Octopus Overlords

Jurors on Friday acquitted two men of conspiring to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and said they were deadlocked on charges against two others, in a significant defeat for federal prosecutors in one of the highest-profile domestic terrorism cases in decades.

The jury of six men and six women found Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris not guilty of all charges against them, and did not reach any verdicts on the charges against Barry Croft and Adam Fox. All four of the men had been accused of plotting to snatch Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, from her vacation home in 2020.

As the verdicts were read, federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents sat in silence while Mr. Harris and Mr. Caserta hugged their lawyers.

“Obviously we’re disappointed in the outcome,” Andrew Birge, the United States attorney for the Western District of Michigan, said outside the courthouse. He added: “We still believe in the jury system, and really, there’s not too much more I can say at this time. I appreciate the time the jury put in. They listened to a lot of evidence, deliberated quite a bit.”

The effort to prosecute the kidnapping plot, which BuzzFeed has extensively reported on, is sprawling. Both the prosecution and the defense are relying heavily on more than 1,000 hours of conversations and other events secretly recorded by informants or undercover agents. The defense lawyers want the case thrown out on entrapment grounds, accusing investigators of “egregious overreaching” by manipulating the accused men to drive the plot forward. Prosecutors will attempt to prove that the suspects were inclined toward the violence from the start.

In another challenge for the case, prosecutors have made an unusual decision not to call to the witness stand three F.B.I. agents with high-profile roles in the investigation. One agent was fired last summer after being charged with domestic violence. Another agent, while supervising “Big Dan,” tried to build a private security consulting firm based in part on some of his work for the F.B.I. Some of the information about that agent became part of the defense arguments.

...

He was not alone. The F.B.I. deployed at least 12 informants, as well as several undercover agents, according to defense filings. On the nighttime surveillance operation of the governor’s cottage, for example, the defense described “Big Dan” as the main organizer. Stephen Robeson, with a long history of both past crimes and work as an informant, was there too. The “explosives expert” who could topple the bridge was actually an undercover F.B.I. agent, as was a man in another vehicle.

The defense lawyers using that same trove of evidence material have built an entirely different scenario of what happened. They depict the accused as reluctant puppets entrapped by the F.B.I. agents and informants whom they say came up with the kidnapping plot.

...

Sting operations using informants are a thorny tactic in terror cases. In those developed after the Sept. 11 attacks, F.B.I. agents often got involved when someone expressed interest in joining Al Qaeda or in fomenting some kind of terrorist act. If the suspects had trouble agreeing on a plot or acquiring weapons, the informants or undercover agents would sometimes help them as a way of gauging criminal intent.

Critics of such F.B.I. methods like Michael German, a former undercover F.B.I. agent, accuse the agency of acting like Cecil B. DeMille, manufacturing complicated, theatrical scenarios rather than pursuing the more complex task of unearthing actual extremist plots.

Mr. German, who is now a fellow at the Liberty & National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice, said, “Rather than focus on those crimes and investigating them, there appears to be more interest in this method of manufacturing plots for the F.B.I. to solve.”

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Fri Apr 08, 2022 4:54 pm I'm sure being unable to prosecute a kidnapping case involving a public official won't have any unforeseen negative consequences in the future.

LordMortis wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 8:23 am I can't help but think of how terrible of a person I am. Once he threatened to blow his own head off, I would have let him. I don't understand how we slaughter so many not so violent criminals but then talk down and take in to custody so many murderous ones. I hope it's a sense of scale that I can't comprehend and the news worthiness of cases makes things seem different than they are in reality.

RunningMn9 wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 8:59 am As many have said I'm sure, as soon as I heard that he was taken into custody, that told me an awful lot about him.

malchior wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:02 pm

RunningMn9 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:51 pm I have no intent to watch the video, but what is it about the first 20 seconds?

RunningMn9 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:51 pm I have no intent to watch the video, but what is it about the first 20 seconds?

LordMortis wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:55 pm

RunningMn9 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:51 pm I have no intent to watch the video, but what is it about the first 20 seconds?

Glad I'm not alone. I have it in me to see such things but I am curious to know why it's so soul crushing aside from the obvious.

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 11:52 am
And we have to have that conversation about these rifles in the hands of our unstable fellow citizens.

Unagi wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 3:41 pm

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 11:52 am
And we have to have that conversation about these rifles in the hands of our unstable fellow citizens.

I don’t think it’s realistic to think we will ever know (before it’s too late) who is stable and who is unstable.

I’m afraid nothing is going to change until the stable ones figure that notion out.

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:46 pm

LordMortis wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:55 pm

RunningMn9 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:51 pm I have no intent to watch the video, but what is it about the first 20 seconds?

Glad I'm not alone. I have it in me to see such things but I am curious to know why it's so soul crushing aside from the obvious.

You only need the first 20 or so seconds to know all you need to. It's a few things. I won't go into detail but you see the coldness of several murders and how living people are immediately turned into corpses in real life, as opposed to tv or film or your imagination. It's different, and worse. It's like someone snuffing out candles, not John Wick.

The transition from someone just casually pulling up in a parking lot to beginning a mass murder is instantaneous. There is no shouting or panic of people fleeing, just gun shots and bodies falling. He also casually headshots bodies as he walks by.

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:46 pmThe transition from someone just casually pulling up in a parking lot to beginning a mass murder is instantaneous. There is no shouting or panic of people fleeing, just gun shots and bodies falling. He also casually headshots bodies as he walks by.

He wrote that he chased down a cat who attacked his own cat, Paige, in his garage and stabbed it repeatedly with a knife. He eventually decapitated it with a hatchet, he said, and buried it in the backyard, but not before taking a picture.

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 4:10 pmThat's the conversation we need to have.

For months, as 18-year-old Payton Gendron formulated a plan to kill dozens of Black people in Buffalo, he worked to keep his racist plot a secret from his family, according to Gendron’s postings online.

“I literally can’t wait any longer, my parents know something is wrong,” he wrote on April 15, musing about when to carry out a planned shooting that took place Saturday, leaving 10 people dead at a Buffalo supermarket.

...

In June of last year, Gendron underwent a psychiatric evaluation after he said in an online high school class that he planned to commit “murder/suicide.” Gendron wrote that he was cleared after he told the evaluators he was joking to get out of class. “It was not a joke,” he said in the Discord messages. “I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

...

“I just had a meeting with my parents about everything that happened this week,” he wrote on March 29. “I lied nearly the entire time. I said I was doing fine in school and going to every class when I haven’t been in a class for weeks now.”

Frankly, I'm not sure how we do that without blanket bans, and I don't see the political support for blanket bans. Maybe Buffalo will be the one that finally moves the needle?