The Gretchen Whitmer Kidnap Plot Became a Political Lightning Rod. Then Two Reporters Got Hours of Secret FBI Tapes.

In the fall of 2020, the FBI announced it had made several arrests and foiled a chilling conspiracy to kidnap and possibly assassinate Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. But as the prosecutors presented their case, details emerged of the role at least 12 FBI agents and informants played in the plot, raising crucial questions about how serious the threat actually had been. This led the likes of Tucker Carlson to describe the case as “a setup by the government to make a group of ordinary people in Michigan look like terrifying right-wing extremists, those violent white nationalists Joe Biden is always mumbling about.” But soon, far more reasonable observers began to raise their eyebrows, too.

In Season 7 of the podcast Chameleon, investigative journalists Ken Bensinger of the New York Times and Jessica Garrison of the Los Angeles Times dig into hours of unreleased audio recorded by the FBI informants, exploring the complex plot as it was devised from the inside. I called the pair to ask what they found in the FBI’s tapes, the political divides shaping the case, and how their perspectives shifted as they delved into the details of this now-notorious prosecution. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Aymann Ismail: How on Earth did you get all of this raw audio from the FBI?

Ken Bensinger: We can’t reveal our source. But I can say that we’ve been covering this alleged plot since the arrests happened in October 2020. We built relationships with sources with different viewpoints about the case. And after we’d done all of our reporting for BuzzFeed, and we both left BuzzFeed at different times, we picked up the podcast in earnest roughly about a year ago, around April 2023. And around June a source came through with this disc drive that had all this on it. So, we got it from a source who was with some kind of visibility of the case.

How much audio were you working with?

Jessica Garrison: We had many, many, many hours. We had a producer who stays off social media and does very little to promote himself, but might in fact be a genius. His name is Ryan Sweikert. He spent weeks going through all the audio.

Bensinger: It was something between 500 and 1,000 hours. It was a lot. I can’t pretend to have listened to every minute of it, because we leaned heavily on Sweikert. I listened to a chunk of it and it just goes on and on and on. Some of it is the most mundane, boring tape, like people talking about normal stuff, or the guy has the recorder in his pocket and he’s walking somewhere so all you hear is the sound of fabric rubbing over the microphone rhythmically for, like, an hour.

How did your first impressions of the story evolve as you dug deeper into the source material?

Garrison: When the arrests happened, I initially thought, “Oh my God. The narrative that the government is putting out about this case is crazy.” Buying explosives, commandos kidnapping her on a boat? We thought that was astonishing. And then post–Jan. 6, like a lot of people, we were very interested in extremist groups in America. And this case seemed like a window into this larger movement of extremism. And as we started to get into it, we saw that it was more complicated than we thought. There were lots of little moments where we were like, “Oh my goodness,” because the FBI was so deeply involved in every single piece of this case.

Bensinger: That’s right. In March 2021, Dan Chappel gave, like, three days of testimonies in a preliminary hearing in Michigan. We watched all of it. I just thought it was stunning. I was like, “Wait a second. He was everywhere.” And then we’d also found buried in a court file a detention hearing for one of the guys, Barry Croft. We found his lawyer saying, “Oh, well, this other informant who hadn’t been mentioned anywhere before was also deeply involved in this.” And we suddenly think, “Well, how many informants were there, and what were they doing and what was going on?” And that was only in the first couple months.

Garrison: And then we got really interested in that meeting in Ohio. We looked everywhere until we found somebody who was there, and when we got in touch with them, they were like, “It’s nothing like what’s being portrayed. We took our kids; we had picnics; we were talking about charter schools.” At that point, we connected to folks who had been at a lot of these events, and they vehemently told a different story. And then we were just into the world and kind of fascinated by it.

Bensinger: And endless phone calls. One thing about the so-called Patriot community is that these people really like to talk and talk and talk.

Garrison: I used to just sit in my front yard and pull weeds while we talked, just like, “Mm hmm, tell me more.” And now my garden looks so good.

You were actually pulling weeds?

Garrison: Literally that is what I was doing.

Bensinger: She was sitting there with the headphones in talking to these people for four hours. If you have a huge pile of laundry to fold, call up a Patriot and it will get done. We just talked to those people and learned their world. And then by July 2021, we ultimately wrote a smaller story just saying there were at least 12 agents and informants involved in this case. And then we wrote a big story that was a look at everything we’d gone through at that point.

And then two things happened. Politically, the whole spectrum was really shocked by what we had dug up. And then it became a darling topic of the Tucker Carlsons of the world pretty quickly.

What did you make of the way your reporting was received so differently by people on opposite ends of the politics?

Bensinger: I mean, it’s funny that Tucker would call up Glenn Greenwald and have him on to talk about our reporting instead of us. He never called us up to talk about our reporting, which I thought was telling. I don’t know if it would’ve been interesting if we’d gone, but we didn’t get the call.

I think it’s possible to believe that the FBI was deeply involved and got out over its skis on this case without believing that there’s a deep-state conspiracy behind everything. And that’s where me and Tucker and people like that are a ways away. One thing that I wanted to get across in our reporting and in the podcast was that there are institutional reasons for why the FBI does things like this that are separate from conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton and George Soros.

Garrison: BuzzFeed had a little habit of deciding that it needed to drop big stories at precisely the moment that I went on long-planned vacations. I turned off my phone and I was hanging around in Portland, and at some point, I got a call from somebody in the militia movement. They were like, “Oh my God, you’re OK? You haven’t been disappeared?” And I just was like, “Wait, what?” Looking back, of course, I get it. But it wasn’t what we were thinking at the time. We weren’t really thinking that this was a hot-button issue to drop into the middle of the political discourse.

I have some friends who are very much on the left, and I was surprised at their reaction to the podcast. They were utterly uninterested in the question of whether the FBI had played this down the middle or not. They were like, “Well, good, I’m glad the FBI is going after these people.” They’re like, “I know I should care about the Fourth Amendment. But … ” It continues to be a very polarizing case in a way that surprises me.

Did your reporting ever get in the way of your relationships with your sources?

Bensinger: There were a couple of moments where people on the right had taken that story and twisted it to fit their narrative. They would say things that I didn’t agree with, and I would challenge them on it. They’re DMing me and one of them expressed a genuine bewilderment and surprise that I didn’t agree with her. She’s like, “You and Jessica have done such amazing work on this story. How could you not believe that the whole thing was a dry run for Jan. 6? How could you not understand that this was part of the deep-state conspiracy?” She wasn’t trolling me. She genuinely was flustered and couldn’t understand why I didn’t see that. To me, it was a little glimpse into the way that the attention economy perverts these stories. This woman massively built up her social media profile based on ranting about this case for two years. And the way she talked about it has evolved and evolved to the point that it became just crazy talk.

What was the biggest challenge in reporting this all out?

Bensinger: The immediate challenge for this one was that like any big story, it’s a feeding frenzy. Cutting through that noise in the first week or two is kind of impossible. You’re just another sheep at the trough slurping up whatever’s there.

Garrison: Sheep don’t slurp.

Bensinger: That’s true. I guess they just eat grass …

Garrison: Look, there’s a lot of people that would not talk to us. It would’ve been great if the FBI had talked to us. I would’ve loved it if the prosecutors had talked to us. They didn’t. A lot of the people in the militia movement, including some of those charged, did not want to talk. We had many, many, many, many doors slammed in our face. Some of them opened a little bit, some of them stayed slammed shut. And that’s true of any project. And sometimes you get all the way into the world. Sometimes you get halfway into the world. I think in any big project there are people that you’re like, “If only that person would talk to me.” Sometimes you get them; sometimes you never get them.

Bensinger: Right. We did send letters to the judge and maybe we did one motion in the court to try to spring forth documents that the prosecutor didn’t want to put out. But for the most part, we’re working the sources, building relationships, talking. When nothing’s going on, calling them just to chit-chat because that’s how do you keep it going. When we were reporting out the FBI agent on his extracurricular activities, I got into a super weird world, the Twitter ISIS hunter community, which is made up of a bunch of anons who are batshit crazy. They’re so fucking nuts.

Garrison: Hey, you can’t talk about your sources that way.

Bensinger: I’m sorry. These people are completely way off the curb. Once they figured out that I was interested, they would call me over and over and over and over again. There was one crazy Italian guy who I think was calling me from Italy constantly. And he just wouldn’t leave me alone. And he’s like, “I’m trolling you. No, I’m not. Yes, I am. I’m not trolling you. Yes, I am. No. I’m … ” Like that.

So this case is for the most part closed. They’ve been sentenced. The longest sentence was 19 years. Do you expect this project to have any ripple effects in the case or in politics?

Bensinger: When we got these files—and I should say it’s not just audio, but all kinds of FBI files that we use to better understand the case—we wondered how the FBI would feel about us having it. And I suspect they don’t feel great about it. We wondered whether they are going to come and try to ask us about it, but they haven’t. They’ve left us alone.

I’ve dealt with the FBI. I have to imagine you both at least now have a folder with your names on it now.

Bensinger: They do! During the course of reporting on this, I did a FOIA request and got a very slim, but real file about me.

Garrison: It was redacted, right?

Bensinger: They redacted it, yes. I had a phone call with an FBI agent and the U.S. attorney in San Diego on a tangent for this case. They sent a copy of the recording where 80 percent of it was redacted. It was just, like, silence. It said very little, but it was like, “Agent so-and-so had a conversation with Ken Bensinger on such-and-such a date. He asked about blank, he did blank.”

I’ve interviewed counterterrorism analysts who argue that the FBI is in a difficult position because most of what these groups do is not illegal, like amassing arms and training in the woods, even if they do pose a hypothetical threat. So the question of how involved FBI agents should be in their undercover work is a potent one.

Garrison: I guess I would say, too, in the defense of the FBI, you hear some of these people’s speech, and you wouldn’t want the FBI to listen to it and be like, “It’s cool. Don’t worry. Nothing to see here.” You can see why they were curious.

Bensinger: But if you’re an incredibly psychologically weak person who’s flogged into deciding to act on it, it may not cross legal lines, but does it pass the smell test?

Garrison: Here’s the thing—we will never know. We’ll never know what these people would or wouldn’t have done without the FBI’s involvement. It’s a Schrödinger’s cat situation.

Bensinger: But of course, if you ask any of these people, it’s not like the experience of having gone through this will make the people in this case trust the government more. Right?

Garrison: Or the media.

Have either of you packed a bug-out bag since this?

Garrison: I mean, my car is just a rolling bug-out bag for all this.

Bensinger: It’s on my agenda for today: bug-out bag.

Garrison: We live in California. You got to have an earthquake kit.

Bensinger: You need seeds.

Garrison: Just eat bagels. They keep seeds around.