


GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. >> Two men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s governor wanted to grab Gretchen Whitmer and hang her, prosecutors said during a stark closing argument Monday as the government tried for a second time to get convictions in an alleged plot to trigger a revolution in 2020.
The jury got the case around noon after a morning of final remarks, including a fiery challenge by defense lawyers who accused the FBI of manufacturing a scheme against Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. Prosecutors, however, called that a phony narrative.
“These defendants were outside a woman’s house in the middle of the night with night-vision goggles and guns and a plan to kidnap her,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said. “And they made a real bomb. That’s far enough, isn’t it?”
After a nine-day trial, Kessler repeatedly urged jurors to also focus on what Fox and Croft were saying months before the FBI placed undercover agents and informants inside the group that summer.
It was Kessler’s effort to get the jury to look past a constant defense argument that the men were entrapped by the government every step of the way.
“‘Which governor is going to be dragged off and hung for treason first?’” Kessler said, quoting Croft’s own words.
“Any governor would do,” the prosecutor said. “By the end of June, he was telling people Michigan’s government is a target of opportunity, and God knows the governor needs to be hung. He didn’t just want to kidnap her. He wanted to have his own trial and execute her.”