A jury has convicted two men of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, in a plot prosecutors described as a rallying cry for a US civil war by anti-government extremists.
The jury also found Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr guilty of conspiring to obtain a weapon of mass destruction, namely a bomb to blow up a bridge and hinder police if the kidnapping could be pulled off at Ms Whitmer’s holiday home.
Croft, 46, a trucker from Bear, Delaware, was also convicted of another explosives charge.
It was the second trial for the pair after a jury in April could not reach a unanimous verdict.
Two other men were acquitted and two more pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors.
The result was a victory for the government following the shocking mixed outcome last spring.
“You can’t just strap on an AR-15 and body armour and go snatch the governor,” Assistant US Attorney Nils Kessler told jurors.
“But that wasn’t the defendants’ ultimate goal,” Mr Kessler said.
“They wanted to set off a second American civil war, a second American Revolution, something that they call the boogaloo. And they wanted to do it for a long time before they settled on Gov Whitmer.”
The investigation began when Army veteran Dan Chappel joined a Michigan paramilitary group and became alarmed when he heard talk about killing police.
He agreed to become an FBI informant and spent summer 2020 getting close to Fox and others, secretly recording conversations and participating in drills at “shoot houses” in Wisconsin and Michigan.
The FBI turned it into a major domestic terrorism case with two more informants and two undercover agents embedded in the group.
Fox, Croft and others, accompanied by the government operatives, travelled to northern Michigan to see Ms Whitmer’s home at night and a bridge that could be destroyed.
Defence attorneys tried to put the FBI on trial, repeatedly emphasising through cross-examination of witnesses and during closing remarks that federal players were present at every crucial event and had entrapped the men.
Fox and Croft, they said, were “big talkers” who liked to smoke marijuana and were guilty of nothing but exercising their right to say vile things about Ms Whitmer and government.
“This isn’t Russia. This isn’t how our country works,” Croft attorney Joshua Blanchard told jurors.
“You don’t get to suspect that someone might commit a crime because you don’t like things that they say, that you don’t like their ideologies.”
Fox attorney Christopher Gibbons said the FBI is not supposed to create “domestic terrorists”.
He described Fox as poor and living in the basement of a Grand Rapids-area vacuum shop, which was a site for meetings with Chappel and an agent.
Ms Whitmer, a Democrat, has blamed then-president Donald Trump for stoking mistrust and fomenting anger over coronavirus restrictions and refusing to condemn hate groups and right-wing extremists like those charged in the plot.
Over the weekend, she said she had not been following the second trial but remains concerned about “violent rhetoric in this country”.
Mr Trump recently called the kidnapping plan a “fake deal”.
