual document filed with the court, but here’s a report:
Defense lawyers Saturday said there was no kidnapping conspiracy.
“…the government initiated this case, despite the fact that it knew there was no plan to kidnap, no operational plan, and no details about how a kidnapping would occur or what would happen afterward,” the lawyers wrote.
Informants were the driving force in a case, cultivating a “sense of patriotism and right-doing,” before FBI agents arrested the men in October 2020, according to the defense team.
“…informants, of course, not only contacted the defendants face to face but also coaxed, persuaded, cajoled, played on sympathies, cultivated friendships, took advantage of the defendants’ financial conditions, and suggested that the offense they proposed ‘would further a greater good,'” the lawyers wrote.
“These defendants had no desire whatsoever to kidnap anyone,” they added.
I’ve written many posts about this case before, and from what I’ve learned so far I agree with the defense.
Here’s Frei on the same subject:
Frei believes the defendants’ chances of prevailing on this issue are small. I agree, unfortunately. Entrapment is an affirmative defense that must be proven and there is no presumption in favor of it. Therefore it’s an uphill battle, because although the burden of proof for defendants’ guilt is on the prosecution, the FBI agents and informants probably have plenty of such proof of defendants’ acquiescence in the supposed plot, and the standard for proving entrapment is a tough one to meet. Also see this [emphasis mine]:
Entrapment can be a difficult defense to assert because it requires the defendant to establish that the idea and impetus for the crime was introduced by government officials, and the defendant was not already willing or predisposed to commit the crime. It is also important to note that entrapment can only occur with a government official, such as an FBI official or a police officer, not a private individual. Additionally, since it is an affirmative defense, the criminal defendant has the burden of establishing that entrapment occurred.
In another court case, Fox and NRO are reporting that Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty of 5 of 6 charges. Maybe they will put her in a prison with trannie inmates.
How big a step is it from Federal entrapment to manufacturing out of thin air… evidence of guilt?
If one action can be justified in the ideologically corrupted FBI… why not the latter? Does not the end justify the means?
I live in Michigan, and when this was first reported a couple of weeks before the election, I was convinced that it was an operation manufactured by the FBI to influence the election. Everything we have learned since then supports that.
I now believe that the FBI is hopelessly corrupt. I didn’t always feel that way. When my son, an Afghanistan combat veteran, graduated from law school, I suggested that he apply to become an FBI agent. He smiled and said “I don’t think so.” He’s much smarter, or at least less trusting of our government than I was at the time.
I agree that there is little chance that the judge will dismiss. However I think that there is a possibility that a jury provided with all the facts may decide not to convict.
@Expat:
Or on the late unlamented slot machine king Sheldon Adelson’s Gulfstream after a suitably dignified interval.
See Jonathan Pollard.
If they put her in with the trannies, she wouldn’t just make lemonade out of lemons… No… I think we’d be seeing her franchising the lemonade stands 🙂
Oops
Apparently I’m not Orthodox (sorry Rod Dreher), so Christmas Truce is over 😛
Was the Whitney FIB setup also a dress rehearsal for Jan6th?
The London Daily Mail revisits the couple of Revolver news stories on the one of the oddly prominent stage managers at “the Insurrection” who featured quite prominently for a time, namely, Ray Epps.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10347577/amp/Ex-Marine-accused-FBI-plant-sent-incite-Jan-6-riot-pictured-ranch.html
Replete with many photos, the story also made it to RealClearPolitics.com.
Steven Rhoads and a still unarmed and also unindicted organizer is not covered by the Daily Mail, however.
Their prominence and online scrubbing raises deeply held suspicions that the “Insurrection” was very much managed by protected FIB assets.
The US Reichstag Fire for the oligarchic fascists? Hmmm? Was the Pope ever Polish?
Jaysus, listen to ourselves. We’ve known for a long time that the FBI was not pure of motive or actions, but we generally believed that it played things straight. Now that’s completely out the window.
Between this and civil asset forfeiture, trust in law enforcement on the right is so low I wonder if it can recover.
So this seems to reveal the playbook for a careerist FBI agent:
(1) develop a network of dirtbags who look to you for protection and who can do stuff that you need to deny
(2) Use dirtbags to trawl the Street (both physical and digital) for ranting idiots, and get the dirtbags to sit in on the beef sessions, build cred with chat rooms, etc
(3) As appropriate, organize the dirtbags to organize the idiots to say stuff on your script (either the one supplied by Main Justice or, if you’re gutsy and clever, your own home-brew)
(4) As appropriate, and using sleazy FBI legal expertise, pull the plug on the “plot” resulting from (3)
(5) Accept Commendation and advance three squares: “I am shocked, shocked, to learn that gambling is going on!” “Your winnings, m’sieu” “Thank you.”
You may want to review the Bundy case. In that case the judge was not receptive that the FBI set it up. Later on she was convinced and the Bundy’s were acquitted.
Now apply this to Jan 6
As VivaFrei’s buddy Robert Barnes would no doubt opine, this will be all about jury selection. There are now many, many good Americans who have now been severely red-pilled about the role our bureaucratic institutions such as the FBI are playing in our society today. The defense for these guys needs to put a lot of effort into finding a kernel of those folks to seat on the jury. If you can get maybe three who are highly skeptical of the government’s role, you can win an acquittal or at least hang the jury.
It does seem that an entrapment defense will be difficult to prove. However, the issues here are not merely the legal ones. The deeper question for us is how far the government can go to encourage a crime in order to find people to arrest. And that leads to the question of whether in this case they went to these lengths primarily to make political opponents look bad. It seems the FBI crossed way over the line here, and for political, not law-enforcement reasons.
Clean Willie.
The wife of the Orlando night club shooter, was on trial for some kind of obstruction issue. She was acquitted. One juror said that some had basic doubts about federal testimony.
Could be a doubt about the testimony, not matching other evidence, so forth.
But doubting solely because it’s a fed testifying is new ground.
I didn’t get the sense of which was the case in the trial.
But for a good many people, it will now be the latter; if a fed is testifying, discount it no matter what.
We need to separate the political and criminal issues here.
From a criminal standpoint, these defendants participated in a plot to kidnap a sitting governor. The plot was a sham, sure, but the defendants didn’t know that. The defendants didn’t know that all of the ringleaders were feds. That’s why they’re going to have such a hard time with an entrapment defense. That’s also why I’m not going to be too bent out of shape if these guys are convicted.
My outrage on this one is political. How is this anything other than the FBI manufacturing a narrative that is politically useful for Democrats? There would have been no “plot to kidnap Whitmer” but for the FBI. That’s what is corrupt to the core.
If these defendants are convicted, as they most probably will be, Democrats will say that exonerates the FBI. It won’t, but the more that folks on the right fail to separate the criminal issues from the political issues, the more successful Democrats will be with that argument.
Keep in mind that in a federal case, the accused will often be facing (1) some sort of process crime; (2) a tax charge; (3) a substantive offense of the three-felonies-a-day variety, (4) a set of ginned up charges making use of statutes whose drafters would never have dreamed they would be made use of this way; or (5) a charge which relies heavily on agents provacateurs. This is especially so in cases with political import. The federal criminal code needs to be recomposed to minimize this. Also, the territorial jurisdictions need to be redrawn so the accused might get a cross section of the population. The jurisdiction in the federal capital should include DC, a half-dozen counties in Maryland, 20-odd counties and stand-alone munis in Virginia, and a scatter of counties in WVa. and Pa. No more DC juries except for offenses defined in the territorial penal code.
From a criminal standpoint, these defendants participated in a plot to kidnap a sitting governor. The plot was a sham, sure, but the defendants didn’t know that. The defendants didn’t know that all of the ringleaders were feds. That’s why they’re going to have such a hard time with an entrapment defense. T
Again, if we had law in this country, the feds would have no case, because they manufactured the crime.
We have principles of evidence which serve the purpose of controlling the police. One of them is excluding illegally seized evidence. We also need principles to divert officers from the joys of manufacturing crimes. That’s not why we employ police.
Bauxite:
Depends what is meant by “participated.” The evidence I have seen is that these young men were chosen for their marginal existence and somewhat shaky mental states and youth, then they were befriended and “groomed” over time by charismatic older individuals who hatched the plan, taught them how to do this and that, encouraged them, transported them, introduced them to each other, and were in every sense of the word the designers and ringleaders of the plot.
If this doesn’t bother you, it should – and it shouldn’t matter if the defendants are on the left or the right or are Muslim terrorist wannabees.
And of course the entire purpose was political.
Must protect The Forehead, and OMB.
Are people still falling for the tale that q anon created j6?
And what else did i hear… oh yes, q killed ashley?
Yammer pushed QAnon swill, and vulnerable people fell for it, much as the vulnerable are groomed and entrapped by the FBI. But yammer never is wrong, so he carries on.
Frau Whitmer must have really gotten off on turning her nursing heims into german style extermination camps
Neo mentioned grooming.
I have read the fbi has done done thing similar with a couple of “Islamic Terrorists” cases…
neo – I agree that it depends on what is meant by participated. If the facts show that the feds sought out these defendants because they were weak and vulnerable, that will increase my sympathy for them. They will still have a very tough task proving entrapment as a defense.
If a private citizen or group sought out weak and vulnerable accomplices for a criminal enterprise in the same way that the FBI did here, the accomplices would have behaved in exactly the same way as these defendants, yet there would be no entrapment defense for them. I doubt that there would be any serious argument that these hypothetical private accomplices should be acquitted.
I completely agree that it matters, and matters a great deal, that the Whitmer defendants were led astray by the government rather than by a private criminal. But that doesn’t mean that the Whitmer defendants didn’t choose to commit a crime.
If we allow the narrow issue of whether the Whitmer defendants should be convicted define this controversy, then the FBI corruption here will go unanswered.
Bauxite:
I don’t have time to go back and read all the articles I’ve already read about these defendants, but there’s little doubt that’s exactly why they were chosen. For example [my emphasis]:
Plus, not only were they drawn into a plot that the government wholly concocted, they were barely “participants” at all. in the sense of committing a crime. What crime was committed? Kidnapping conspiracy – because nothing actually happened except what the FBI did. Yada yada yada talk talk talk.
More [emphasis mine]:
They face the possibility of life imprisonment, by the way.
They will still have a very tough task proving entrapment as a defense.
That’s because the federal courts have defined ‘entrapment’ out of existence. They’ve gone 90% of the way there with libel and slander. And they’ve granted themselves and the public prosecutor comprehensive immunity from tort claims. And they’ve conferred upon themselves the franchise to declare conventional matrimonial law ‘unconstitutional’. They haven’t yet declared any constitutional amendments unconstitutional, but who puts it past them?
Imagine rough men tear up the rule book in their own idiom, and get medieval with the judiciary and their law professor enablers? It will not be unjust.
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