Commentary: The Fake, and Real, Domestic Terrorists

by Julie Kelly

To hear the government tell it, a homeless guy who lived in the dilapidated basement of a vacuum repair shop with no running water is as much a danger to society as was Timothy McVeigh and the Tsarnaev brothers.

Adam Fox, according to the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan, should spend the rest of his life in prison for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. After a jury could not reach a verdict in Fox’s case last April, the Department of Justice retried Fox and his remaining co-defendant Barry Croft, Jr. in August; both men were found guilty the second time around.

In what must be one of the most dishonest motions filed by the government perhaps in recent history—for example, prosecutors insist two men acquitted during the same April trial are Fox’s co-conspirators despite being cleared of all charges by a jury—the Justice Department described the kidnapping plot as an act of domestic terrorism in a memo arguing

Fox, 38, should die in jail. Fox, who had to use the Mexican restaurant in the same strip mall where his vacuum repair flophouse was located to brush his teeth, somehow had the wherewithal to attempt to “light the fire of a second revolution,” assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Birge wrote in Fox’s sentencing memo.

“While the plot to kidnap a sitting state governor is shocking for its temerity, it is not without recent antecedents. For Fox’s paranoid fantasies of government ‘tyranny,’ one need look no further than the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The defendant’s plan to use homemade explosive devices to kill and maim recalls the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.” (Fox also was convicted of planning to use a weapon of mass destruction.)

Setting aside the government’s despicable comparison of Fox’s half-baked (and sometimes, literally baked) bull-session planning to two deadly terror attacks, both of which resulted in the murder of children, the plot to kidnap Whitmer existed only in the “paranoid fantasies” of agents and informants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Fearful that Donald Trump might win reelection, the FBI, a frequent and deserved target of the president, took no chances. At least a dozen FBI informants hired to work at the direction of numerous FBI supervising agents and alongside at least three undercover FBI agents made it appear that white supremacist militiamen loyal to the president hatched a plot to abduct and assassinate one of his biggest political foes.

In fact, the plot was an FBI entrapment scheme from start to finish, another example of the agency interfering in a presidential election to sabotage Donald Trump. It was, in effect, the bureau’s own act of domestic terrorism—an attempt to terrify the public as millions of Americans were already voting for president.

As prosecutors wrote in the Fox sentencing memo, domestic terrorism is legally defined as action “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion.” Concocting a fake and allegedly politically-motivated kidnapping plot and announcing arrests in the late stage of a close election—targets were lured to the arrest site by the main FBI informant to meet another undercover FBI agent on October 7, 2020—to produce negative, wall-to-wall media coverage while Joe Biden and Democrats leveraged the news to influence voters in an last-ditch effort to remove a sitting president certainly meets the spirit, if not the letter, of the legal definition. Who successfully sought a “revolution” in Washington—a bunch of random dudes in Michigan or the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world?

Perhaps Fox’s “paranoid fantasies” about government tyranny weren’t so fantastical after all.

Just like everything produced by Biden’s Justice Department, Fox’s sentencing memo is more narrative-setting to boost the regime’s false claims about the threat of domestic violent extremism, innocent lives be damned. The events of January 6, 2021 are mentioned on three occasions—although the year is twice incorrectly stated as 2020—as a consequence of the failed kidnapping caper. “As the public became aware after January 2020 [sic], Fox’s plot was a harbinger of more widespread anti-government militia extremism,” Birge wrote.

Birge is right to connect the Whitmer fednapping and January 6, just not in the way he intended. The FBI also ran several informants into two so-called “militia” groups months before the Capitol protest; no one can explain exactly what the informants did since it appears not a single source alerted law enforcement about the pending “insurrection.” So, did the FBI hire the worst informants ever or did those informants act in a manner similar to those involved in the Whitmer fednapping—agents provocateur rather than channels for information to thwart a potential crime?

One has to assume, given the bureau’s conduct over the past six years, the former is accurate. Further, the FBI and Justice Department continue to weaponize the four-hour disturbance, likely provoked by government actors, to label the entire MAGA movement as domestic terrorists. The Justice Department is closing in on a total of 1,000 new January 6 defendants in its ongoing “Capitol siege” investigation as the FBI arrests new protesters every week, nearly two years later.

“FBI Ramps Up Spending to Fight MAGA Terrorism,” blared a Newsweek headline this week. A senior government official confirmed what I covered in my book: the regime is now using the tools created to fight the first war on terror against Trump supporters.

“Stopping terrorism before it happens has been the entire career focus of most FBI agents and intelligence analysts in the 20-year war on terrorism, and is now being applied to domestic terrorism,” reporter William Arkin wrote. “The FBI and the Intelligence Community are already significantly increasing their monitoring of social media and working more closely with local law enforcement to uncover potential plots and monitor individuals and groups.”

The FBI’s focus, of course, is more political than justified. “Since [January 6], anti-government, ‘anti-authority’ and civil unrest cases have taken over as the number one threat, making up almost 90 percent of all investigations,” an internal FBI document claimed.  Of the more than 2,700 open cases flagged by the FBI as domestic terror investigations—a laughably miniscule figure in a country of 330 million people—more than one-third are tied to January 6.

This crusade against Trump supporters is more than a paper fight: for nearly two years, each of the 56 FBI field offices, as FBI Director Christopher Wray often brags, has been involved in the abusive round-up of January 6 protesters: Dozens of armed FBI agents accompanied by SWAT vehicles conduct predawn raids to terrorize families and neighborhoods in a show of brute government force—even those accused of nonviolent offenses or low-level misdemeanors, which represents the overwhelming majority of charges. These efforts are clearly designed to intimidate American citizens on the Right.

Joe Biden’s hand-picked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia warned the government could prosecute up to 2,000 January 6 protesters, more than double the current figure. In other words, the vengeful, retaliatory FBI raids will continue into the foreseeable future.

Again, who are the real terrorists?

None other than Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently boasted how the work of the January 6 select committee influenced the outcome of the 2022 election. “There were the January 6 hearings—I think they had an important effect,” Schumer told reporters on December 7. “People didn’t just read about something that happened once, but every night they saw on TV these hooligans, these insurrections, being violent, beating up police officers. They saw all of that, and they said ‘wow,’ They saw that the Republican leaders wouldn’t even attack this crazy.”

One doesn’t need a set of furry horns or marijuana-induced shock talk in a dingy cellar about kidnapping a politician to be an actual domestic terrorist. In this new destructive era, more often than not, it requires an FBI badge or congressional office to terrorize an electorate into reordering the composition of government.

The terrorism is coming from inside the house.

– – –

Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right and Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project. She is the co-host of the “Happy Hour Podcast with Julie and Liz.” She is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University and lives in suburban Chicago with her husband and two daughters.
Photo “January 6” by TapTheForwardAssist. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sign up here to get your copy of The Georgia Star News Daily Update

Daily updates, breaking news, special offers, and more

CONFIRM

Thank you for signing up!