A Michigan appeals court has now overturned terrorism convictions for three men tied to the 2020 plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the state's attorney general says she'll fight to restore them.
Pete Musico and Paul Bellar, both convicted of providing material support for an act of terrorism, had their convictions set aside by the Michigan Court of Appeals on Monday. The ruling followed the same legal reasoning that freed their co-defendant, Joe Morrison, in a precedent-setting decision last month: kidnapping, the court held, does not qualify as an underlying violent felony that can support a conviction under Michigan's anti-terrorism law.
A different panel of the same court reached that conclusion in Morrison's case in June. The panel handling Musico and Bellar said it was obligated to apply that precedent. The result is that all three men, members of a paramilitary group that trained with the plot's ringleader, Adam Fox, have now walked away from their terrorism convictions on what amounts to a technicality in how Michigan's statute defines the underlying crime.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel did not take it quietly.
Nessel calls ruling 'linguistic gymnastics,' vows Supreme Court appeal
Nessel, a Democrat, ripped the appeals court's reasoning in a statement reported by Just The News:
"The Court twists itself into a knot using legal and linguistic gymnastics in order to liberate dangerous criminals using convoluted definitions of the crimes upon which they were convicted."
She said she would ask the Michigan Supreme Court to take up the cases. Whether the state's highest court agrees to hear them, and whether it reverses the appeals court's interpretation of the terrorism statute, remains an open question.
But Nessel's frustration, however politically convenient, does not change the legal reality. The appeals court did not say the men were innocent. It said the statute under which they were convicted does not apply to the facts as charged. That is a distinction prosecutors should have anticipated years ago, and one the legislature could have fixed at any point since.
FBI informants, undercover agents, and a plot that unraveled before it started
The Whitmer kidnapping plot made national headlines when the FBI broke it up in October 2020, just weeks before the presidential election. Prosecutors said the conspirators were furious over the tough COVID-19 restrictions Whitmer and officials in other states had imposed during the early months of the pandemic, and over what they saw as threats to gun ownership.
The scheme called for Whitmer to be kidnapped from her vacation home. She was never physically harmed. Undercover FBI agents and informants had been embedded inside Fox's group for months before the arrests came down.
Fourteen men were swept up in the broader investigation. Five were acquitted at trial. Fox, the plot's ringleader, and co-leader Barry Croft Jr. were prosecuted in federal court, convicted in August 2022, and sentenced months later. Fox is serving a 16-year prison sentence for conspiracy. Morrison, Musico, and Bellar were prosecuted under state law, and it is those state convictions that have now collapsed, one after another, on the same narrow legal ground.
The case echoes a broader pattern in which criminal convictions unravel not because the underlying conduct was excusable, but because prosecutors overreached on the charges or relied on statutes that could not bear the weight placed on them.
Musico and Bellar were on the plot's periphery
Neither Musico nor Bellar played a central role in the kidnapping scheme itself. Both were members of the paramilitary group that had earlier trained with Fox, but as AP News reported, they had no direct involvement in the kidnapping plan. Morrison and Musico said they were no longer in contact with key figures by the time the FBI moved in. Bellar had moved out of state weeks before the October 2020 arrests.
That distance from the core conspiracy made the terrorism charges against them a stretch from the start. Prosecutors chose to charge them under Michigan's terrorism law for providing material support, a theory that required kidnapping to be classified as a violent felony under the statute. The appeals court said it is not.
Nine people were originally convicted in connection with the plot, CBS News reported. With three state convictions now overturned and five defendants acquitted at trial, the case's legal legacy looks far thinner than the dramatic 2020 arrests suggested it would be.
A statutory gap the legislature never closed
The core issue is not whether these men trained with extremists or harbored dangerous views. The issue is whether Michigan's terrorism statute, as written, covers what they did. Two separate panels of the state appeals court have now said it does not.
That is a failure of legislative drafting, not judicial activism. If Michigan lawmakers wanted material support for a kidnapping conspiracy to fall under the terrorism statute, they had years to amend the law. They did not. Nessel can call the ruling "linguistic gymnastics" all she wants, but courts interpret statutes as they are written, not as prosecutors wish they had been written. Cases involving long-contested criminal convictions often turn on exactly these kinds of statutory questions, where the law on the books does not match the outcome the state pursued.
Nessel's pledge to take the fight to the Michigan Supreme Court keeps the legal battle alive. But even if the high court agrees to hear the cases, the attorney general will have to convince a majority that the appeals court misread the statute, a heavy lift when two separate panels reached the same conclusion independently.
Meanwhile, the men whose convictions were overturned walk free. The federal defendants, Fox and Croft, remain behind bars. And the Whitmer kidnapping plot, once held up as proof of a sprawling domestic terror threat, continues to shrink under legal scrutiny.
When prosecutors build headline cases on statutes that cannot support the charges, the headlines eventually come back to haunt them.
