Informers

By abducting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one man who pleaded guilty said, he hoped to disrupt the 2020 election and perhaps start a civil war.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — To hear Ty Garbin tell it, the kidnapping of Michigan’s Democratic governor would have been just the beginning.By abducting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Mr. Garbin and other plotters hoped, he said, to set off a chain of events that would prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being elected president and perhaps foment a civil war.“The plan was for us to basically be the ignition to it, and hopefully other states or other groups would follow,” said Mr. Garbin, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to kidnap the governor and who testified this week at the federal trial of four other men accused of participating in the plot.Since Mr. Garbin and the others were arrested in October 2020, before there was any attempt to carry out a plan, prosecutors have portrayed the group as a menace to democracy and a vivid example of the dangers of domestic extremism. Lawyers for the four men now standing trial have described the case instead as an F.B.I. trap, in which their clients were targeted for their political views, pushed toward a far-fetched plot by government informants and undercover agents, then prosecuted for their speech.That made the testimony of Mr. Garbin, a militia leader who was neither an informant nor a federal agent, pivotal to the prosecutors’ case against the men on trial. The defendants, Brandon Caserta, Barry Croft, Adam Fox and Daniel Harris, are charged with kidnapping conspiracy and could face life in prison if convicted. Mr. Croft, Mr. Fox and Mr. Harris are also accused of planning to blow up a bridge and were charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.Wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, his hands cuffed in front of his waist, Mr. Garbin testified for hours this week at the federal courthouse in downtown Grand Rapids. Looking straight ahead, and speaking in even tones, Mr. Garbin told jurors that he had wanted to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, and that he had been prepared for a gunfight with her security detail. Mr. Garbin testified that he had not been pushed into his planning by an F.B.I. informant whom defense lawyers have tried to portray as the architect of the plot.Ty GarbinKent County Sheriff, via Associated PressUnder questioning by prosecutors, Mr. Garbin pointed out to jurors an AR-15 rifle and a pistol that he said he was prepared to use against the governor’s security detail, as well as a bulletproof vest where he planned to store extra bullets. He recounted a nighttime “recon” mission in which he and other members of the group tried to scope out Ms. Whitmer’s vacation cottage, outside the northern Michigan town of Elk Rapids, but ended up driving aimlessly on her street because they had the wrong address. And he described a training outing where he and others went through a makeshift “shoot house” as practice for storming Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home.“The purpose of the training was furthering our skills to prepare for kidnapping the governor of Michigan,” said Mr. Garbin, 26, who until his arrest worked as an airplane mechanic at Detroit’s international airport. He received a prison sentence of just over six years after pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors.Another prosecution witness who also pleaded guilty to the kidnapping conspiracy, Kaleb Franks, testified on Thursday that he also intended to kidnap the governor and had not been forced into the plot by the F.BI. Mr. Franks, who has not yet been sentenced, said he had hoped to die during the attack on the governor. Mr. Franks, 27, said he had been in despair after the deaths of three close family members.Prosecutors said in the months before the arrests, the men, many of whom were militia members, attended meetings and what they described as “field training exercises” to practice shooting and first-aid. In one exercise, they videotaped themselves jumping out of Mr. Franks’s bright-blue PT Cruiser and taking cover behind its doors while they fired rifles.Secretly recorded audio and private messages also showed members of the group repeatedly airing grievances about the government, especially about Covid-19 restrictions, and expressing openness to a range of possible attacks. But there has been vast disagreement in court about how close they were to carrying out any attack, and about what their exact plan even was.Dan Chappel, a military veteran who signed on as an F.B.I. informant in early 2020 after becoming worried about the goals of one militia, the Wolverine Watchmen, pretended to befriend the men who were charged and recorded their interactions for months. As the group began to develop a plan, some of the defendants mused about storming the State Capitol in Lansing or taking Ms. Whitmer in a boat across Lake Michigan or blowing up a bridge to make it harder for police to respond to the kidnapping.But defense lawyers, who are pursuing an entrapment defense, questioned Mr. Chappel’s role in the plot, pointing out that he helped lead militia training and made suggestions about attack plans. The implication was that, if not for Mr. Chappel, who was receiving instructions from the F.B.I., the plan to kidnap Ms. Whitmer would probably not have moved forward.Mr. Chappel, who spent parts of several days on the witness stand, said he believed the men intended to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, kill members of her security detail and eventually kill the governor herself after staging a fake trial. But the exact plans for the kidnapping, a date for which had not seen set, seemed to have still been in flux at the time of the arrests, a fact that defense lawyers have seized on.Mr. Garbin, who had expressed hope of setting off a civil war, testified that he thought they would kidnap Ms. Whitmer, take her out on Lake Michigan, strand her in a boat, drop the motor and leave her there alone. Under cross-examination, Mr. Garbin conceded that no boat had been selected for that mission, and that he did not know how the kidnappers planned to get themselves back to shore.“How were you going to drop this nonspecific motor from this nonspecific boat into the lake?” Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, asked.The trial, now in its third week, is expected to continue into April. More