A Michigan appeals court has now reversed terrorism convictions for all three men charged with secondary roles in the 2020 plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the state's attorney general says the courts are bending the law to free dangerous criminals.
Pete Musico and Paul Bellar had their convictions for providing material support for an act of terrorism set aside on Monday after a panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled it was bound by a precedent set just weeks earlier in the case of their co-defendant, Joe Morrison. The legal reasoning in all three cases is the same: kidnapping, the court held, does not qualify as an underlying violent felony that can support a terrorism charge under Michigan law.
The ruling does not dispute the facts of the plot itself. Fourteen men were swept up in the broader investigation after FBI agents and informants spent months embedded inside the conspiracy, which aimed to seize Whitmer from her vacation home just before the 2020 presidential election. Prosecutors said the conspirators were furious over COVID-19 lockdown orders and what they saw as threats to gun ownership. But the appeals court's decision turns on statutory language, not on whether anyone actually conspired to do harm.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel did not hold back. She called the ruling "linguistic gymnastics" and said she would ask the Michigan Supreme Court to take up the cases. In her response to the earlier Morrison decision, Nessel called that ruling "completely and irredeemably nonsensical, outrageous and irresponsible" and promised the same appeal.
The fuller version of her statement on the Musico and Bellar reversals, as reported by Just The News, sharpened the point further:
"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."
Whether the Michigan Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, and whether it reverses the appeals court, remains an open question. But the pattern is now clear: every state-level terrorism conviction tied to a secondary role in the Whitmer plot has been thrown out on the same narrow statutory ground.
Morrison's conviction was overturned first, in a unanimous 3-0 decision in June. That panel found that Michigan's anti-terrorism statute requires the underlying crime to be a "violent felony," and that kidnapping, however dangerous in practice, does not meet the statute's technical definition. Morrison had originally been sentenced to a minimum of ten years, later reduced to six, for providing material support for terrorism and other charges.
A different panel of the Court of Appeals handled the Musico and Bellar cases. But it concluded it was obligated to follow the Morrison ruling. The result: three convictions gone, all on the same technicality.
None of the three men were accused of playing a direct role in the kidnapping scheme. Morrison, Musico, and Bellar belonged to a paramilitary group that had trained with Adam Fox, the plot's ringleader. Fox was prosecuted in federal court and is now serving a 16-year prison sentence for conspiracy. The state cases targeted the men around him, the ones who provided support, training, and infrastructure.
Bellar's case stood out even at trial. He had moved out of state weeks before the FBI arrested the conspirators in October 2020. His defense argued he was on the periphery. The appeals court did not need to reach that question, the statutory issue disposed of the case first.
Of the fourteen men caught up in the investigation, five were acquitted at trial. Fox and at least one other defendant were convicted in federal court under different statutes. The state-level terrorism charges, once the centerpiece of Attorney General Nessel's prosecution, have now collapsed entirely for the three men who faced them.
The practical effect of the appeals court's reasoning is striking. Michigan's terrorism law was designed to punish people who provide material support for acts of terrorism. A plot to kidnap a sitting governor, broken up by the FBI using months of undercover work, would seem to be exactly the kind of case the statute exists for. Yet the court found the law's own language does not cover kidnapping as a predicate offense.
That gap is a legislative problem, not a judicial invention. If the statute's list of qualifying violent felonies does not include kidnapping, the court's hands may be tied regardless of the facts. Nessel clearly believes the court is reading the law too narrowly. The Michigan Supreme Court will have the final word, if it agrees to hear the appeal.
Meanwhile, the men who trained with a convicted domestic terrorist walk free on a technicality. The law either means what it says or it doesn't, and right now, Michigan's terrorism statute apparently doesn't say enough.
