The FBI’s ‘FAFO’ Kidnapping Plot UnravelsAmericans still want to believe that the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency handles its authority with care rather than recklessly ruining lives to advance a political agenda. It doesn’t.
By Julie Kelly
March 24, 2022
In the spring of 2020, or so the government’s story goes, an Iraq War veteran named Dan Chappel was scouring social media to find like-minded libertarians devoted to the Second Amendment when algorithms prompted him to a Facebook group called the Wolverine Watchmen, an online “militia group” formed just a few months earlier.
Chappel reportedly became alarmed at violent “anti-law enforcement” rhetoric posted by some members of the Watchmen, so he notified police. Two weeks later, Chappel, under the code name “Big Dan,” became the lead FBI informant in a wild plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, an act of domestic terror according to the Justice Department.
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During two days of testimony this week, Chappel struggled to maintain the government’s case while revealing what might be the most egregious example of FBI entrapment in decades. Chappel was paid more than $60,000 by the FBI for less than seven months of work; part of his compensation included a $3,300 laptop, a smart watch, and reimbursement for taking a loss after selling his eastern Michigan home that year.
And far from acting as a conduit between the alleged militia group and the FBI—the bureau’s alleged raison d’etre for hiring informants—Chappel methodically coalesced a random group of misfits angered by COVID-19 lockdowns and Black Lives Matter riots to form the gang of would-be kidnappers. The burly Iraq War vet—working for the U.S. Postal Service at the time—along with multiple FBI assets, “ingratiated” themselves, one defense attorney said, into the lives of seemingly isolated, destitute men. Some of the defendants referred to Chappel as “dad” as he used his age and military experience to assume a father-like persona. (Kaleb Franks, one of the original defendants who pleaded guilty to kidnapping, told the jury Thursday that he wanted to be killed by police in a shoot-out because “a large portion of my family had died” and he was “struggling financially and just wasn’t happy.”)
Chappel also took on another fake identity—a leader of the Wolverine Watchmen. Leveraging his imaginary leadership role for the Watchmen, Chappel acted as the “glue,” in his words, to unite the men. During two days of testimony this week, Chappel admitted he created group chats including one named “FAFO,” the acronym for “bleep around and find out,” on the encrypted app Wire and invited the defendants to join.
Chappel immediately gave the FBI direct access to the chats while deluging his targets with daily texts and calls; nearly 1,000 texts were exchanged over a three-month period between Chappel and Adam Fox, the alleged brains behind the kidnapping plot who lived alone in what one witness described as the “dark, dirty” cellar of a vacuum repair shop in a Grand Rapids strip mall with no running water, sink, or toilet.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/24/the-fbis-fafo-kidnapping-plot-unravels/
