Co-leader in plot to kidnap Michigan governor sentenced to 16 years in prison

The co-leader of the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Adam Fox returned to federal court Tuesday, four months after he and Barry Croft Jr.

He is accused of leading a wild plan to destroy anti-government extremists ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Whitmer was not physically harmed. The FBI was secretly attached to the group and broke it up with 14 arrests.

The government said Croft offered bomb-making skills and ideology, while Fox was “the driving force behind recruiting recruits to take up arms, kidnap governors and kill those who stand in their way.”

Croft will be sentenced on Wednesday.

The man’s arrest, along with the arrest of 12 others, was a dramatic coda to a turbulent year of racial strife and political unrest in the US.

Fox and Croft were convicted in a second trial in August, a month after a different jury in Grand Rapids, Mich., could not reach a verdict but acquitted the other two.

Fox and Croft in 2020 met with the same provocateur at a summit in Ohio, trained with weapons in Michigan and Wisconsin and rode “eyes” at Whitmer’s vacation home with night goggles, according to evidence.

“People need to stop their misplaced anger and anger where it needs to go, and that’s against a tyrannical government…,” Fox said this spring, boiling over the COVID-19 ban and the threat to gun ownership.

The FBI broke it up by the fall.

“They have no real plan of what to do with the governor if they actually arrest him. Paradoxically, this makes him more dangerous, not less,” said Assistant US Attorney Nils Kessler in a court filing ahead of the hearing.

In 2020, Fox, 39, lives in the basement of a vacuum shop in the Grand Rapids area, the site of secret meetings with members of paramilitary groups and undercover FBI agents. His lawyer, Christopher Gibbons, said he was depressed, anxious and smoked marijuana every day.

Gibbons said the life sentence would be severe.

Fox was regularly exposed to “inflammatory rhetoric” by FBI informants, particularly Army veteran Dan Chappel, who “falsified not only Fox’s sense of ‘patriotism’ but also his need for friendship, acceptance and male approval,” Gibbons said in a court filing.

He said prosecutors had exaggerated Fox’s abilities, saying he was poor and didn’t have the ability to pick up the bomb and carry out the plan.

Croft, a truck driver from Bear, Del., will be sentenced Wednesday.

Two men who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and testified against Fox and Croft received substantial breaks. Ty Garbin has been released after 2 1/2 years in prison, while Caleb Franks was sentenced to four years.

In state court, three people were recently sentenced to long sentences for aiding Fox in the early summer of 2020. Five others are awaiting trial in Antrim County, where Whitmer’s vacation home is located.

When the plot was killed, Whitmer, a Democrat, blamed then-president Donald Trump, saying he had given “comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.” In August, 19 months after leaving office, Trump said the kidnapping plot was a “bogus deal.”