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A federal jury on Tuesday found two men guilty of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.

Adam Fox and Barry Croft face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the kidnapping conspiracy conviction. They were also convicted of one count of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.

Their first trial ended in a mistrial.

Prosecutors allege that Fox was the ringleader of a plot to kidnap the Democratic governor from her summer home and Croft was a part of the plan and practiced detonating explosives in preparation.

“There are a lot of things that are complicated today. There’s one thing that’s pretty simple still – kidnapping is wrong. You can’t just strap on an AR-15 and body armor and go snatch the governor. You can’t snatch anybody, and you certainly can’t make bombs that are meant to maim and kill people. And this case is about a plot to abduct Gov. Whitmer. But that wasn’t these defendants ultimate goal,” Prosecutor Nils Kessler said during closing arguments Monday morning.

“They wanted to set off a second American Civil War and the second American Revolution,” Kessler said.

Defense attorneys maintained an entrapment defense, arguing that the FBI coerced the defendants to drive the plot forward through a collection of undercover agents and confidential informants.

Fox’s attorney told jurors during closing arguments that he was lured into the scheme by the government’s key witness, a confidential informant called “Big Dan.”

“Adam Fox was not ever predisposed to the crime of kidnapping Gov. Whitmer. He talked a big game but talk is just talk. Adam Fox took no affirmative steps to achieve the ends as Special Agent Chambers and Big Dan pushed so hard to achieve,” Fox’s attorney Christopher Gibbons said.

An attorney for Croft told the jury Monday that FBI agents lied on the stand about Croft’s participation in an effort to nab him for any crime they could because of his years-long record of extreme anti-government internet chatter.

“Now as we sat here the last couple of weeks together in the trial, the government has shown us time and time again that they don’t care that Barry Croft didn’t actually make an agreement to kidnap the governor. They think it’s enough that some of the things that Barry says scares them,” Croft’s attorney Joshua Blanchard said in court. “They’d like to lock him up in a cage, not because he committed this crime, but because they’re afraid of the things that have come out of his mouth.”

Neither defendant testified in their own defense.

A federal judge declared a mistrial over a hung jury in the first trial for Fox and Croft earlier this year. Two other men acquitted in the first trial, Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris, ultimately did not testify in the defense case despite being subpoenaed by the defense.

Two other co-defendants that pleaded guilty before the first trial, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, testified in both trials.

Croft was also convicted Tuesday on an additional weapons possession charge.

David Porter, assistant special agent in charge with the FBI Detroit Field Office, said the verdict is a “clear example” that anti-government views do not justify violence.

“Here in America, if you disagree with your government, you have options. You can criticize your government, you can protest, you can vote your elected officials out of office,” Porter told reporters outside the courthouse. “However, what you cannot do is plan or commit acts of violence. Violence is never the answer.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/politics/michigan-whitmer-verdict/index.html

Joe Biden warned that American democracy was in grave peril by Republican forces loyal to Donald Trump who “fan the flames” of political violence in pursuit of power at any cost.

In a primetime address from Philadelphia, the city where American democracy was born, the US president said the United States was in a continued battle for the “soul of the nation.”

It was reprising a theme that animated his campaign for the White House in 2020 to frame the stakes of the November elections as an existential choice between his party’s agenda and Republicans’ “extreme Maga ideology”.

“Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Biden said in remarks delivered at Independence Hall.

Maga is short hand for “Make America great again” – a slogan from Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

Biden emphasized that not all, not even most, Republicans are “Maga extremists” but there was not a question, he said, that the party was “dominated, driven and intimidated” by his White House predecessor – and perhaps would-be successor.

These Trump Republicans, he said, “thrive on chaos” and “don’t respect the constitution” or the rule of law. They “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence”, he continued, adding that they believe there are only two possible outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated.

“You can’t love your country when only you win,” Biden said to thundering applause.

‘Democracy is under assault’, Biden warns in primetime speech – video

The unsparing speech was part of a newly aggressive line of attack Biden has unleashed on Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, as his party enjoys a brightening political outlook helped by a string of significant legislative wins and building public backlash to the supreme court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.

It also comes as Trump, once again at the center of a criminal investigation – this one involving classified documents – lays the the groundwork for a potential 2024 presidential run.

“Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards,” he said. “Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”

Biden also lashed Republicans for amplifying violent political rhetoric, including language targeting federal agents after the FBI seized boxes of classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month.

The protection of democracy has been a through line of Biden’s rise to the White House, which he has said was motivated by the racist violence in Charlottesville. Though he pledged to build national unity as president, the forces unleashed by Trump’s lie of a stolen 2020 election have only gained strength in the nearly two years that Biden has been in office.

Polls suggest that a majority of Republicans do not believe Biden is the legitimately elected president. Election deniers are running for office, securing the nominations for key posts with power over how future elections will be conducted. State and local elections officials have become targets of harassment and threats.

“History tells us blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy,” Biden said, vowing to defend the nation’s system of government with “every fiber of my being”.

Thursday’s primetime speech was the second of three visits by the president in less than a week to battleground Pennsylvania, which will play host to several consequential races this election season.

Among the most concerning, democracy experts warn, is the nomination of Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania who was a leading figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state and helped shuttle people to Trump’s rally in Washington on 6 January that preceded the attack on the US Capitol.

In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state, giving the next governor enormous sway over how the 2024 presidential election is conducted in the state.

Without mentioning any candidates by name, Biden said the election deniers running for office saw their failure to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 as “preparation” for future elections.

Yet Biden sought to avoid casting this fight as partisan, arguing that it was his “duty” as president to speak plainly about the threats facing the nation, no matter their origin. Instead he hoped that his remarks would serve as a call to arms for the majority of Americans who reject Trumpism, and urged them not to be “bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy”.

“For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed. But it is not,” Biden said. “We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it. Each and every one of us.”

Joe Biden speaks outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader and a staunch Trump ally, delivered a “pre-buttal” to the president’s address from Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania. In his remarks, McCarthy accused Biden of “doing everything in his power to crush America’s soul” and demanded an apology from the president for accusing Republicans of being beholden to a philosophy of “semi-fascism”.

McCarthy made no mention of the 6 January assault or the widespread election denialism embraced by most of his party’s supporters and many of their nominees for public office.

Rather it was Trump who addressed the events of 6 January on Thursday, promising pardons and apologies for those who participated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol if he were elected to the White House again.

“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he told Wendy Bell, a conservative radio host on Thursday. “I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons.”

Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Scranton on Saturday.

Critics say the president’s combative rhetoric shows that he has failed in his promise to bring the nation together. Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, called Biden the “divider-in-chief” who has “pitted neighbors against each other” with his divisive agenda.

White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said it was clear Biden had “hit a nerve” and was making Republicans uncomfortable with his urgent appeal for Americans to reject Trumpism.

But America’s political divisions run deep. As Biden spoke outside at Independence Hall, he was interrupted repeatedly by a heckler yelling profanities. Biden said it was his right to be “outrageous” because “this is a democracy”.

“We are still a democracy at our core,” Biden said, ending his speech with the rallying cry: “Democracy!”

Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/01/biden-speech-philadelphia-extremist-republicans-threaten-democracy

Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a defense research institute in Arlington, Va., said the Kremlin’s first step would likely be to call up reserve officers and others with more recent military experience to replenish badly depleted units in the field, perhaps in the next month or so. The Russian military has been identifying such personnel for months in anticipation of Mr. Putin’s order, he said.

“Bottom line, it’s not going to change a lot of the problems the Russian military has had in this war, and the military will be limited as to how many additional forces it can deploy in the field,” Mr. Kofman said. “But it does begin to address the structural problems that Russia has had with manpower shortages and will extend Russia’s ability to sustain this war.”

Crucially, Mr. Kofman said, Mr. Putin’s announcement extends indefinitely the service contracts of thousands of soldiers who signed up thinking that they would only serve several months, and enacts policies and penalties to prevent them from refusing deployment to Ukraine or leaving the service.

Even if Moscow can mobilize some reservists quickly, the Russian military faces serious longer-term shortages in equipment, vehicles and weaponry, and generating entire new units to replace those lost in battle might not happen until early next year, some officials said.

“It will be many months before they can be properly equipped, trained, organized and deployed to Ukraine,” said Frederick B. Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. “And without massive artillery support, these new soldiers will be pure cannon fodder, sitting in cold, wet trenches this winter as Ukrainian forces continue to press.”

Mr. Putin’s struggles to mobilize enough regular troops has forced the Kremlin to rely on a patchwork of impoverished ethnic minorities, Ukrainians from the separatist territories, mercenaries and militarized National Guard units to fight the war.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/us/politics/putin-ukraine-biden.html

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/12/finland-nato-membership-russia-ukraine/