In October 2020, the FBI announced it had thwarted a plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, arresting more than a dozen individuals affiliated with various militia groups.
What the FBI did not disclose is that they were the ones who crafted the plot and encouraged a small group of Michigan men to attend FTX’s or “Field Training Exercises,” militia meetings, many of which were being put on by the FBI.
At the same time, a network of FBI informants manipulated them into talking about incendiary things while they were being secretly recorded.
The announcement of the charges coincided with the contentious 2020 election, where rampant systemic voter fraud was found throughout Michigan, especially in its absentee ballot programs, in a key battleground state for President Trump’s re-election.
The FBI gave a major campaign advertisement and political ‘win’ to far-left Democrats who were claiming that Trump and his followers were dangerous extremists.
But what first-time documentarian Christina Urso has discovered, is that the scope and scale of FBI corruption went much deeper and further than anyone realizes.
Now Donald Trump and Trump pardon attorney Ed Martin, are openly considering pardoning the men, an action Urso believes is overdue and cannot come soon enough. Trump has publicly said, about the Whitmer Kidnapping prisoners, “It looks like they got railroaded.”
For nearly five years Christina, with a background in law, has conducted interviews and poured over thousands of pages of court transcripts and proceedings to uncover what the real story was in the Whitmer Kidnapping Hoax. Her documentary, “Kidnap and Kill” is due out this fall with a current planned release of November 2025.
What she says is that the FBI’s corruption is worse than anyone knows.
The defendants were accused of planning to storm the Michigan Capitol, incite a civil war, and ultimately abduct Whitmer from her vacation home, allegedly in response to COVID-19 restrictions and perceived government tyranny. The federal government charged six men with conspiracy to kidnap, and additional defendants were charged under state law with terrorism and weapons offenses.
There were four trials: two federal and two in the state of Michigan.
What Christina says, and what the FBI has never admitted, is that they wanted the plot to be a multi-state plot with various militia groups kidnapping Governors or storming capitals all at the same time, hoping to sweep up many more individuals who were likely either innocent or who were making idle boasts in response to federal agent provocateurs, but they were unable to get it off the ground.
“What the FBI was planning is straight out of the Soviet Union’s criminal playbook,” Urso told the Gateway Pundit. “They were trying to organize these militia groups, make some light connections between them all, and then come in with a major multi-state prosecution, ensnaring potentially many more men. They weren’t able to pull that off, and these men were the only ones unfortunate enough to be easy for them to put in prison on false charges.”
Central to the prosecution’s case was the use of undercover FBI agents and informants who infiltrated the group and recorded conversations and training sessions. Prosecutors argued that the defendants were serious in their intentions, conducting surveillance of Whitmer’s home and assembling weapons. However, the defense attorneys argued that the FBI’s extensive involvement amounted to entrapment, claiming the accused were coerced or manipulated into escalating their rhetoric and actions. These entrapment claims were bolstered by evidence that FBI informants had taken leadership roles in planning activities and provided resources such as transportation and lodging.
Urso, in her forthcoming documentary, points out the impossibility of some of the government informants’ proposed plans, including sieging the Governor’s lake house in northern Michigan with an amphibious landing in the fall, a likely impossibility given the weather in northern Michigan.
The first federal trial in 2022 resulted in the acquittal of two men and a hung jury for the remaining two, highlighting the difficulty of proving conspiracy without clear evidence of intent absent FBI influence. In a retrial, Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. were convicted, with the court later rejecting appeals that claimed the judge had improperly limited the entrapment defense.
Meanwhile, several other defendants in state court faced mixed outcomes: some were convicted, while others were acquitted or had charges dropped.
Allegations of juror misconduct and concerns about fairness in the trials further complicated the proceedings.
Urso claims that the operation was likely part of a long-running federal program known as “PATCON” which stands for “Patriot Conspiracy.” This operation, originally uncovered by Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue who has investigated the death, and likely murder by federal authorities, of his brother Kenneth in 1995 uncovered it through decades of litigation related to Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) lawsuits. PATCON operations have included a variety of federal ‘false flags’ and violence used to justify increasing federal police budgets, as well as utilizing violence to achieve political ends.
Trentadue has told the Gateway Pundit that he believes the illicit and ongoing PATCON operation was used in the Whitmer Kidnapping Hoax.
The FBI has been repeatedly accused of setting up false violent events, such as this incident in 2024 in Georgia involving a defendant named Mark Alan Prieto.
The Whitmer case attracted national attention due to its implications for domestic extremism, law enforcement tactics, and political rhetoric. Critics of the prosecution emphasized the FBI’s role in shaping the plot and warned about the potential abuse of informant-driven sting operations.
The agents involved and the convictions were also tainted by the credibility problems of some of the agents involved. Special Agent Richard Trask testified in pre-trial proceedings to convict the men, and provided affidavits supporting the arrests of the suspects. However, in July 2021, Trask himself was arrested and charged with viciously assaulting his wife and leaving her bloodied following an argument after a swingers party where he was a ‘cuckold’ offering his wife for sex to other men. This incident led to his dismissal from the FBI in September 2021 but Trask was sentenced to simply ‘time served’ and some believe he was given a lenient sentence due to his connections to federal law enforcement. His arrest and subsequent firing raised concerns about the credibility of the investigation, particularly among defense attorneys who argued that the FBI’s conduct, including Trask’s actions, tainted the case.
Supporters of the government, including federal prosecutors and Governor Whitmer herself, argued the plot was real and dangerous, regardless of FBI mistakes. Urso notes that in public statements, Whitmer smirks about the case and does not present the kind of emotional reaction to the incident if it were legitimate.
Pundits widely blame the collapse of the prosecution on the entrapment and illegality the FBI used to frame up the defendants.
The current Speaker Pro Tempore of the Michigan House of Representatives Rachelle Smit honored Eric Molitor and the Null brothers for their courage and tenacity in proving their innocence in 2023, an action that leftists said was dangerous, where they called for her removal from the State House’s committees and punished.
Reason magazine described the Whitmer kidnapping hoax as: “…one of the biggest public embarrassments for the FBI‘s counterterrorism and informant programs since 9/11.”
The hoax mastermind at the FBI’s Detroit Field Office, Steven M. D’Antuono was promoted to lead the Washington Field Office.
“Kidnap and Kill” is coming soon, and Urso is raising funds to finish the video editing and other post-production work.
You can donate to Verum’s film here at GiveSendGo: https://www.givesendgo.com/radixverum
Urso also says she has been SWAT’d previously, and has been debanked while working on the documentary. One of the responding officers mentioned to her offhandedly that he hoped that the FBI had not been the one to instigate the SWAT raid, and that the federal police refuse to investigate SWATting incidents because the technology to trace is “too complicated.”
Urso relates that the vast majority of her funding so far has come from her savings, and that all donations will go to finishing the film and promoting its release.
The URL for the documentary is kandkfilm.com
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