Michigan Bomb Plot: FBI Scheme to Create False ‘Domestic Terror’ Cabal Exposed in Court

FBI director’s use of entrapment is part of a strategy designed to sow public fear and render support for draconian anti-terrorist legislation.
For 95 years—from J Edgar Hoover to Christopher Wray—the FBI has lied, cheated, threatened, and even murdered Americans. Is it beyond reform?

Should we replace it with a national police force that protects instead of persecutes those it is supposed to serve?

The Michigan bombing case is just the latest, but it is surely not the first example, of the FBI overstepping legal and ethical boundaries to burnish its public image by creating Bad Guys to scare the public and blackmail Congress into passing ever larger budgets to fight domestic terrorism.

Like the Pentagon and the CIA, the FBI needs Bad Guys to justify its existence—and it’s trampling on civil rights. So if villains do not exist, they will be created. In the case of the Governors bombing plot, the FBI cynically created “dangerous terrorists” out of “credulous weekend warriors, often stoned on marijuana and prone to big, wild talk.”

But the members of the jury didn’t buy it

The jury in the bombing case—six men and six women—believed the defense’s evidence, which showed that “FBI agents and informants had tricked and cajoled the men into targeting the governor.”

Two of the defendants, Daniel Harris and Brendan Caserta, were acquitted in court and a hung jury probably ended the case for the other two, Adam Fox and Barry Croft.

During the trial, one of the defense attorneys said that the FBI’s plan was “utter nonsense,” and pleaded with jurors to be the “firewall” against the government. “I think what the FBI did is unconscionable,” another defense attorney said outside court. “And I think the jury just sent them a message loud and clear that these tactics—we’re not going to condone what they’ve done here.”

Bomb Plot

On October 7, 2020, one month before the presidential election, six men associated with a militia known as the Michigan Wolverines were arrested in a sting outside a warehouse in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a city east of Ann Arbor.

An undercover FBI informant had driven the men to the warehouse, tricking them into thinking they were going to make a down payment on explosives, pick up some military gear, and then head to Buffalo Wild Wings for beer and chicken.

The next day, The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, and other media published stories detailing a “failed domestic terrorism plot to overthrow the Michigan state government.”

[…]

Big Dan Hosts a Government Party

At least a dozen confidential informants infiltrated the Wolverine Watchmen, including an undercover bomb maker.

Court testimony shows that the main leader and instigator of the phony plot was an FBI informant named Dan Chapel—an Iraq War veteran and postal worker who went by the nickname “Big Dan.” The former army sergeant and firearms instructor made hundreds of hours of clandestine recordings of the defendants, accompanying them on trips to meetings and training exercises, and often paying for their travel expenses.

Dan told jurors that he was a former Wolverine Watchman who quit the group after hearing the men talk about killing the police. He then became an FBI informant who was paid $54,000 for seven months of work, during which time he carried a secret recording device for the FBI.

On one outing, Big Dan had the others videotape themselves jumping out of Kaleb Franks’ blue PT Cruiser and taking cover behind its doors while they fired rifles.

Big Dan said that his FBI handlers told him to develop a plan whereby teams of men wearing body armor and equipped with explosives kidnap Governor Whitmer and take her on a boat to Wisconsin where they were to hold a kangaroo court and then execute her.

R. Michael Bullotta, a defense lawyer who worked as Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit, said that the premature arrests hampered the government’s case. He also said that the use of too many government informants “almost made it look like it was a government party as opposed to having just one informant reporting to the FBI.”

[…]

Another of Big Dan’s FBI handlers—Henrik Impola—sent text messages asking Big Dan to destroy his text messages and to lie to Pete Musico, the founder of the Wolverine Watchmen, and accuse another person named Trent of being an undercover agent rather than him.

Impola—who made hundreds of hours of secret recordings during the probe—had been accused of perjury in a prior case and “had trouble telling the truth under oath.”

Yet another FBI agent involved with the case, Richard Trask, was charged with felony assault in state court for beating his wife after visiting a swingers party together.

Michael Hills, Brendan Caserta’s lawyer, said that Jayson Chambers’ side business sent the strongest “signal” to jurors that something had gone wrong.

Here was a “rogue FBI agent trying to line his own pockets with his own cybersecurity company, pushing a conspiracy that just never was, never was going to be. Our Governor was never in any danger. And I think the jury—they didn’t get all of it—but they smelled enough of it.”

Manipulation

The defendants in the case, to be sure, were not choir boys. Prosecutors said they had cased Governor Whitmer’s vacation house twice, drew maps of the area, built a model of her cottage and practiced using explosives. Brendan Caserta once said that he “wanted to drink the blood from the skulls of Zionist bankers.”

What is disturbing, however, is the clear effort by the FBI to provoke, mobilize and then entrap a group of anti-government zealots for the purpose of manipulating public opinion.

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/17/michigan-bomb-plot-fbi-scheme-to-create-false-domestic-terror-cabal-exposed-in-court/