President Joe Biden’s condemnation of political violence Sunday night following the attempted assassination of his Republican rival, Donald Trump, listed a number of recent such incidents, but it also included the curious case of the alleged plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“We cannot—we must not go down this road in America,” Biden said. “We’ve traveled it before throughout our history. Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”
The inclusion of the would-be Whitmer kidnappers is a bit of continued gaslighting by the Biden administration, because the plot was in large part concocted and encouraged by paid FBI informants and their Bureau handlers.
The arrest of six Michigan militia members who plotted to kidnap Whitmer before the 2020 presidential election grabbed national headlines and stoked fears of rising right-wing extremism. However, the federal case against the plotters unraveled as court documents and news investigations revealed that the FBI used no less than a dozen of confidential informants and two undercover agents to gather intel on the group.
As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted, “During a June 2020 meeting highlighted by the FBI, for example, it was an informant who argued that kidnapping was necessary.”
“We have a saying in my office,” one FBI special agent told a confidential informant in the case. “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
That’s why two of the defendants charged in the Whitmer conspiracy were acquitted, and two others were only convicted after a mistrial that stunned and embarrassed the FBI.
Hellbound and Down 