Did the FBI Manipulate the Michigan Kidnapping Plot to Influence the Election?

Americans deserve to know whether the FBI meddled in the 2020 election.

Remember this headline? “Trump appears to give a pass to the domestic kidnapping plot against Whitmer.”

Just before the November 2020 election, CNN and many other mainstream media outlets repeatedly attempted to tie President Trump to a domestic terrorism plot allegedly aimed at Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. “Trump has repeatedly attacked Whitmer before and after the news of the plot,” CNN wrote, implying that Trump’s criticism of Whitmer inspired the plot.

Whitmer went further, directly accusing Trump of “fomenting anger and giving comfort to those who spread fear and division.” The Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “Donald Trump was complicit in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” adding, “Political rhetoric can incite. Incendiary posturing can trigger those who carry matches. We’ve now seen this play out dramatically in Michigan.”

The timing of the story and its circumstances seemed a little fishy, even then. The headlines reinforced very ugly stereotypes about Trump supporters: Violent rural men hatching a plot to kidnap a key Democratic governor. Nobody paid any attention to the FBI’s weirdly balancing details that the kidnappers also hated Trump. It’s almost like the FBI added that detail to the plot to camouflage the otherwise obviously partisan impact of the story.

The story supposedly broke when it did because the kidnappers had begun to set things in motion. Trump lost Michigan just a few weeks later by a very small margin. The story almost certainly played a role in tipping this key battleground state.

In publicizing the plot, the Justice Department declared its commitment to “make sure violent extremists never succeed with their plans, particularly when they target our duly elected leaders,” and that, “All of us can disagree about politics, but those disagreements should never . . . result in violence.” We all knew exactly what that was supposed to be code for: The FBI stopped Trump supporters from kidnapping the Democratic governor of Michigan.

Last week, BuzzFeed published an article that completely changes what we know about the plot. Previously, we were led to believe that the FBI “disrupted” the plot. But according to...

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