I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at Scott Horton dot org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Okay, guys, introducing Ken Bensinger from BuzzFeedNews.com, and man, he's got this incredible piece co-authored with Jessica Garrison called Watching the Watchmen.
In fact, there's a couple of follow-up pieces, too, and maybe prequel-type ones.
The Michigan kidnapping case is a major test for the Biden administration's commitment to fighting domestic terrorism and a crucible, the fierce ideological divisions pulling the country apart.
Well, that's not the subhead I thought it would be.
I thought it was going to say this whole thing was a giant FBI hoax is basically what the article is about.
Welcome back, or welcome to the show, sorry, not back to it.
Nice to talk to you, Ken.
How are you doing?
Nice to be here, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
What a great piece of work you have here, and I think we knew from the beginning, especially people who were watching with an eagle eye, that the magic word informant is going to come up here somewhere, and then the question is just how much they had to do with the thing.
And what you have uncovered is, boy, did the informants, plural, have a lot to do with the plot that was revealed last October, right before the election, coincidentally, that the plot to kidnap and possibly, I guess, murder the governor of Michigan, Governor Whitmer there.
So Whitmer, I guess I meant to say, sorry, please, I guess if you could take us through, you know, the most important names here and and who's who and how it was that the plot began to come together.
And I know it has to do with, you know, this militia group and these guys showing up at the Capitol building to protest previously and all of that was sort of the prelude to the the later sort of entrapment story, I think, right?
Yeah, I think that's that's that's broadly and I want to I want to say that, you know, in this piece, before I sort of go through the dramatis personae, I want to stress that that we that a you may hear a barking dog occasionally, and I apologize, but also that we endeavored to sort of fact check, in a sense, the government government's narrative about this case and find out what else is there beyond what the government is saying.
And indeed, we did find out a lot that there's a lot more of in the story than than what is necessarily shown up in court records.
That said, I want to be clear that we are we are not trying to declare in this piece that this whole thing was a was a set up by the government, that this whole thing was a complicated government conspiracy.
What we're saying is, here's what the government says.
Here's what the defense is saying.
Here's what we uncovered.
And and you, the audience, you, the readership should you should look at this and make it make your own decisions about whether you think this was what the government says it is or what the defense says it is or or whether there's some third truth.
I just think it's important to emphasize that we are not declaring officially in the story that this was a you know, that these guys got sort of targeted by the FBI, concocted the entire thing.
The kind of people we're talking about in this absolutely did have some pretty strong, pretty extreme ideas, pretty expressed violent thoughts, talked about things that I think were are outside the norm of conversation before the feds ever got involved.
Right.
And they were sharing memes in their in their militia group about, you know, killing cops and making jokes about getting, you know, explosives and burning up police stations and in their meetings talking about throwing Molotov cocktails into police officers homes.
And on top of that, and separately expressing, you know, political ideas that I do believe are probably protected speech, you know, like they didn't like the governor of Michigan.
They expressed their frustration with her and they said pretty nasty things about her.
Things that I wouldn't say about a good official, but things that I do believe are protected speech.
So they called her dirty names and they sort of question her moral character and said all kinds of yucky things about her.
But I think those things are protected.
Just to clarify, just to clarify here real quick, I see here again, I'm reminded at the top of your article that you have documented or through the government documents, you've confirmed that there are 12 different informants.
And I think the ratio that got the headline was 12 out of 15 people involved in the plot.
Is that correct?
12 out of 15?
Yeah, no.
So it is correct that there were 12 informants and there may be more.
We don't know.
There's 12 informants that have been identified through discovery served up to the defense in the case.
I would just say that the evidence that the government has shared with the defendants, which at this state is not all the evidence, shows that there were at least 12 confidential human sources, which is what the FBI calls informants these days.
There was at least 12 of those in some way connected to the case.
Some of them were very deeply in sort of embedded in the case and some were a bit more peripheral, but there were about 12.
That does not mean that 12 of the 15 people who were engaging in a conspiracy were in fact informants.
There were 14 people ultimately arrested in the conspiracy between federal charges and state charges.
There were six in federal court and eight in state court.
None of those people are informants.
The government isn't in the business of arresting these informants.
So those 14 people are not informants.
There were separately 12 people who were, as I said, involved in the case in some way.
So that it's a little bit more squishy in terms of what the ratio would be.
But for example, in September, about less than a month, three weeks or so before they got arrested, a lot of these guys went on the nighttime surveillance run of Governor Whitmer's vacation home up in Northern Michigan.
And by our calculations of the 12 people who went on that, either four or five of them were either government informants or undercover FBI agents.
So that's a significant number of the people who were on that trip.
And just yesterday, new evidence came out showing that at a meeting that the government is considered to be very important in the history of this case in Ohio in June of 2020, there were at least three confidential informants in a room of about 15 people.
So the government did have a significant number of eyeballs in almost every setting.
And then, and this is something that, you know what, maybe I have a little confirmation bias from this because I've seen this kind of thing before.
Isn't it the case that you tell in the story, if I have my names right, or if I did have them right as I was reading this thing and trying to understand it, that a lot of the worst provocation here came from the informants rather than, you know.
In other words, they found some guys talking big on Facebook or whatever it was.
And then they went and made a mountain out of the molehill.
Or is that not right?
Well, I guess the easiest and most honest answer is that that's for the jury to decide.
But that is certainly what the defense is saying.
And they're suggesting their evidence shows that.
And we found not just from the defense, but also from documents and interviews and conversations with people who knew that the individuals involved through attorneys who were involved in the case and also through people who were at some of the same meetings that, um, that there is certainly a way to look at this that has a very different version of events that the government doesn't want to talk about.
So the government wants to cast in their, in their charging documents that certain meetings, you know, we're just basically a room full of people saying, yeah, let's kill this person.
Let's kill that congressman and that governor and that sort of thing.
You talk to other people who were in the meeting and they said that if indeed some of that conversation happened, the great majority of the conversation was peaceful and had nothing to do with that.
And the government's leaving those facts out.
Um, um, so there's a real, you know, there's, there's just a giant chasm between what one side is saying and what's the other side is saying about what happened.
Um, and I'm, I'm, I'm not in the business of picking sides, but I do think there are certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that the government wanted to push things.
And as an example, yesterday, this wasn't in the story either because it's new, but we found out yesterday that, um, the main, probably what would be the main convention for me in the case, um, wasn't just sitting there sort of, um, idly listening to what people were saying, but was indeed suggesting they do stuff.
And we knew this when we wrote our article that he was paying for transportation for people to make sure they got to events.
He helped pay to fix someone's vehicle so they could go to things.
Um, he, you know, um, became the leader of the set, sorry, the de facto leader of the group.
Um, he was the second in command of this group, the Wolverine Watchman, and then later the leader left.
And so he was the de facto leader of the group, um, and, um, clearly had an influence in all these people's decisions.
What we learned yesterday was that he actually, um, uh, asked or suggested to one of the defendants, probably the most notorious defendant, a man named Adam Fox.
He suggested to him that you should consider shooting a bullet through governor Whitner's house.
Um, he suggested him that each put a bomb outside her house or destroy her boat.
Um, so he actively was giving him ideas of violent acts to take against the governor.
So that's, that certainly militates in the direction of, um, uh, the government and doing more of ingesting, sitting by and observing and reporting, but actually encouraging and pushing.
All right.
So now let's go back if we could, cause you're right, I kind of jumped the gun the way I started here.
Uh, if we could go back to tell us a little bit of the most important who's who here.
Um, and for example, like this Wolverine Watchman group, it's not the case that it was informants who set this whole thing up in the first place.
These are the goofballs who were talking big and got themselves investigated basically.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's no indication whatsoever that the government created the Wolverine Watchman.
Uh, the Wolverine Watchman were, was founded by a guy named Joe Morrison in late 2019.
Um, Morrison lived with his wife and his kid and his father-in-law, um, on a property in semi-rural Michigan.
Um, and he had had a few minor run-ins with the law, nothing major, but he got busted for, um, open carry of a, of a sidearm inside his car and he got it knocked down to a misdemeanor and I think served one day in jail or something.
But, um, it was just a few days after he took that plea that he found at the Watchman, um, which existed as a, as a training group to some extent, but also sort of an online community of these people, right?
A lot of their activity was just, um, on Facebook and on, uh, the wire encrypted app where they were talking to each other, sharing memes and talking about their feelings, largely about cops.
So they're mostly angry about what galvanized the group was, uh, COVID-19, which pushed a lot of them in the direction of being very angry at the government and elected officials, particularly the governor of Whitmer when she started doing, um, stay at home orders, that sort of thing, and push them much farther towards wanting to sort of take some kind of concrete action or, or to show their discontent.
Um, and coincidentally or not, it was right around this time that, um, a guy named, who we know of as Dan, who was a confidential, who became a confidential informant, um, comes across the group.
The story he tells is that he was, he's an army vet, an Iraq war veteran who, um, is into guns and was, um, searching Facebook for second amendment type groups and for groups where he could train, um, uh, with firearms and the Facebook recommendation engine recommended the watchman to him.
He went to check out their page, entered the group, pass through their vetting to the private group and then pass through another round of vetting to get into their wire chat, um, where he almost immediately discovered them saying things like, let's go kill cops.
And one of them suggested, um, downloading an app to people's phones.
It was like a hunting app, which I guess they could use to log the address of police officers and then make strategies to kill police officers.
And um, Dan, the informant testified to this later, but he went, he was so scared about this.
He went to a friend who was a cop, the cop referred to the FBI and within a few days he was meeting the FBI, showing the, his phone to them where they could see the contents of these chats.
And, um, they asked him if he would be willing to be an informant for them and he said yes.
And he continued to engage with a watchman and train with them.
Um, and you know, it's interesting because, um, from the government, the FBI's perspective, the training with them was all just part of him getting confidence with the group so they could sort of honestly talk about their feelings.
The defense says no.
I mean, he knew more about training and knew about military tactics and all of them, but together and the sense he militarized them, he taught them things that they would never have learned otherwise.
And, and gave them capabilities that made them attractive to other militants and in general sort of made a, what was a minor threat at best into a much more serious threat.
Was he one of the guys who decided, Hey, let's go bring our rifles to the Capitol building?
And I'm not talking about January 6th, I mean the state Capitol building and wherever it was.
Lansing, Michigan.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So on April 30th, 2020 there was a big, uh, anti, I guess anti-mask just sort of an end, a, a, a, a political protest.
So it was a mixture of all the kinds of things were happening at that time.
Now this was before George Floyd, but there were certainly COVID feelings going on and a lot of other political things swirling in the air in spring of 2020.
So they went to a protest there and this was a lot of people in, you know, that would call themselves militants wearing, um, tactical gear, a lot of them wearing Hawaiian shirts because they, um, believed in the ideas of the Boogaloo.
If some of your audience is familiar with that, if not at the Boogaloo is a sort of a, it's not an organization, it's kind of a belief system believing that the country is due for a massive, um, uh, violent over, uh, sort of overhaul, uh, essentially a civil war to throw out old values and install, uh, or start throw out new values and get us closer to, um, you know, the values that the founders and the framers of the constitution that, um, so people are wearing the Hawaiian shirts, they're carrying, um, uh, sidearms as well as long guns, um, that are, that with ammunition, which is legal to open carry in Michigan.
Um, and they're sort of protesting it outside the Capitol and there starts to be rumors among the crowd that they want to storm the Capitol, right?
This is the Capitol of Michigan.
Um, but in that circumstance, the Michigan state police stood down and let them into the building.
It was interestingly, they did temperature checks for each of them to make sure they weren't sick with a virus, but they let them in with their weapons.
So the building got filled up with, um, uh, these armed protesters throughout the whole building.
And there's lots of photos from press who were there, um, showing them, you know, throughout the building.
It's a kind of an interesting sort of, um, sneak preview of obviously what happened in January in Washington DC, um, uh, with a slightly different outcome.
So, um, the Wolverine Watchmen were there and Dan, the informant was with them.
Um, he was wearing a wire and recording for the FBI at the time.
Um, and according to his testimony, he said that he, um, when he was outside the building and people were starting to rumor, to whisper about storming the Capitol, he quietly whispered into his mic or the device he was carrying, you know, these guys are serious about storming the Capitol.
So we don't know, um, what impact that had, but it's quite possible that the stand down order that, that allowed the people in the building without, uh, resistance may have come as a result of Dan warning the government.
Mm hmm.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
So you're constantly buying things from amazon.com.
Wow.
That makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do though, is click through from the link in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
It's a nice little way to help support the show again.
That's a right there in the margin at scotthorton.org Hey, you want to know what industry is recession proof?
Yes, you're right.
Of course, pot Scott Horton here to tell you about green mills, super critical extractors, the SFE pro and super producing parallel pro can be calibrated to produce all different types and qualities of cannabis crude oils for all different purposes.
These extractors are the most important part of your cannabis oil business for precision, versatility and efficiency.
Green mills, supercritical.com Hey y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom woods is Liberty classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have follow through from the link in the margin at scotthorton.org for Tom woods is Liberty classroom.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and that could have turned out different ways, I guess if they had been denied entrance, but uh, seems like maybe that was actually a, you know, really a provocation to, to let them get that far instead of trying to stop them at the door, you know?
Yeah, I don't, you know, it's interesting.
I don't, I mean, I don't know enough.
I'd be, it'd be interesting to see if someone could, could dive into the records and find out why the government, why the state police decided to let them in.
I think we have our friend Jason Sue them under the freedom of information act, right?
And get those documents.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, if I worked for the Detroit newspaper, I would definitely want to know what that was all about.
Um, you know, is it a good, like look, comparing January 6th to that April 30th in Michigan, is it a good idea to let people in?
Is it, is it a good idea to put up resistance?
What's the best way to handle that kind of situation?
And clearly the government, I think there's downsides to both, obviously, and the government hasn't figured that one out yet.
Um, but maybe if they have an informant inside the group, maybe they have him try to dissuade everyone else from doing that instead of being a big part of it all with them.
Right.
I mean, to, to, to be fair, Scott, you know, well I watched when we're there, but there's probably only about 10 of them and we're talking about a crowd of several hundred people.
So it wasn't all watching.
Right.
But that, that raises questions of how many other informants from other groups were there too though.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
We never know.
I mean, there, there is, you know, there is a theory that some have that sort of particularly people in the, in what the, the, what they call themselves the Patriot movement, people who, um, are more politically conservative and, um, uh, some, many of whom identify as, you know, some identifies Republicans, but more likely were identified as libertarians.
These people tend to believe that there's FBI agents behind every door.
Um, if you talk to FBI agents, especially retired ones, they'll say, no, that, that's like not true.
There's not enough of us and we need to have more.
I guess that's obvious.
They would say that.
But, um, but I, I think there certainly is something in the FBI's game of wanting people to believe they're omnipresent and taking actions like this in part because they want to scare other people and make them think, I mean, agents are one thing, but informants are another.
And it's not very easy for them to flip anybody by threatening them with decades in prison over, you know, receiving junk mail or whatever they call that mail fraud or telling somebody it's Tuesday and they call that line to an FBI agent or whatever it is.
And then they can extort pretty much anyone into becoming an informant and you can have one agent can run how many informants, you know, it's not that hard.
It's certainly true.
And then informants too, oftentimes are bastards, right?
And so they're making money and not having to have a job instead, all they got to do is get somebody else to say something stupid, which is pretty easy if that's your game, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's right.
I think like there are informants, like you said, who are working off some problem, right?
And they have a real incentive to find something, whether it's there or not.
And I think that there's no question that the, the, the power of the federal government of the federal law enforcement, FBI, the DOJ and other agencies is, is massive, massive, massive.
And the thing they can do, things that it can do to people's lives, the drop of a dime is, is sometimes very terrifying.
And one would think sort of to quote Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility.
And I think there's no question in my mind and my experience of having covered federal law enforcement a fair amount over the years, that there are members of that community who will take it very seriously and draw lines.
And there's others who don't.
And I tend to, and I don't know if you do it this way, but I tend to analyze things on a individual basis, meaning that we like to think of the FBI as a big monolithic organization that does everything of a single mind.
But what I really see is a group of people with their own motivations that collectively create the actions of the FBI.
And some people are motivated by ambition, personal ambition, and some are motivated by political ideology.
And some are motivated by, you know, grudges they want to settle on, all these different things.
And when you look at it from the outside, it just seems like this is what the FBI is doing.
Right.
But, but in the end, it's because, you know, maybe the informant, for example, is motivated by wanting to work off a problem or because they have some ideological issue or because they're a true believer and they think they're saving the planet.
And in the end, those kinds of personal motivations can lead to very dramatic impacts on other people's lives.
Yeah.
Um, I just had the opportunity to watch, sort of on point, I said the opportunity to watch a movie that I thought was, it's not, I don't think it's very well known, uh, in this country for some reason.
It's a British filmmaker, but it's an American movie, um, that I, that I think your audience might really enjoy.
It's called the day shall come.
Um, and I have no connection to it, so I'm not, it's not benefiting from this endorsement, but I think it's tremendous.
It's, it's, it's a fictional movie, but it's, it says at the beginning, based on hundreds of true stories.
And it's about the FBI in Miami, um, trying to basically bust terrorists and they target this one group of sort of kind of kooky religious fundamentalists like this, like small enclave of like the Libby C seven you're talking about.
Well, I think it's based on that.
I think it's clearly based on that, but this is like a fictionalized version and boy, like it's like, it's like the, to me it's the perfect example of like a black comedy that you're laughing and laughing until you're suddenly not laughing anymore.
Yeah.
I really recommend it.
And there's so many of those that Trevor Aronson of course is the boss of it and wrote the book on it.
But, uh, you know, there's just from the Bush years through the Obama years and I guess I lost track at some point, but you know, I know Trevor says there have been more than 300 of these cases that are, you know, somewhat at least pretty questionable about how much of a real plot ever existed here before the informant themselves took the initiative.
And then some of them are just absolute outrages like Liberty City seven and Hamid Hyatt and the Fort Dix pizza plot and some of these others that are just complete put ons.
And so I guess that's really the bottom line here.
And I know we're running out of time, but I guess the question for you is, and I know that you're a hard reporter on this and you can't do too much opinionating or whatever, but does it look to you that without these informants, all of this stuff about scoping out the governor's house and plotting to blow up bridges and all of these things that these guys are now being indicted and prosecuted for would not have really happened?
I mean, it's very hard to sort of imagine a version of this, uh, of this narrative that that exists when the informants, the multiple informants aren't, aren't there to sort of help put pieces together.
We only talked about the Wolverine Watchmen, but there was other groups of people, three percenters were heavily involved in this case.
Um, for example, you have different groups of people with lots of, um, strong and potentially violent feelings, but they're not together.
They don't know each other.
They're not talking to each other.
And if nothing else, the government played a role in making sure that they knew each other and spent time together.
I mean, the government went to great lengths to ensure that happens.
And so the question is, you know, would these people have taken any kind of violence, um, if they hadn't, if they hadn't been sort of put into the same, you know, the same room, um, and, and those conditions hadn't been made by the government.
And you know, I can, I'm very sympathetic to those who would say that seems impossible without the government putting them together, they never would have made that plot.
And I think that, um, it's not unreasonable.
The flip side is that, you know, um, uh, these people did, it's, it's too simple to say these people were just sort of like regular citizens who were randomly targeted.
These are people who were expressing pretty extreme thoughts.
You know, Adam Fox, who was one of the main defendants in the federal case.
The first time he gets in the phone with the informant sort of unprovoked without like really no provocation, just sort of like what the informant says, what are you interested in doing?
What do you want to do?
And he says, I want to storm the Capitol.
I want to, uh, barricade the doors of the Capitol.
This is Michigan Capitol, not the federal, um, during their legislative session.
And then I want to, um, execute every single lawmaker on TV one by one.
Um, and if that doesn't work, I want to burn down the building with all the minute.
Um, and meanwhile, I want to kid you, I want to grab the governor hog tie or put her on a table and to spread her out like a DEA trophy, you know, the way they spread sort of drugs and money they see from, from, from drug dealers.
It's like, I want to spread her out on the table for everyone to look at.
He said all that unprovoked.
That wasn't like the agent being like, Hey, would you like to do this?
The governor of the eight, the, in the informant just said, Hey, what are you interested in?
And that's what he said.
I don't think that's the kind of normal fantasies that most people have, um, in this country.
It certainly is not my experience.
Um, so the question is, what is a guy like that?
Adam Fox who harbors those kinds of ideas?
What becomes of him if not, if he's not put in a room with other people with similar ideas and that, I don't know, we don't know.
Yeah.
So in this case, he's saying all this to a guy whose job is essentially to figure out how to make it look like this guy's dangerous.
Yes.
But I mean, that's right.
He's supposed to make this guy look like he's dangerous and the flip side, like, um, you know, it's complicated.
Are we allowed in this society to have those thoughts?
I think we are in the first amendment.
That said, you know, if this guy, I mean, let's look at the flip side, let's say this guy, Adam Fox has these ideas and he does something on his own anyway without the FBI ever getting involved.
And he goes to, he like blows up the governor's house or kill some lawmaker or kills a cop.
I mean, then the question is going to be, where was the FBI?
How could they have failed so badly on this?
Right.
Then there would have been massive public attention about what a failure this was and how much they screwed up.
I'm not crying for the FBI.
I'm not sympathetic for them, but they are in this position where they definitely are damned either way.
They always like, if they go too far, which they often do, they rightly get lambasted in public for going too far.
If they fall asleep at their post, which also happens too often, then they're, they're, you know, critiqued for not being on top of things.
So I think that's, you know, boohoo the FBI, I get it.
But like, that's, that's one of the difficulties of, of, of the task they're assigned.
And now how many total people have been indicted in this thing?
Uh, well, uh, in federal court, six people in state court, eight people.
And why the discrepancy there?
I hesitated there by the way, because it's a boring technical point, but in state court, they weren't, they weren't indicted.
They were charged.
And then, um, there was no grand jury because in most state cases in Michigan, there is no grand jury.
It was just what's called bound over to district court.
So essentially judge served as a, uh, the jury grand jury and determined that the charges were legitimate and can move towards trial.
Um, why we're indicted in federal court and why we're a charge in state court, um, the federal ones were charged with conspiracy, uh, kidnapping conspiracy.
And then later with, um, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and a couple of firearm charges.
Um, the state, the state charges were people who seem to be a little less involved in what the government says was the kidnapping plot.
So they're being charged under Michigan's, um, anti-terrorism law, um, which, uh, among other things, they're being charged with, uh, what do you call it?
Um, uh, uh, aiding and abetting, uh, providing material support to terrorism, right?
Um, because they trained with them and spent time with them.
They're being, they're being charged with a crime under that.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I know you got to go.
Thank you so much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Ken.
It was a pleasure.
Thanks for the good questions.
Aren't you guys?
I'm with Jessica Garrison here at buzzfeednews.com watching the watchmen.
It's worth all 10,000 words here.
Believe me.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA apsradio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
