The militia members who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer because of her COVID-19 lockdown policies will go to trial in just a few weeks. Six were charged in connection with the plot, and one of them has already pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against the rest. State authorities charged eight others with aiding a terrorist plot.

But the government’s case against these 14 alleged extremists relies on work done by at least a dozen government informants and undercover FBI agents whose extensive involvement in the plot calls into question whether it would have moved forward at all without the government’s prodding. Some of these government actors took lead roles in organizing the supposed plot—one of the informants was even paid $54,000 by the FBI.

Taken together, these and other details raise the strong possibility that the militia members were victims of entrapment on the part of the FBI.

Indeed, the revelations have prompted considerable, welcome scrutiny of the case from the mainstream media. “The FBI Investigation Into The Alleged Plot To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Has Gotten Very Complicated,” conceded BuzzFeed News in an in-depth examination of the available evidence published last month. And earlier this week, The New York Times acknowledged that the involvement of informants and agents had “muddled” the case:

On a rainy night in northern Michigan in September 2020, a group of armed men divided among three cars surveyed the landscape around the vacation cottage of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, considering how to kidnap her as payback for her Covid-19 lockdown measures.

Two men descended from the lead car to inspect a bridge on Route 31 in nearby Elk Rapids, assessing what was needed to blow it up to delay any police response to the house on nearby Birch Lake.

Later, after team members returned to the rural camp where they had already conducted military-style training exercises, a man identified as “Big Dan” in government documents asked the assembled group, “Everybody down with what’s going on?” Another man responded, “If you are not down with the thought of kidnapping, don’t sit here.”

Of the dozen men on that nighttime surveillance mission, four of them including “Big Dan” were either government informants or undercover F.B.I. agents, according to court documents.

“Big Dan” was no passive spectator: After initially alerting the authorities that he was involved in a Facebook group for militia members in which violence against police officers had been discussed, he agreed to become an informant. The government paid him $54,000 for six months’ work. When the militia group surveilled Whitmer’s vacation home, it was Big Dan leading the charge. According to the group’s defense attorneys, Big Dan—an Iraq War veteran—took charge of training the other men in military tactics.

And that’s not all: Big Dan’s FBI handler, Jayson Chambers, had a side hustle. Chambers was attempting to build a security consulting business in the midst of the investigation; it’s easy to see how his desire to create a brand for himself could have led him to encourage Big Dan to nudge the plot along. BuzzFeed obtained a resume that Chambers had shared with prospective clients, and in that document, he took credit for using “online undercover techniques” to investigate terrorist groups. According to BuzzFeed, Chambers has a long history of participating in FBI investigations of Muslim youths who were enticed by law enforcement to become involved in wholly theoretical violent plots, according to their defense attorneys.

Chambers is no longer slated to participate in the trial.

Another government asset, Stephen Robeson, worked as an informant during the investigation, but is no longer involved after pleading guilty to various felonies. And the government’s star witness, FBI Agent Robert Trask, was fired by the agency after beating his wife following an orgy at a swingers party. Suffice it to say, it’s very hard to tell the cops from the criminals in this matter.

The court may determine that none of this matters, and that even though the defendants were clearly goaded into action by the very law enforcement agents seeking to ensnare them, they still made the colossally stupid decision to proceed. Historically, victims of entrapment have had a tough time prevailing, no matter how duplicitously the FBI behaved.

But in any case, it is now clear that Whitmer was in no real danger. At all stages of the alleged plot, the FBI was aware of every facet: Their agents and informants were intimately involved—not just surveilling the militia members, but actively offering guidance on how to pull off the kidnapping. Yet Whitmer has become a more sympathetic figure on the national stage because she is perceived as a victim of former President Donald Trump’s reckless rhetoric and emboldening of right-wing domestic terrorists.

“Every time the president ramps up his violent rhetoric, every time he fires up Twitter to launch another broadside against me, my family and I see a surge of vicious attacks sent our way,” wrote Whitmer in an Atlantic article titled, “The Plot to Kidnap Me.” The thrust of her piece is that Trump’s criticism of governors in blue states inspires real violence, and she cites her own case as a near-example. Trump undoubtedly said many things that were vile and wrong, but the person most responsible for the Whitmer kidnapping plot is the FBI agent who greenlit this farce. (Ironically, in a speech condemning Trump for egging on right-wing terrorists, Whitmer thanked the FBI for thwarting the plot.)

Many conservatives have become committed to the idea that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was not the work of Trump supporters, but rather, elements of the so-called Deep State. There’s no evidence for that; the Capitol riot is one of the clearer cases of Trump’s remarks leading to actual mayhem and violence. The Whitmer kidnapping plot, on the other hand, was extensively directed and encouraged by agents of the government. It’s a much, much, much, much more persuasive case of Deep State nefariousness.

The post The Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Looks an Awful Lot Like Entrapment appeared first on Reason.com.

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A troubled transportation grant program that’s gone through three presidential administrations and multiple rebrandings still managing to give the bulk of its award to politicized projects with little connection to national priorities or even transportation.

During its first year in office, President Joe Biden’s White House has awarded close to $1 billion to states, localities, and territories through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) grant program in 2021.

Of the 90 projects that have received funding through the RAISE program, only nine could be considered national in scope. And 40 of the RAISE projects that received grants last year couldn’t even be considered transportation projects.

That’s according to a new analysis from the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), which also found that 41 of the 90 projects funded went to districts or states represented by lawmakers on Congress’ various transportation and finance committees.

The root of the problem, says Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation researcher at the Reason Foundation, is that the White House has near-total discretion to award these grants as it sees fit.

“In theory, a discretionary grant process should be better because you are focusing on money on the highest and best need,” says Feigenbaum. Instead, successive administrations have operated them “like some sort of personal slush fund. They’re not going to do any good.”

The Biden administration’s RAISE grant program started in 2009 as part of the stimulus bill passed by Congress that year. It gave the White House $1.5 billion and wide latitude on how to spend it.

The subsequent Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program created by the Obama administration directed much of this funding at multimodal transit projects, streetcars, recreational trails, and other such projects that were either not national in scope or connected to transportation (moving people and freight).

The program also suffered from politicization, with many of its grants going to vulnerable Democratic congressmen in swing districts, says Feigenbaum. The Government Accountability Office repeatedly criticized the TIGER program for passing over projects that were given high technical ratings to fund ones that received lower technical rankings.

While it was created as a temporary stimulus effort, Congress has continued to provide around $500 million to the TIGER program throughout the Obama administration.

Despite Republican opposition to TIGER during former President Barack Obama’s years, and early Trump administration proposals to kill it off entirely, the program was expanded once the GOP gained full control of Washington.

In 2018, former President Donald Trump’s White House used $1.5 billion provided by a Republican-controlled Congress to refashion TIGER as the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program.

BUILD managed to do a better job of spending money on projects that were of both national significance and related to transportation, but that was mostly a happy accident of most of its awards going to road and port projects in rural, heavily-Republican districts.

A 2019 Congressional Research Service report notes that 69 percent of BUILD projects in fiscal year 2018 were in rural areas.

The heavy focus of spending on rural areas also meant that more deserving urban and suburban transportation priorities went unfunded, says Feigenbaum. RAISE grants have managed to combine the worst elements of both previous administrations’ programs, he adds.

The Biden administration has kept a requirement that RAISE grant funding be split evenly between urban and rural areas, despite more transportation infrastructure and mobility needs be located in urban areas.

Similar to the Obama administration’s TIGER program, a large number of RAISE grants are being spent on hiking trails in rural Arkansas, expanding pedestrian greenways along Lake Michigan, and other non-transportation projects.

Feigenbaum says that fixing these discretionary grant programs requires a competent president and transportation secretary who’s actually interested in transportation policy.

Trump, he argues, failed the former requirement while current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is mostly interested in setting himself for a future presidential run and not the efficient movement of commuters and cargo.

Maybe the fourth presidential administration is the charm?

The post Despite Multiple Redesigns and Rebrandings, This Grant Program Continues To Be a White House Slush Fund appeared first on Reason.com.

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The America COMPETES Act of 2022 is a sprawling mess of spending and nonsense. House Democrats are rallying behind a 2,912-page bill that’s allegedly concerned with addressing supply chain issues and keeping U.S. manufacturing and technology competitive. But like anything Democrats do these days, the bill can’t simply address one main issue or a few critical needs. Instead, it tries to insert the government into every aspect of all sorts of industries and markets and pretend that bureaucrats can solve complex social and cultural issues.

For instance, this bill addresses everything from “combating sexual harassment in science” to seeing that more science grants go to people with caregiving responsibilities; retention and advancement of women and minorities in science and tech careers; subverting censorship in China; and supporting collective bargaining agreements and union organizing efforts.

It aims to tackle Chinese fentanyl production, e-commerce platform liability, misinformation in foreign media, global wildlife trafficking, legal conventions in Pacific Island nations, Arctic mammal rescue capabilities, coral research, and the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

It bans shark fin sales, driftnet fishing in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, and the transportation of certain wildlife across state lines.

It offers money for establishing a fund for Chinese language studies, climate change initiatives, solar power, spreading U.S. propaganda overseas, and promoting the consumption of certain types of seafood.

What do some of these issues have to do with supply chain issues, promoting American manufacturing, or ensuring our global tech competitiveness? Your guess is as good as mine.

The summary of the bill—dubbed The America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength (America COMPETES) Act of 2022— is 20 pages long and the section-by-section summary is 109 pages long. I haven’t had time to look through the full bill yet, but these documents provide us with a good start to understanding what’s in this behemoth.

One worrying aspect is new liabilities for online marketplaces—something that could actually decrease the competitiveness of American tech companies. It would make e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.) liable for counterfeit products unless these companies follow a heavy-handed and extensive roster of so-called “best practices.” This new framework “would replace the liability framework established by case law” under which a platform is only liable for counterfeiting by third-party sellers if it has “specific knowledge of the infringement (usually through a notice provided by a trademark owner) and fails to take action,” a summary of the bill notes.

America COMPETES would pour money into funding government science offices, science education programs, a National Engineering Biology Research and Development Initiative, and so much more.

The first two items listed in the summary are $52 billion to “incentivize” semiconductor production and $45 billion toward “ensuring that more of [critical] goods are made right here in the United States.” Once again, rather than remove government-created barriers to free trade and low prices, lawmakers threaten to make it worse by further ballooning U.S. debt and enacting more protectionist policies.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote about the semiconductor issue last spring, when Democrats first pushed it. Ensuring more domestic production of semiconductors “dovetails nicely with President Joe Biden’s pivot toward China as the post-pandemic villain that will justify future expansions of government, as well as with the emerging nationalist economics and anti-China sentiment on the political right,” he pointed out. “But what it really amounts to is a massive handout to a successful industry that doesn’t need government aid, delivered under the guise of a national security argument that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.”

The America COMPETES act authorizes billions for things that have long been on Democrats’ policy wish list, along with all sorts of other random things.

It devotes $3 billion to “incentivizing the new construction of solar manufacturing capacity and providing grants and direct loans to retool, retrofit or expand existing solar manufacturing facilities.”

It authorizes millions for the antitrust division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for this year. It would also increase filing fees for large mergers, with the goal of giving more money to the DOJ and FTC “to aggressively enforce the antitrust law.”

It would “authorize $500 million for the “United States Agency for Global Media for ongoing and new programs to support local media, build independent media, combat PRC disinformation inside and outside of China, invest in technology to subvert censorship, and monitor and evaluate these programs.”

It authorizes “$20 million per year through FY 2026  … to combat human trafficking through seafood import monitoring and strengthening international fisheries management.”

Instead of removing barriers to bringing new drugs and medical technologies to the U.S. market, the bill would make manufacturers jump through more administrative hoops, “requiring manufacturers to provide additional information to [the Food and Drug Administration] about manufacturing sites and the quantity of drugs they produce.”

Instead of making it easier for U.S. university faculty to collaborate with foreign partners, it creates a reporting requirements for faculty that “receive gifts or enter into a contract with a foreign entity of which the value is $50,000 or more.”

Instead of simply beefing up cybersecurity and critical tech infrastructure, it “establishes a permanent advisory council” at the Federal Communications Commission “to increase the security, reliability and interoperability of communications networks”—which sounds a lot like what Democrats have been pushing in other bills with regard to tech companies and interoperability standards, even though mandating interoperability makes user data more vulnerable to security threats.

Instead of seriously reducing tariffs and duties across the board, it would lower them in a few areas while raising them in others. Under America COMPETES, “imports valued under $800 [coming] into the United States without paying duties, taxes, or fees” would have to start paying them if these imports came from certain countries, including China.

There’s a lot of Cold War-style influence mongering happening here, too. A section titled “Countering China’s Educational and Cultural Diplomacy in Latin America” directs the Secretary of State “to devise a strategy that evaluates and expands existing people-to-people programs and creates new exchanges and people-to-people programs that advance U.S. foreign policy goals and promote U.S. national security interests and values.” Another section would study the impacts of Chinese political and economic activity in Africa and develop a plan for “promoting improvements in the investment climate in Africa, including through support for democratic institutions, the rule of law and improved transparency.”

The few bright spots in the bill involve immigration. The America COMPETES Act would provide “temporary protected status and refugee status for qualifying Hong Kong residents for the 18-month period beginning after enactment” and authorizes “special immigrant status admission for certain priority highly skilled Hong Kong residents.” It would amend immigration law to make it easier for startup entrepreneurs and staff (and their families) to come here on temporary visas and petition for lawful permanent resident status. And it would exempt “from the numerical limits on immigrant visas, certain aliens (and the spouses and children of such aliens) who have earned a doctoral degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) from a qualified U.S. research institution or a foreign institution if the degree is the equivalent to a doctoral degree issued by a qualified U.S. research institution.”

FREE MINDS

Students less enthusiastic about banning controversial speakers from campus. A new report from the Knight Foundation looks at college student views of free speech: “The ‘Knight-Ipsos College Student Views on Free Expression and Campus Speech’ report is the fourth in a series of Knight Foundation reports measuring college student attitudes toward speech and the First Amendment since 2016. For this report, Knight Foundation commissioned Ipsos to conduct a survey with a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 college students ages 18-24 enrolled in all types of higher education institutions, along with 4,000 American adults, offering insight into how college students’ views on free speech compare with those of the general public.” You can read the whole thing here. A few interesting findings:

• Students are less interested in campuses banning controversial speakers. “Just 1 in 4 students favor schools disinviting controversial speakers, down from more than 2 in 5 in 2019.”
• Students increasingly believe free speech rights are not secure. “The percentage of students saying speech rights are secure has fallen every year since this question was first asked in 2016,” the Knight Foundation reports. “This includes a 12-point decrease from 2019 as an increasing number of students—particularly Republicans—say they believe speech rights are threatened.”
• Students have competing and contradictory attitudes toward free speech on campus. “More students now say the climate at school prevents some from saying things others might find offensive, and fewer feel comfortable disagreeing in class. Yet slightly more now report feeling unsafe because of comments made on campus than in 2019.”

FREE MARKETS

A new study provides a rebuke of state-funded pre-K programs. “At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said study co-author and Vanderbilt professor Dale Farran. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

"By the end of sixth grade, the children in the study who had been randomly selected to attend the state’s pre-K program were more likely to be referred to special education services than their peers who had not secured a spot in the program"https://t.co/hG7I2BzSED

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) January 25, 2022

Devastating new results on the effects of state-funded pre-K programs.

In policy you rarely get stronger study designs than random assignment + multi-year longitudinal follow-up.

Yikes.https://t.co/PE5eY5oOUw pic.twitter.com/AUHdqzdSYr

— Samuel Hammond ???????? (@hamandcheese) January 25, 2022

QUICK HITS

• “Democrats in the House of Representatives are planning to expedite a massive bill that would dramatically increase U.S. security assistance to Ukraine and lay the groundwork for substantial new sanctions on Russia — hastening a war-friendly posture without opportunity for dissent as concerns over a military invasion abound,” reports The Intercept.

• We shouldn’t exaggerate what’s at stake in Ukraine, writes Reason‘s Natalie Dowzicky. “The ‘liberal world order’ doesn’t require a war with Russia over the Donbass.”

• Showing a fake vaccination card could become a crime in Washington state.

• “Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, CBP officers across the nation have seized more than 30,000 counterfeit coronavirus vaccination cards,” Grid reports.

• Kat Rosenfield laments that we’re all COVID cops now.

• How U.S. abortion laws compare to abortion policy around the world.

• On The Oldest Profession Podcast, host Kaytlin Bailey explores what’s wrong with the Nevada brothels’ method of legalizing sex work.

• What Japan got right about pandemic responses: “Drastic measures, such as lockdowns, were never taken because the goal was always to find ways to live with Covid-19,” writes Hitoshi Oshitani, a virology professor at Tohoku University who helped formulate Japan’s COVID-19 response.

• “The current stereotype of Gen X as politically apathetic do-nothings simply does not match the reality, at least in terms of their youth,” writes Freddie deBoer in a piece challenging the idea that today’s politically engaged young people are somehow unique.

• A new study finds “virus-fighting antibodies capable of blocking the omicron variant persist four months after a third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine,” The Washington Post reports.

• “What left-wing progressives and right-wing populists miss in their regulatory frenzy is that antitrust laws have not been used intentionally to destroy success, as they are being deployed now,” writes Bret Jacobson at Real Clear Policy. “Their goal for decades has been to ensure competition in the marketplace. That’s what makes [Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy] Klobuchar and [Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck] Grassley’s legislation”—more on that here—”so, in a word, weird.”

• “Authoritarian governments ban Bitcoin mining. The U.S. shouldn’t join them,” says Andrea O’Sullivan.

• Justin Amash has a new podcast.

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