The Whitmer Kidnapping Case Reveals The FBI’s New Counterterrorism Target Is You By Matthew Braun for The Federalist
What’s interesting about the revelations from this week is not that the FBI is up to some new, clever gambit to combat the wily insurrectionists in our midst.
This week included interesting revelations about the FBI’s case against the handful of people charged with plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Of 14 people indicted, five (or more) were working as informants for the FBI.
As Revolver has noted, the five people who seem to be the FBI informants were also the people who seemed to have all the kidnapping ideas and access to all the equipment needed for a paramilitary assault on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s vacation home. At one point, the leadership of the conspiracy met, and three of the five people in that discussion were FBI.
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I worked in counterterrorism for more than 10 years, so I understand all the reasons a federal agent would argue this isn’t technically entrapment. The people didn’t know they were surrounded by fedsx and continued to take overt actions that advanced the fantasy conspiracy, and that’s illegal. Okay, fine.
But this got me thinking about some of the old ISIS and al-Qaeda cases I reviewed when I was helping prosecute terrorists who actually killed people. I remember giving my buddies in the FBI a hard time when they would “win” a domestic terror case and all they had was a kook who had been running his mouth on the internet.
“Your case is weak,” I would tell them, “And why are you wearing a suit? We’re going to be reading in the SCIF again today. It’s the same things we’ve been doing all year.”
At the risk of sounding like Tom Nichols some old man sitting on a porch going on about how hard things were in my day, I’m going to say this: There was a time the FBI caught and prosecuted really dangerous people.
Remember Ramzi Yousef, the guy who bombed the World Trade Center? Now, that’s a real terrorist. He could build bombs and teach others to build them. He would work independently in foreign countries for months on end. He could quietly travel and move money around the world without anyone noticing.
When the FBI secured his conviction, he was airlifted out of the courthouse in lower Manhattan. The agents who caught him were in the helicopter with him. They could easily see the World Trade Center, and one of the agents said to Yousef, “You failed. They’re still standing.”
“I just needed a little more money,” Yousef said.
That’s a real terrorist.
