FBI arrest 6 men in a militia plot to kidnap Michigan governor who also wanted to kill police officers.
- Thread starter hanimmal
- Start date
and should they not appear? Carole Merrill will you tell us..what's behind door #1? I have a feeling Party City is going to have a run on Kraken costumes..pick me up some pink Silly String..will ya?
IT IS SO ORDERED.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michigan-2020-election-fallout/2021/06/23/e15bc0d2-d387-11eb-a53a-3b5450fdca7a_story.html
As Michigan state Rep. Donna Lasinski got out of her car at the state Capitol in Lansing on a sunny morning last week, she was greeted by two people carrying what she described as assault rifles while protesters outside the building called for an audit of the 2020 election.
Such disconcerting encounters are not uncommon in Lansing — a reflection of persistent and growing tension gripping Michigan eight months after Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump and more than a year after arrests were made in a plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election have persisted in this state, where local county officials are contending with demands by some residents to review ballots for possible fraud. The mounting calls by Trump supporters to revisit the election results are creating a thorny dilemma for the state Republican Party, which has sought to fend off those efforts, even as GOP officials seek changes to election law.
Trump has grown increasingly consumed with ballot audits as he pushes falsehood that election was stolen
On Wednesday, a Republican-controlled state Senate committee issued a report forcefully rejecting the claims of widespread fraud in the state, saying citizens should be confident in the results and skeptical of “those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”
As Lasinski, the House Democratic leader, walked to her office last week, speakers on the Capitol steps lambasted officials who have resisted requests to review last year’s ballots and asserted that the election was well-run and that Biden received more votes than Trump.
“They are lying,” said Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who is spearheading the petition drive. A small crowd cheered as he denounced Michigan’s secretary of state as a “tyrant” and the state’s Democratic governor as “the Fuhrer” and claimed that county clerks — many of them Republicans — had engaged in racketeering and conspiracy.
“These people have committed crimes,” he said.
“Put them in shackles,” shouted a man in the crowd, to whoops and applause.
Lasinski said the atmosphere has grown more fraught by the day.
“It seems we have become ground zero in this effort we see across the country to suppress democracy and deny the peaceful transfer of power,” she said.
DePerno did not respond to a request for comment.
'Zero credibility'
The demands for recounts in Michigan are rooted largely in an election night error in rural Antrim County, which temporarily showed Donald Trump losing the historically Republican stronghold. The mistake was quickly corrected to show Trump carried the county with 61 percent of the vote.
However, Trump and his supporters seized on the error. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a Michigan resident, held a news conference days after the election in which she decried a “major software issue in Antrim County” that she said could hold implications for the election in other areas.
False theories about what happened in Antrim proliferated and a local resident filed a suit challenging the results in the county last fall. Trump hailed it in a statement this year as “the major Michigan Election Fraud case,” adding that “the number of votes is MASSIVE and determinative.”
Last month, a Michigan judge dismissed the suit, citing an audit conducted by Michigan’s secretary of state that found the election had been conducted fairly and accurately.
In its report Wednesday, the Senate Oversight Committee recommended that the attorney general investigate “those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends,” adding that their statements have “zero credibility.”
“All compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further,” McBroom wrote in his letter.
But the calls that began in Antrim have spread to a handful of other counties, where citizens have demanded audits, some citing a documentary produced by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell that falsely claims votes were hacked by foreign powers.
Inspired by Arizona recount, Trump loyalists push to revisit election results in communities around the country
On Tuesday, the board of commissioners of Cheboygan County — a tiny jurisdiction that Trump won with 64 percent of the vote — agreed to send a letter to the state elections director seeking permission to conduct a ballot audit, citing concerns from constituents. (The Cheboygan board said it would seek to hire “an accredited election auditor,” a distinction from the widely criticized recount underway in Arizona, which is being conducted by a firm that is not federally accredited to test voting systems.)
Republicans have been divided over the issue. But state GOP spokeswoman Kaitlyn Buss said in a statement this week that the party is “not interested in relitigating the past. This is our formal position.”
Leading Republican legislators have taken a similar stance. Both Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Rep. Ann Bollin, the chairwoman of the House Elections Committee, have stated that Biden won the state.
They have drawn sharp denunciations from those casting doubt on the results: At the rally in Lansing, one speaker called for Shirkey and other Republican leaders to be ousted from office.
Republican strategists fear that Trump’s obsession with relitigating the 2020 election is turning off suburban moderate voters who were once a core part of the Republican base in Michigan and elsewhere.
“We need to be focused on 2022 and 2024,” said the state party’s executive director, Jason Rowe, in an exchange last week with Michigan reporters in which he pushed back against the audit advocates.
A push for new laws
There appears to be consensus among Michigan Republicans about revamping the state’s election rules, an aggressive effort that has alarmed Democrats and voting right activists.
Earlier this year, Senate Republicans in Michigan introduced a 39-bill election reform package that would tighten voter identification rules, absentee ballot requirements and requirements for drop boxes and recounts.
The proposal is part of a wave of voting restrictions being promoted by state Republicans around the country this year.
States across the country are dropping barriers to voting, widening a stark geographic divide in ballot access
“It is a sad package of legislation,” said Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, who described it as a way to “deny the voices of voters going to the polls,” a way for Republicans “to circumvent the results when the results are not in their favor.”
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Nothing like using a brand-named manufactured issue and then demand political data on students to use in their attack on our society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/24/florida-intellectual-freedom-law-mandates-viewpoint-surveys/
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n'awww it's okay you can keep it.
um someone needs to tell them the Michigan 'audit' is over and the report issued.
captainmorgan
Well-Known Member
Michigan Judge Refuses to Allow Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Other 'Kraken' Attorneys to Skip Sanctions Hearing
Hours after lawyers for the so-called "Kraken" litigation to overturn the 2020 election asked to skip attending an upcoming sanctions hearing, a federal judge reiterated that they must attend.
captainmorgan
Well-Known Member
Must mean the GQP is going for a ninja recount here soon.
www.rawstory.com
Michigan GOP leader abruptly resigns after he dared to say Trump lost in 2020
The leader of the Michigan Republican Party who dared to counter his party's narrative and say that Donald Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election has resigned from his position. "I resigned my position as executive director and the reasons will remain between me and Chairman Weiser," Roe said...
www.rawstory.com
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
That is our tax payer money that they are wasting.Must mean the GQP is going for a ninja recount here soon.
Michigan GOP leader abruptly resigns after he dared to say Trump lost in 2020
The leader of the Michigan Republican Party who dared to counter his party's narrative and say that Donald Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election has resigned from his position. "I resigned my position as executive director and the reasons will remain between me and Chairman Weiser," Roe said...
captainmorgan
Well-Known Member
Militia-linked Michigan sheriff hires private eye to probe supposed 'voter fraud' in county Trump won by 32 points
Election clerks in Michigan are reporting strange interactions with a man investigating election fraud conspiracy theories for a controversial sheriff. Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf faced calls to resign in October after sharing a stage with the Michigan Liberty Militia and admitting he knew...
www.rawstory.com
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I never heard of that website that they got that story from, it looks interesting.Militia-linked Michigan sheriff hires private eye to probe supposed 'voter fraud' in county Trump won by 32 points
Election clerks in Michigan are reporting strange interactions with a man investigating election fraud conspiracy theories for a controversial sheriff. Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf faced calls to resign in October after sharing a stage with the Michigan Liberty Militia and admitting he knew...
That is some great local level reporting.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
Gov. Whitmer Kidnapping Suspects Claim Entrapment (buzzfeednews.com)
WATCHING THE WATCHMEN
The Michigan kidnapping case is a major test for the Biden administration’s commitment to fighting domestic terrorism — and a crucible for the fierce ideological divisions pulling the country apart.
In the inky darkness of a late summer night last September, three cars filled with armed men began circling Birch Lake in northern Michigan, looking for ways to approach Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s three-bedroom vacation cottage, subdue her — using a stun gun if necessary — and drag her away.
One vehicle stopped to check out a boat launch while a second searched in vain for the right house in the thick woods ringing the lake. The third car ran countersurveillance, using night vision goggles to look out for cops and handheld radios to communicate with the others.
Earlier, they had scoped out a bridge over the Elk River, just a few miles away, scrambling down under the span to figure out where plastic explosives would need to be placed to blow it sky-high. That would slow police response, giving the men time to escape with the governor — who had infuriated them by imposing COVID lockdowns, among other outrages — and either take her to Lake Michigan, where they could abandon her on a boat, or whisk her to Wisconsin, where she would be tried as a “tyrant.”
“Everybody down with what’s going on?” an Iraq War veteran in the group demanded to know when they ended their recon mission, well past midnight, at a campsite where they were all staying.
“If you’re not down with the thought of kidnapping,” someone else replied, “don’t sit here.”
The men planned for all kinds of obstacles, but there was one they didn’t anticipate: The FBI had been listening in all along.
For six months, the Iraq War vet had been wearing a wire, gathering hundreds of hours of recordings. He wasn’t the only one. A biker who had traveled from Wisconsin to join the group was another informant. The man who’d advised them on where to put the explosives — and offered to get them as much as the task would require — was an undercover FBI agent. So was a man in one of the other cars who said little and went by the name Mark.
Just over three weeks later, federal and state agents swooped in and arrested more than a dozen men accused of participating in what a federal prosecutor called a “deeply disturbing” criminal conspiracy hatched over months in secret meetings, on encrypted chats, and in paramilitary-style training exercises. Seven of the men who had driven to Birch Lake that night would end up in jail.
The case made international headlines, with the Justice Department touting it as an example of law enforcement agencies “working together to make sure violent extremists never succeed with their plans.” Prosecutors alleged that kidnapping the governor was just the first step in what some on the right call “the Big Boog,” a long-awaited civil war that would overthrow the government and return the United States to some supposed Revolutionary War–era ideal.
The defendants, for their part, see it very differently. They say they were set up.
The audacious plot to kidnap a sitting governor — seen by many as a precursor to the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol by hundreds of Trump-supporting protesters — has become one of the most important domestic terrorism investigations in a generation.
The prosecution has already emerged as a critical test for how the Biden administration approaches the growing threat of homegrown anti-government groups. More than that, though, the case epitomizes the ideological divisions that have riven the country over the past several years. To some, the FBI’s infiltration of the innermost circle of armed anti-government groups is a model for how to successfully forestall dangerous acts of domestic terrorism. But for others, it’s an example of precisely the kind of outrageous government overreach that radicalizes people in the first place, and, increasingly, a flashpoint for deep state conspiracy theories.
The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.
An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.
A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come.
The Iraq War vet, for his part, became so deeply enmeshed in a Michigan militant group that he rose to become its second-in-command, encouraging members to collaborate with other potential suspects and paying for their transportation to meetings. He prodded the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping plot to advance his plan, then baited the trap that led to the arrest.
This account is based on an analysis of court filings, transcripts, exhibits, audio recordings, and other documents, as well as interviews with more than two dozen people with direct knowledge of the case, including several who were present at meetings and training sessions where prosecutors say the plot was hatched. All but one of the 14 original defendants have pleaded not guilty, and they vigorously deny that they were involved in a conspiracy to kidnap anyone.
...
WATCHING THE WATCHMEN
The Michigan kidnapping case is a major test for the Biden administration’s commitment to fighting domestic terrorism — and a crucible for the fierce ideological divisions pulling the country apart.
In the inky darkness of a late summer night last September, three cars filled with armed men began circling Birch Lake in northern Michigan, looking for ways to approach Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s three-bedroom vacation cottage, subdue her — using a stun gun if necessary — and drag her away.
One vehicle stopped to check out a boat launch while a second searched in vain for the right house in the thick woods ringing the lake. The third car ran countersurveillance, using night vision goggles to look out for cops and handheld radios to communicate with the others.
Earlier, they had scoped out a bridge over the Elk River, just a few miles away, scrambling down under the span to figure out where plastic explosives would need to be placed to blow it sky-high. That would slow police response, giving the men time to escape with the governor — who had infuriated them by imposing COVID lockdowns, among other outrages — and either take her to Lake Michigan, where they could abandon her on a boat, or whisk her to Wisconsin, where she would be tried as a “tyrant.”
“Everybody down with what’s going on?” an Iraq War veteran in the group demanded to know when they ended their recon mission, well past midnight, at a campsite where they were all staying.
“If you’re not down with the thought of kidnapping,” someone else replied, “don’t sit here.”
The men planned for all kinds of obstacles, but there was one they didn’t anticipate: The FBI had been listening in all along.
For six months, the Iraq War vet had been wearing a wire, gathering hundreds of hours of recordings. He wasn’t the only one. A biker who had traveled from Wisconsin to join the group was another informant. The man who’d advised them on where to put the explosives — and offered to get them as much as the task would require — was an undercover FBI agent. So was a man in one of the other cars who said little and went by the name Mark.
Just over three weeks later, federal and state agents swooped in and arrested more than a dozen men accused of participating in what a federal prosecutor called a “deeply disturbing” criminal conspiracy hatched over months in secret meetings, on encrypted chats, and in paramilitary-style training exercises. Seven of the men who had driven to Birch Lake that night would end up in jail.
The case made international headlines, with the Justice Department touting it as an example of law enforcement agencies “working together to make sure violent extremists never succeed with their plans.” Prosecutors alleged that kidnapping the governor was just the first step in what some on the right call “the Big Boog,” a long-awaited civil war that would overthrow the government and return the United States to some supposed Revolutionary War–era ideal.
The defendants, for their part, see it very differently. They say they were set up.
The audacious plot to kidnap a sitting governor — seen by many as a precursor to the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol by hundreds of Trump-supporting protesters — has become one of the most important domestic terrorism investigations in a generation.
The prosecution has already emerged as a critical test for how the Biden administration approaches the growing threat of homegrown anti-government groups. More than that, though, the case epitomizes the ideological divisions that have riven the country over the past several years. To some, the FBI’s infiltration of the innermost circle of armed anti-government groups is a model for how to successfully forestall dangerous acts of domestic terrorism. But for others, it’s an example of precisely the kind of outrageous government overreach that radicalizes people in the first place, and, increasingly, a flashpoint for deep state conspiracy theories.
The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.
An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.
A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come.
The Iraq War vet, for his part, became so deeply enmeshed in a Michigan militant group that he rose to become its second-in-command, encouraging members to collaborate with other potential suspects and paying for their transportation to meetings. He prodded the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping plot to advance his plan, then baited the trap that led to the arrest.
This account is based on an analysis of court filings, transcripts, exhibits, audio recordings, and other documents, as well as interviews with more than two dozen people with direct knowledge of the case, including several who were present at meetings and training sessions where prosecutors say the plot was hatched. All but one of the 14 original defendants have pleaded not guilty, and they vigorously deny that they were involved in a conspiracy to kidnap anyone.
...
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
This sounds a lot more ominous than saying that someone who joined the militia got spooked when shit started getting real and tipped off the FBI and started wearing a wire.
Dryxi
Well-Known Member
This is a story we have heard before.
On June 29, 2011, Cromitie, Onta Williams, and David Williams were each sentenced, for their part in the attempted attack, to 25 years in prison by Manhattan Federal Judge Colleen McMahon. The judge criticized not only the defendants, but also what she viewed as the government's overzealous handling of the investigation. Referring to Cromitie, she said, "The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own. It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true." She added, "The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot – there was no nefarious plot to foil." She said the defendants were "not political or religious martyrs," but "thugs for hire, pure and simple."
Whether this plot was real or not, who knows? It's not like the FBI had a man inside planning the plot as the #2 ringleader, organizing and paying for the meetings, or recruitment.
On June 29, 2011, Cromitie, Onta Williams, and David Williams were each sentenced, for their part in the attempted attack, to 25 years in prison by Manhattan Federal Judge Colleen McMahon. The judge criticized not only the defendants, but also what she viewed as the government's overzealous handling of the investigation. Referring to Cromitie, she said, "The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own. It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true." She added, "The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot – there was no nefarious plot to foil." She said the defendants were "not political or religious martyrs," but "thugs for hire, pure and simple."
Whether this plot was real or not, who knows? It's not like the FBI had a man inside planning the plot as the #2 ringleader, organizing and paying for the meetings, or recruitment.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
They are still gonna go down for it, informants have a lot of latitude, besides it's the thought that counts, the intent, and it was criminal. Wait until there are new anti domestic terrorist lists and new laws to easily scoop them up, they are coming as soon as democratic patriots gain control of the government. 2022 will be another pivotal election in the struggle for the soul of the nation. If they were foreign or even American Muslims living abroad, they would have drone struck them for less.