It appears that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and possibly one of her top advisors, were accomplices, not innocents, in a “foiled” kidnapping plot.
No one in national politics plays the role of victim better than Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
In a fawning 3,700-word puff piece published by the Washington Post over the weekend, reporter Ruby Cramer told the embattled governor’s self-described tale of woe: Whitmer isn’t really an ambitious political climber—the daughter of well-connected and wealthy parents, she started running for office in her 20s and was elected to the Michigan legislature at age 29—but rather a misunderstood and underappreciated champion of the people targeted because of her sex, looks, anti-Trump stance, lockdown orders, and pro-abortion views, among other unjustified reasons for “right-wing” derision.
That’s Whitmer’s story, anyway.
Interviewed at the official governor’s summer residence in Mackinac Island, Whitmer and her daughters detailed the horrors of growing up in Clarence Thomas’ America while enjoying a taxpayer-funded getaway. “I live on a college campus,” Whitmer’s oldest daughter, Sherry, told Cramer. (Both daughters attend the prestigious University of Michigan.) “There are people out there who would force me into conceiving. It’s a scary thought.” She then admitted she really doesn’t have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy since she is a lesbian.
But the FBI-concocted plot to abduct and assassinate Whitmer remains a source of great angst for the governor even though she knew about it weeks, if not months, before the “kidnappers” were arrested. At some point during the summer of 2020, Whitmer told her family “there was going to be a story coming out soon about ‘some people plotting to kidnap and kill me.’” That disclosure, according to Whitmer, happened a few months after an anti-lockdown protest at the Lansing Capitol building in late April 2020.
From there, Whitmer’s recollection of the timeline gets fuzzy, if not revelatory. “When the kidnapping plot was announced, it was summer. And people were blowing up your phone, right?” Whitmer asked her daughters during the interview. “Yeah,” replied her daughter, Sydney.
Except that’s not what happened. Law enforcement made the arrests on October 7, 2020—fall, not summer. Whitmer for her part was ready to go the next day with a distraught video message blaming Donald Trump for inciting right-wing “militias” to attack her. The shocking news produced wall-to-wall negative headlines for Trump as millions of Americans were voting for president; Joe Biden took full advantage of the FBI’s latest gift to the Democratic Party, ranting from the campaign trail about Trump’s “dog whistles” to extremist groups.
But three months after the Justice Department failed to win a single conviction in the kidnapping conspiracy, a case the government considers one of its biggest domestic terror investigations in decades, not one reporter has pushed Whitmer to explain what she knew and when she knew it. Further, her public comments and FBI testimony presented during the trial earlier this year indicate Whitmer and her family knew well before the public did and that she was never in danger. Plenty of evidence suggests Whitmer was in on the scheme for months.
Rather than act like a reporter digging for answers, Cramer instead allowed Whitmer to complain about the recent acquittal of two men and a mistrial for two other defendants amid a clear case of FBI entrapment—a key detail Cramer omitted from her story.
“It was awful,” Whitmer told Cramer about the verdicts reached by her own constituents in April. “We’re supposed to expect this now? People plot to kidnap and kill a governor?”
Whitmer also complained that the attack on her is described as a “kidnapping plot” instead of an “assasination plot,” as the media correctly describes the near-miss murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last month. “Does anyone think these kidnappers wanted to keep me or ransom me?” she whined to Cramer. “No. They were going to put me on trial and then execute me. It was an assassination plot, but no one talks about it that way. Even the way people talk about it has muted the seriousness of it.”
What has “muted” the “seriousness” of the plot isn’t Whitmer’s gender but the fact at least a dozen FBI undercover agents and informants working with FBI handlers at multiple FBI field offices in the eastern half of the country stitched together the random group of innocents who did not know each other before the government...
