March 25, 2023 - Epoch Times
13:12
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| Two years ago, right in front of the 2020 election, it was revealed that there was a plot involving over a dozen men who were planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Ms. | |
| Gretchen Whitmer. | |
| However, after these men were caught, after they were apprehended, and during their court proceedings, the federal government was forced to admit that they had at least 12 confidential informants who were embedded in this particular group. | |
| And furthermore, these Feds were not just flies in the wall, but rather, these informants were heavily involved in both the inception as well as the planning of this alleged kidnapping. | |
| Here's how BuzzFeed News described the situation, which by the way, in this case, BuzzFeed News did a great job reporting the story. | |
| Here's what they wrote, quote, An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants acting under the direction of the FBI played a far larger role than has previously been reported. | |
| Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. | |
| Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. | |
| The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them. | |
| They further went on to explain some of the details regarding how one of these federal informants actually helped the entire plot to take root. | |
| Here's what they wrote. | |
| A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plot took root. | |
| The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come. | |
| Which then naturally leads to the next obvious question, which is, if the government is so heavily involved in this, and if the overwhelming majority of the people in this plot are government agents, at what point does this so-called kidnapping plot become nothing more than a government operation? | |
| Regardless, the reason that I bring up this Michigan kidnapping story today is because many people in the country are actually aware of it. | |
| That's because it made national news, and because of it, many people woke up to the tactics that the FBI uses to entrap people. | |
| However, what a lot of people don't know is that what happened over in Michigan was not an isolated incident. | |
| That's because new reporting shows that this same FBI operation was also trying to get a man out in Virginia to likewise participate in a similar scheme against the Virginia governor, who at that time was Democrat Ralph Northam. | |
| However, let me back up for a quick second and set the stage free properly regarding that whole period of time. | |
| And by the way, I hope that if you do appreciate content like this, you take a quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons, which quite literally forces the YouTube algorithm to share this video out to ever more people. | |
| Now, back in the spring of 2020, you might remember that President Trump sent out three messages on Twitter, one after the other. | |
| Those specific messages took aim at three Democrat governors who at that time were continuing to push very strict COVID lockdowns. | |
| Here were the three tweets that were sent out back-to-back on the morning of April 17, 2020. | |
| Quote, And it's worth noting that those particular tweets coincided with the anti-lockdown rallies that were going on in several different states, including a blockade around Michigan's Capitol building, which took place just a few days before these tweets were sent out. | |
| And so, you can imagine that the media in this country took these tweets from President Trump and began to run with the narrative that the president was encouraging violence against his political rivals. | |
| For instance, Vox ran a story saying that, quote, Then there was another story in the Washington Post which said that, quote, And then you had the governor of Washington state saying this, | |
| quote, Regardless, all these different critics of President Trump were seemingly vindicated when just a few short months after he issued those tweets, The FBI announced that they had arrested several men for conspiring to kidnap, as well as to possibly even kill, the governor of Michigan, Ms. | |
| Gretchen Whitmer. | |
| Now, of course, as we discussed at the start of the episode, that plot was later revealed to be a case of FBI entrapment, with about 90% of the people who were involved being feds. | |
| But what most people aren't aware of is the fact that a similar scheme was also playing itself out over in Virginia. | |
| What happened was that in the summer of 2020, a federal informant by the name of Dan Chappell began to look for possible targets in Virginia. | |
| Now, Dan Chappell was actually one of the main federal informants in the Michigan kidnapping plot as well, for which he was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI. And over in Virginia, Mr. | |
| Dan Chappell was essentially following the same playbook. | |
| At the behest of one of his FBI handlers, Mr. Chappell targeted a man by the name of Frank Butler, who was a disabled veteran in his late 60s, as well as an alleged member of a local militia. | |
| Now, a lot of the details of what took place in Virginia actually came out during the Whitmer trial, and so I'll read to you part of what was written by the defense lawyers in the Michigan case. | |
| Quote, Dan, who is the FBI informant, suggests to Frank that he engage in acts of domestic terror. | |
| Like the defendants in this case, meaning the Michigan case, Dan suggested to Frank that he attack the governor of Virginia. | |
| Then, there were several text messages that were submitted to the court as evidence, which showed just how far the feds were willing to go in order to entrap Mr. | |
| Frank Butler. | |
| For reference, these text messages are between the federal informant and his FBI handler. | |
| Quote, Then, just like in the Michigan plot, in Virginia, the FBI informant was also trying to lure Mr. | |
| Frank Butler into making some sort of bomb. | |
| The text messages show that the informant passed on a recipe to Mr. | |
| Frank and told his FBI handler that Frank was planning on purchasing the bomb-making supplies, to which the handler responded by saying just this, quote, Awesome. | |
| Excellent work. | |
| Now eventually, after a lot of his back and forth, the FBI informant invited Frank to what he called a field training exercise. | |
| The event was being billed as a practice run for the real thing, and the men from both Virginia as well as from Michigan were supposed to go there in order to train on how to kidnap their respective governors. | |
| But again, it's worth noting that the entire thing was actually just being run by the FBI. | |
| Here's how the defense lawyers in the Michigan case, here's how they described this particular event that was set to take place over in Wisconsin. | |
| Quote, This event, like all the others, was conceived, planned, and conducted by the federal investigative team of agents and undercover informants working together to provide a stage upon which to manipulate their targets into acting out ostensibly incriminating behavior the government hoped to elicit in its bid to develop and then interpret the operations of a domestic terrorist organization. | |
| However, while the FBI was more successful in Michigan, in Virginia they ran into a roadblock. | |
| Because Mr. | |
| Frank Butler was disabled, he was not able to drive, and so therefore, he did not show up at the training event over in Wisconsin. | |
| And to this day, Mr. | |
| Frank Butler has yet to be charged with any crimes. | |
| But, despite the fact that this plot in Virginia didn't go anywhere, and of course, despite the fact that the whole thing was actually planned out by the FBI, Well, when it became public, the governor of Virginia used it as an opportunity to blame President Trump for emboldening supposed white supremacists. | |
| Here was Governor Ralph Norum speaking to CNN about this particular case on October 14th of 2020, a time, I should mention, when people were already early voting in the election. | |
| Certainly, I don't govern under a cloud of intimidation. | |
| That's not who I am. | |
| And this is not about me. | |
| It's not about the governor of Michigan. | |
| This is about this country. | |
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| I'll also throw a link down in the description box below. | |
| Then, the spokeswoman for the Virginia governor, Ms. | |
| Alina Yermarski, she also got into the action when she released this statement to the press. | |
| The president regularly encourages violence against those who disagree with him. | |
| The rhetoric coming out of this White House has serious and potential deadly consequences. | |
| However, notably, the spokeswoman also told reporters that the governor's security team was being briefed, quote, meaning, just to recap, The FBI is running these different operations to essentially manufacture terrorist plots in multiple different states. | |
| As they're doing this, they're keeping the local governors in those different states fully aware of the situation. | |
| But still, the governors in those states were then using these FBI-led operations as their talking points to attack President Trump. | |
| Now, there are two ways to look at the situation. | |
| One is that the FBI is doing their best to uncover potential terrorists, they're doing their jobs dutifully, and the fact that it has the possibility to affect the election isn't really their business. | |
| However, the other perspective, which you can say is a more cynical perspective, is that this is a form of election interference, with the FBI manufacturing plots right around election time that can get a lot of news coverage and negatively affect a certain candidate while bolstering another candidate. | |
| And in terms of which one of these two are correct, well, that will have to be determined by an internal investigation within both the FBI as well as the broader Department of Justice as a whole, which appears to be actually happening. | |
| While I was over in Washington, D.C. about a week ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. | |
| And she told me about some of the work that the House is doing to, for one, investigate the internal workings of the Department of Justice, and secondly, to keep bureaucrats within the government accountable. | |
| And so, smash that like button, smash that subscribe button, and take a listen. | |
| Because, I mean, what can we point to with bureaucrats that is extremely successful, that we could never accomplish anything without them? | |
| I mean, there are very few things that are there. | |
| I mean, there are many agencies that completely can go away, and we would be just fine. | |
| Give that power, that authority, delegate that back to the states. | |
| You know, the states created the federal government. | |
| The federal government didn't create the states. | |
| So I think we would be just fine or at least have mechanisms to be able to get rid of them, to fire them. | |
| We did in the speakers race bring back the Holman rule so we can target a bureaucrat's position and their salary individually. | |
| I think that this will be a huge check on the bureaucracy. | |
| Imagine if we would have had that ability to target Anthony Fauci's salary. | |
| For what he was doing. | |
| Now, Anthony Fauci may have so much money he wouldn't care at this point for all of his other crazy misdealings. | |
| But if we could have targeted that and said, well, maybe Anthony Fauci is reduced down to a federal minimum wage, you know, that would have sent a signal to many other bureaucrats who maybe couldn't afford it. | |
| With the Homan rule, is that sort of then reserved for the top brass? | |
| Because I imagine, you know, there's only like 500 plus congresspeople, so you can't, you're not going to dig deep into the individual weeds and say, well, hey, this mid-management position, we're going to reduce his salary, so it would have to sort of be only at the top. | |
| The way I understand it, it's not reserved for the top, but I think we want to go for the top. | |
| Practically, it sort of would be, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Because you wouldn't have the power to do that, just on a practical level. | |
| Right. | |
| Interesting, okay. | |
| That's the first time I've heard of that. | |
| It's already been implemented. | |
| Has it actually been used since the Speaker's race? | |
| It has not been used. | |
| This is used in the appropriations process. | |
| So it would still take some time before we could implement it. | |
| But there are certainly some bureaucrats that I know some members of Congress would love to go after because they have abused their positions and have damaged the American people. | |
| So, I mean, I think all of this is... | |
| Gearing up for just some great fights that we have the ability to win. | |
| and this is one of the concessions that we got in the speakers race. | |
| Now it's worth mentioning that what you just saw was not the full interview. | |
| If you'd like to watch the entire interview between myself and the congresswoman, well, you can find it over on Epic TV, our awesome no censorship video platform. | |
| The link will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| You can just click on that link and it'll take you right over to Epic TV where you can watch the entire full-length interview. | |
| And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epic Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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