Men Who Plotted To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Face WMD Charges

Federal prosecutors added additional charges to the three men who plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in October 2020. In addition to federal kidnapping charges, Adam Fox, 40, Barry Croft, 45, and Daniel Joseph Harris, 23 are now charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

The new charges came with an announcement from U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan saying that the three men intended to use explosive devices to carry out their plot against the governor by “harming and hindering the governor’s security detail and any responding law enforcement officers,” a spokesperson for the office said in a statement Thursday.

The compounded indictment alleges that Fox ordered $4,000 in explosives from an F.B.I. agent pretending to be a weapons dealer and co-conspirator to their plot. The indictment explains that Croft and Harris performed tests with the explosives on mock-human targets “to assess its effectiveness as an anti-personnel weapon.”

“I’m incredibly grateful to the FBI and [Michigan State Police] and that gratitude only grows with more revelations about how serious and scary this group was. And how intent they were on not just harming me but harming our law enforcement, harming communities,” Whitmer said in an interview Thursday. “The rhetoric has got to stop. We’ve got to all rise to this challenge and stop vilifying and encouraging these domestic extremists to hurt our fellow Americans.”