Saidu Umar thought his future was secure in 2006 when he poured his life savings into a piece of land in Sokoto, a city in northwestern Nigeria, for ₦120,000 ($77). His dreams, however, spiraled into a nightmare when, 16 years later, the children of the late owner laid claim to the land. 

The late owner’s children claimed that their father hadn’t sold the land before he passed away, making it rightfully theirs. In the legal debacle that unfolded, they alleged possession of documents proving their ownership and demanded that Umar either leave the land or provide financial compensation.

Shocked and confused, the 53-year-old farmer sought refuge with the police and filed a complaint. His claim was later dismissed because he, as is common in Sokoto, had purchased the land in good faith via a verbal agreement with the owner and could not provide any validating documents.

Saidu Umar was able to reclaim his land in 2022 thanks to the Kukana radio show. Credit: Abdullah Tijani

“I tried everything, but people would tell me that I didn’t have evidence to prove that I owned the land. I even met with several community leaders asking for help but to no avail,” Umar says. “That was until I pleaded my case on Kukana.”

Kukana, roughly translated to “my woes” in English, is a weekly radio show with over 1.7 million active listeners, as reported by the show’s hosts. Since its inception in 2016, the program, which airs on Vision FM, Sokoto’s first private radio station, has committed to voicing the grievances of those unable to access Nigeria’s justice system. In each episode, hosts of the show present victim complaints and then work towards providing solutions.

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With his dream of owning land almost slipping away, Umar met and explained his ordeal to the host of Kukana, Ibrahim Salihu Isa, who, after researching the matter, invited him to appear on the show. During the episode, Isa introduced Umar to Ibrahim Tudundoki, a Sokoto-based human rights activist and lawyer. 

Tudunoki took the matter to the Sultan’s Palace, Sokoto’s traditional arbiter. Because the Sultan was traveling, he discussed Umar’s case with a local judge, who invited the divisional police officer to investigate further. At this time, the late owner’s brother, Chika Maidaw,  got in touch with Isa and confirmed that his deceased brother had indeed sold the land.

Ibrahim Salihu Isa, the host of the Kukana radio show that has helped address the grievances of thousands of people. Credit: Abdullah Tijani

“He listened to me on Kukana and was willing to come and testify,” Umar explains. “That was how I got my land back.”

Tudundoki, a regular guest on Kukana, believes in the show’s cause and regularly communicates with Isa to follow up on cases of vulnerable people in Sokoto free of charge.

“Most of the people who appear on Kukana have nowhere to turn to, and if a program like this is not available, they will end up being victims of injustice,” Tudundoki says. 

Sokoto is Nigeria’s poorest state, with nearly 90 percent of its population of over six million, living below the poverty line, and more than three-quarters unable to read or write in English, the country’s official language. According to Isa, Kukana’s popularity as an alternative platform for justice stems from these socioeconomic hurdles that render the legal system an unnavigable labyrinth to the majority.

Mu’azu Habibu Sabaru, the chairman of the Joint Disabled Association, resorted to the show after the association’s social welfare stipend was cut in 2022. Credit: Abdullah Tijani

Among those who can relate to this are members of Sokoto’s differently-abled community, whose government-issued monthly allowance was withheld for almost a year before they presented their case on Kukana. 

Mu’azu Habibu Sabaru, the chairman of the Joint Disabled Association, a coalition of different groups of people with disabilities, explains that the social welfare program was first introduced in 2007 and included a monthly stipend of ₦6,500 ($4.16), which was issued to about 7,000 beneficiaries. However, over the years, the payment disbursement became increasingly irregular until it was halted completely in June 2022. 

“It was only after we went on Kukana that the governor visited us,” Sabaru says “He had heard our complaint on the radio show.” 

Not long after the meeting, the government resumed the program. Sabaru even revealed that the monthly stipend was upped to ₦10,000 ($6.30).

After a resident from Kurfi voiced concerns about illegal encroachment on government school land during a segment on Kukana, the land infringement stopped completely. Credit: Abdullah Tijani

Over the past seven years, Kukana’s team says they’ve been instrumental in transforming the lives and addressing the grievances of more than 100,000 individuals. 

“Kukana has helped a lot of people. Sometimes a community of more than a thousand people would be impacted,” he adds. 

The host recalls an incident involving a resident from Kurfi, a village outside of Sokoto, who voiced concerns about illegal encroachment on government school land during a segment on Kukana. Following his appearance on the show, it seemed as though “the perpetrator was deterred, because the land infringement ceased altogether.”

“After the case, the government went there and started building a wall around the school. I was so elated when I heard this,” he exclaims.

In Nigeria, the simplicity and wide reach of radio as a mass communication tool have primed it to become a viable last resort for many victims of injustice, according to Lekan Otunfodurin, the executive director of Media Career Development Network, a nonprofit group that trains aspiring media professionals.

“Much like mass religion, radio’s appeal is far-reaching,” Otunfodurin notes regarding the success of radio shows focused on advocacy. 

The school land in Kurfi village, Sokoto, that has been saved thanks to the radio show. Credit: Abdullah Tijani

Like Kukana, Berekete Family is another reality radio and television program focused on civil rights. It airs on Human Rights Radio 101.1 in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, and streams online on several social media platforms. The program, hosted by Ahmed Isah, invites people to share their problems and grievances on air while Isah tries to bridge the gap between claimants and relevant authorities. 

Otunfodurin believes that despite the predominance of online media and television, radio remains important through social justice platforms such as Kukana and Berekete Family.

“The lesson here is that radio, as a form of media, is still relevant and very important in seeking justice,” Otunfodurin says. “It also costs less when compared to other forms of media.”   

Despite these successes, there are times when the show’s crew feels hopeless. In many cases, the accused refuse to give their account of the story when approached by Kukana, halting any potential progress that could bring justice to the victims.

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“There was a case of a man who came to complain that an army officer driving a car hit his mother, who died from her injuries,” Isa says. “We approached [the officer] to confirm the story and hear his side, but he declined. All efforts to get him to speak to us failed, and we couldn’t air the story.”

This type of challenge is not unique to Kukana, as noted by Otunfodunrin, who believes that all media outlets engaged in investigative journalism or advocating for justice for the oppressed encounter such issues at some juncture.

“What the host [of Kukana] can do in this situation is seek collaboration with other media platforms, especially ones with a national presence, to make the story public,” Otunfodunrin explains. “When more people are engaged, the perpetrators would be forced to grant investigators an audience.”

The article is published in collaboration with Egab.

The post Finding Justice Over the Airwaves appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

In his state of the Union address, President Joe Biden zeroed in on the chaos that has ensued in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to cast reproductive rights out of the Constitution.

He talked about Latorya Beasley, an Alabama woman in the audience whose plans to have a second child using in vitro fertilization were scuttled after the state’s Supreme Court announced that embryos created via IVF were “extrauterine children.” The ruling prompted IVF providers in the state to halt services.

Biden also talked about Kate Cox, a Dallas mother in attendance who asked a Texas court for permission to terminate a nonviable pregnancy. A district judge agreed that her situation met the medical exception to the state’s merciless abortion ban. But the attorney general and state Supreme Court balked, forcing Cox to flee Texas to receive care meant to protect her life and future fertility.

“Like most Americans, I believe Roe v. Wade got it right,” Biden said. He noted that the Supreme Court’s majority opinion overturning Roe referred glibly to women having electoral power — and thus the political ability to overcome the ruling. Indeed, Biden said, state ballot measures enshrining reproductive rights won handily in 2022 and 2023. “Those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women,” Biden said to thunderous applause.

“If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose,” he said, “I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”

While that might sound good, Roe was never enough to ensure reproductive autonomy in the first place. The ink was barely dry on the 1973 decision before its supposed protections came under attack. In 1976, Congress passed a measure that stripped government funding for abortion for low-income people. In the decades that followed, elected officials and the courts took a hammer to Roe — even as the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld its core ruling —passing and then blessing hundreds of restrictions, some targeting abortion facilities and doctors with excessive regulation, others erecting barriers between pregnant people and care, many of them based entirely on junk science.

Roe was always a paper-based right that depended on status and ZIP code.

Roe was never enough to guarantee that everyone in need of reproductive care could meaningfully access it. It was always a paper-based right that depended on status and ZIP code, leaving low-income people and other vulnerable groups out of the fold.

And that’s because Roe had a deep and unmalleable flaw: It was never about whether the government had a right to your body, only when it had a right to your body. Roe ensured that at some point, a pregnant person would lose the right to autonomy, which in turn guaranteed, if not wholly encouraged, the surveillance and criminalization of pregnant people.

Also present in the chamber for Biden’s state of the Union speech was a woman from Ohio named Brittany Watts. Her story is emblematic of Roe’s failures.

Watts had been to the hospital several times before she miscarried at her home southeast of Cleveland. She was nearly 22 weeks pregnant — the cutoff for abortion under Ohio law — and her water broke early. The fetus was not viable, and even though she was under the state’s gestational cutoff, the Catholic hospital she went to for help failed to intervene.

In September 2023, Watts miscarried the pregnancy in her bathroom. Back at the hospital later that day, Watts was soothed by a nurse who had already called the cops on her. Prosecutors charged Watts with “abuse of a corpse.” In justifying the charge, they vilified Watts, saying she put her “baby into the toilet” and then “went on” with her day. The truth was that she’d sought treatment, miscarried in the toilet, and then, scared, went to a scheduled appointment before diverting to the hospital.

The arrest caused a national uproar. Watts’s attorney argued that her client was being “demonized” for miscarrying, “something that goes on every day.” Nonetheless, a municipal court judge allowed the case to go to a grand jury: “There are better scholars that I am to determine the exact legal status of this fetus, corpse, body, birthing tissue, whatever it is.”

Ultimately, the grand jury declined to indict Watts, and she was cleared. But the bottom line is this: Roe did not save her. While the ruling had been overturned by the time Watts came under the scrutiny of the criminal legal system and its proxies in health care, Ohio’s remaining legal protections were based on Roe’s structure, including the gestational limit of 22 weeks.

The judge sent the matter to a grand jury precisely because the miscarried fetus might have had some legal rights, leaving Watts’s personal medical circumstances open to judgment by the government.

In contemplating a role for the government in a person’s reproductive life, Roe and its progeny deemed that outside intervention was acceptable later in pregnancy, when the fetus could be viable outside the womb. Generally speaking, this is accepted to occur around 24 weeks. But it is also a fluid concept. Anti-abortion activists had long advocated for pushing up the viability line, arguing that medical advancements meant a fetus could be supported outside the womb even sooner — thus encouraging greater governmental oversight of pregnancy.

While the notion that there is some government interest in protecting a fetus later in pregnancy might seem reasonable, pregnancy is a highly individualized experience and complications or circumstances that arise cannot be generalized or fairly conscripted to government control. The entire term of a pregnancy depends on the person carrying it, and the right to intervene in that pregnancy should lie with the individual.

In the years before Roe fell, near-total bans on abortion had become commonplace, passing in a number of states under the notion that legal personhood should begin before the person exists. It was the framework of Roe that allowed these power grabs, regardless of whether they were blocked by various courts before the Supreme Court said otherwise. Since the fall of Roe, several states have sought to codify its protections, as Biden said he would do given the chance. But that just reimagines the same inadequate framework. In November, Ohio became the seventh state to enshrine reproductive rights post-Roe when voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state constitution that guarantees access to abortion free from government intervention — before viability.

Read Our Complete Coverage

The End of Roe

Opting to hew to the line Roe cast is seen as politically safe. But recent research suggests the electorate isn’t so sure.

In June 2023, research firm PerryUndem conducted an experiment involving more than 4,000 registered voters and two reproductive rights amendments. The first amendment was the exact language passed by Michigan voters in 2022, which allows the government to regulate abortion after fetal viability. The second amendment mirrored the first but stripped out any role for the government.

Which amendment did voters prefer? By a large margin — 15 points — participants preferred the clean amendment, free of government control. “Which is it?” one voter said when asked about concerns with the first amendment. “Do we have individual freedoms or is the state controlling us?”

Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, vice president of communications for the National Institute for Reproductive Health, put it bluntly: The voters are out ahead of the government, she said, and even ahead of many reproductive rights organizations. People see that government involvement is a trap. And yet there is disagreement among reproductive rights organizations when it comes to the path forward, with many hedging, believing a Roe-like framework might pull us more quickly out of the current, hideous abyss. But that only takes us backward to days that were never all that great.

As we move forward, we need to think about what we really want — and what we can do to guarantee fully autonomous reproductive lives for all. Among those pushing for a holistic and inclusive approach is the NIRH’s Learning and Accountability Project.

“The public has never been more with us, more willing to reject government interference in our reproductive lives and futures,” the organization and its partners wrote on Medium. In each election since Roe was overturned, “we’ve won. But voters can only vote for what we put in front of them. It’s time to offer something more.”

The post Roe Was Never Enough to Ensure Reproductive Freedom appeared first on The Intercept.

A month before the 2020 presidential election, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose pandemic lockdown measures drew harsh criticism from President Donald Trump and his supporters.

The alleged plot coincided with growing concern about far-right political violence in America. But the FBI quickly realized it had a problem: A key informant in the case, a career snitch with a long rap sheet, had helped to orchestrate the kidnapping plot. During the undercover sting, the FBI ignored crimes that the informant, Stephen Robeson, appeared to have committed, including fraud and illegal possession of a sniper rifle.

The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Those cases too raised questions about whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents and informants.

• Thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and hundreds of hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept offer an extraordinary view into the alleged conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
• The Intercept exclusively obtained a five-hour recording of the FBI’s interrogation of Stephen Robeson, a paid informant central to the alleged kidnapping plot.
• The reports and recordings reveal how the FBI has adapted abusive war-on-terror sting tactics to target perceived domestic extremists and raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger effort to encourage political violence ahead of the 2020 election.
• Federal agents running the Whitmer kidnapping investigation put the public in danger to avoid undermining their operation, the files show.
• When FBI agents feared their informant might reveal the investigation’s flaws, they sought to coerce him into silence, at one point telling him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?”

For the FBI, the stakes in the Whitmer case were high. If defense lawyers learned of Robeson’s role in the kidnapping plot, the FBI agents feared, they’d be accused of entrapment. The collapse of the case, built over nearly a year using as many as a dozen informants, two undercover agents, and bureau field offices in at least four states, would have been a public relations coup for right-wing politicians and news media. Both groups have used the problematic investigation as evidence that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against conservatives — despite a decadeslong public record proving the opposite — and as fuel for conspiracy theories that the January 6 Capitol riot was engineered by the FBI.

But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward, using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.

The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.

The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado.

The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.

Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.

So on December 10, 2020, agents called Robeson into the FBI’s office in Milwaukee in an apparent attempt to silence him. In an extraordinary five-hour conversation, which FBI agents recorded, one of Robeson’s handlers told him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.

“A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.’”

The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “double agent” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.

“We know we have power, right?” an FBI agent told Robeson during this meeting. “We know we have leverage. We’re not going to bullshit you.”

“We’re speaking from a position of power. That’s why we’re here. We planned this out. We know we have power.”

Robeson’s role as an informant in the Whitmer kidnapping plot was supposed to be a tightly held secret. FBI agents had written the charging documents to conceal his identity.

But the FBI’s paperwork was sloppy. Supporters of the 14 defendants began to piece together clues from details like the FBI’s descriptions of passengers in a car that had been driven near Whitmer’s vacation home in Antrim County, Michigan. The clues appeared to point to Robeson as a snitch — or, in the FBI’s terminology, a confidential human source. After the October 2020 arrests, a panicked Robeson started calling targets of the FBI investigation and denying that he was an informant.

“So when you call, your intentions are to keep some of the heat off of you, right?” an FBI agent asked Robeson during the December 2020 meeting. “To point people in the other direction?”

“Anywhere but me,” Robeson answered. “Not at anyone specific, just away from me.”

FBI Special Agent Henrik “Hank” Impola, one of the lead investigators in the Whitmer kidnapping conspiracy, testifies in a Michigan court on Aug. 31, 2020.
Photo: Eric L. VanDussen

Robeson was talking to Henrik “Hank” Impola and Jayson Chambers, two of the lead FBI agents in the Michigan case. Chambers, who previously played in a rock band that “bases all of its music on the fact that Christians are in a spiritual war,” was the registered owner of a private intelligence company whose purported CEO ran a Twitter account known for right-wing trolling and that appeared to tweet about the Michigan case before it was announced.

The two agents started up a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Robeson. Chambers assured him they had done all they could to conceal his role as an informant. Impola, meanwhile, said they needed to come up with a plausible cover story.

Adam Fox, left, and Stephen Robeson, right, in a 2020 photo, became fast friends. The FBI tried to position Fox as the leader of the Whitmer kidnapping plot, but Robeson was also deeply involved, FBI records show.
Photo: FBI evidence

“Robey’s Idea From Day One”

From the start of the investigation, the FBI knew that Robeson, like many paid informants, had credibility problems. Robeson has been in and out of the criminal justice system since the early ’80s, charged with having sex with a minor, writing bad checks, bail jumping, and many other offenses. Robeson also acknowledged to the agents that he was previously a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. “I can’t blame what I did on anybody else,” Robeson told FBI agents of his criminal record. “I’m doing what I hope is better now.”

Sexual misconduct is a repeated claim in allegations involving Robeson, and his handlers at the FBI knew this. A local police report in the FBI’s files describes how a 17-year-old claimed Robeson coerced her to have sex in return for a promise to put her pictures in a calendar. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge.

More recently, according to an internal FBI report, a woman who lived in Robeson’s garage in Wisconsin told federal agents that Robeson pressured her for sex because he said she wasn’t contributing enough to the household. “I would not call it rape,” the woman said, though she acknowledged to federal agents that she did not believe she had a choice. The woman also told FBI agents that Robeson sold marijuana and prescription drugs out of his house, according to internal bureau documents. She reported that she suspected he was selling firearms as well. (The Intercept is not publishing these reports because they contain identifying information about alleged sex crime victims.)

Robeson’s career as a government cooperator appears to have coincided with his career as a criminal. In 1985, he testified that a member of a violent motorcycle gang with whom he had shared a jail cell confessed to him that he had “hit a girl on top of the head” before her body was found in a burned-out bar, which was allegedly set ablaze for insurance money. More recently, in the mid-2000s, Robeson helped police set up a Wisconsin farmer, who wanted to harm a romantic rival, in a murder-for-hire scheme.

Defense lawyers say the FBI used a nondisclosure agreement with Robeson — which they claim was never turned over as evidence in the Whitmer cases — to prevent Robeson from talking publicly about his work as an informant. As Special Agent Chambers reminded Robeson in their recorded meeting: “So when you get asked, ‘Why did you have to go to the FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ You don’t have to talk about what we’re talking about here.”

Federal agents were particularly troubled by messages Robeson had sent to Barry Croft Jr., a primary target in the investigation, that alluded to using violence against elected officials. Croft’s lawyer could use those messages to suggest that the kidnapping plot had been Robeson’s idea, not Croft’s, the agents feared.

“This is something that we’re all going to have to overcome,” Impola told Robeson, adding a few minutes later: “It quickly becomes, from a defense strategy, ‘Well, this was Robey’s idea from day one.’”

Joe Morrison (third from right), Paul Bellar (second from right), and Pete Musico (right) of the Wolverine Watchmen were among protesters inside the Michigan Capitol on April 30, 2020.
Photo: Seth Herald/REUTERS

“I Let the FBI Know”

In the spring of 2020, as the United States grappled with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a “stay home, stay safe” order in Michigan that barred “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Covid-19 skeptics, along with many Republicans, were enraged. On April 17, Trump weighed in with a tweet: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Two weeks later, as many as 1,000 protesters attended a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing in what a state senator later described as a “dress rehearsal” for January 6. The so-called American Patriot Rally was organized by Ryan Kelly, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for taking part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many of the protesters inside the Michigan Capitol were armed, including an FBI informant and former Army sergeant named Dan Chappel. The FBI had hired Chappel to infiltrate a ragtag group of gun enthusiasts he’d met through Facebook who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. “I let the FBI know that there was talks of storming the Capitol,” Chappel, known to the militia group as “Big Dan,” later testified.

About 10 members of the Wolverine Watchmen were with Chappel at the state Capitol, unaware that he was working for the FBI. Although he informed the FBI in advance that the Wolverine Watchmen planned to storm the Capitol that day, federal agents did not try to stop them, Chappel later testified. FBI agents knew the militia members had discussed the locations of police officers at the Capitol and how to start “the boogaloo,” code for a civil war. (A year after arrests were made in the Whitmer kidnapping plot, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed in a podcast interview that law enforcement perceived violence at the Capitol as a real threat. “There was a plan for mass execution that day,” Nessel said.)

The April rally in Lansing was so successful that the same organizers held another, on June 18, 2020. The protesters, including Chappel and other members of the Wolverine Watchmen, milled about outside the Capitol that day, showing off their firearms and military cosplay for the news cameras.

That’s where Chappel first met Adam Fox, who lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop and liked to work out, smoke marijuana, and rant on social media. A stout man with a beard, Fox had already met Robeson, who was the Wisconsin chapter president of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had started working for the FBI as an informant in October 2019, according to the bureau.

Adam Fox, photographed outside the Michigan Capitol on June 18, 2020, lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop. He liked to work out, smoke marijuana, rant on social media, and had become fascinated by the militia movement.
Photo: Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State/USA Today Network

Robeson had come to the FBI’s attention in part through a secret program known as Operation Bronze Griffon — first revealed publicly in 2022 to Republican House investigators by a whistleblower who misspelled it as Bronze Griffin — through which Facebook provides user activity information to federal agents without a search warrant or subpoena. According to an FBI report obtained by The Intercept, agents received a Bronze Griffon lead on Robeson for posting “possibly violent rhetoric in support of the militia movement and the Boogaloo concept.” The FBI recruited Robeson to be an informant, and he told agents that he knew of fellow militia members who had spoken about attacking law enforcement officials.

Once on the FBI payroll, Robeson organized and led several militia planning meetings, including one in Dublin, Ohio, that Fox and Croft attended on June 6, 2020.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox at the Michigan Capitol would bridge two federal investigations, known internally as Operation Cold Snap and Operation Kessel Run, and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox would bridge two federal investigation and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

The informants went to great lengths to position Fox as a leader. Robeson suggested that Fox launch a Michigan chapter of the Patriot Three Percenters. On June 21, 2020, just three days after Fox met Chappel, a third FBI informant, Jenny Plunk, created a private Facebook group called “Michigan Patriot III%ers.” (The FBI classifies Three Percenters as a domestic terrorism threat.)

The Facebook group’s first members were Plunk and Robeson, both on the FBI’s payroll, and Fox and his girlfriend, Amanda Keller. Plunk lived in Tennessee, where, according to her FBI cover story, she led a small militia. While Plunk and Robeson administered the Facebook group, Fox invited several Wolverine Watchmen and other gun enthusiasts to join, bringing the group’s membership roster to 28. Although the FBI’s informants had created the Facebook group for Fox, Robeson announced in a welcome message that Fox was the “C.O.” — a military acronym for “commanding officer.”

Robeson often spoke in the vernacular of a soldier. He never served in the military, but he was so gung-ho that he had obtained forged paperwork that made it appear he’d been a Marine, according to FBI reports. Using military lingo, Robeson posted an invitation to the new Facebook group for a weekend tactical training session in Cambria, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Madison.

More than 30 people attended that weekend event in July 2020, including Fox, his girlfriend, and a few members of the Wolverine Watchmen. At the time, Robeson was running scams related to a fake charity he called Race to Unite Races, whose mission was “to bridge the racial divide.” Internal FBI reports indicate that Robeson used proceeds from the fake charity to buy supplies to build a shooting range to train in close-quarters combat, known as a “kill house.”

Militia members practice inside a “kill house” during a July 2020 training session in Wisconsin organized and partially financed by FBI informant Stephen Robeson.
Screenshot: The Intercept/FBI evidence

Videos from the FBI files show the attendees shooting at targets in the kill house. Robeson, a firearm holstered at his side, can be seen giving directions. Chappel, who had combat experience in Iraq, also appears in several videos demonstrating tactics. FBI agents gave Chappel permission in advance to share combat tactics with the militia members, telling him: “You can do what’s on YouTube.”

In a group photo from the event, many attendees hold up rifles, offering the reluctant half-smiles of an awkward family picture. Robeson is off to the left, wearing flip-flops, American-flag swimming trunks, and a sleeveless T-shirt that hangs over his large belly. He’s holding up three fingers, the sign of the Three Percenters.

The events of that weekend were critical to the Justice Department’s case, as they appeared to show the men training for scenarios they’d encounter in their supposed attempt to kidnap Michigan’s governor. But by the time the FBI spoke to Robeson in December 2020, federal agents were deeply concerned that the fine details of that weekend might suggest entrapment.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping with Wolverine Watchman at the training you’ve set up, right?” Impola, the FBI agent, said to Robeson.

“It wasn’t just me,” Robeson said. “I set it up and —”

“These are things we need to discuss,” Chambers interrupted.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping, with Wolverine Watchmen at the training you set up, right?”

Impola told Robeson that the FBI’s case notes show that a Wisconsin agent was aware of the training, but that federal agents did not know that Robeson was the one who had organized it.

“I don’t want to put these words in your mouth, but the question is —” Impola said.

“Did I do it under FBI directive?” Robeson interrupted.

“Right,” Impola answered.

“No, it wasn’t just — What I’m saying is, it wasn’t me. It was Adam [Fox] that asked if they could do that —”

“Yup,” the two FBI agents said in unison.

“It was Barry [Croft] who asked if we could get a joint one together. It was Illinois. And I asked before I said yes.”

“The question becomes: Did a bunch of terrorists Shanghai your training for their purposes, or did you set up a training for terrorists?” Impola asked. “That’s the question, right? There’s a training that happened in which a terrorist operation was planned and played out, and you’re involved in setting it up.”

“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”

Robeson’s organizing and financing of the weekend training in Wisconsin wasn’t the FBI’s only problem.

In multiple videos from the training, Robeson can be seen using firearms. As a felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. But FBI agents apparently believed that handling firearms would be critical to his credibility among the militia members, so they had asked the Justice Department for a waiver to let Robeson handle “nonfunctional” weapons in his undercover capacity, according to internal emails.

In photos and videos taken during the FBI sting, informant Stephen Robeson can be seen with firearms even though the Justice Department had instructed the FBI not to allow Robeson, a convicted felon, to use guns during the operation.
Photo: FBI evidence

The Justice Department said no, reminding Robeson’s handlers that he was prohibited from handling even an inoperable firearm. “Just the receiver satisfies the federal definition of a firearm,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rita Rumbelow told the FBI in a May 21, 2020, email, referring to the tube that houses the firearm’s bolt.

Internal FBI records show that Robeson and his handlers found creative ways to get around the Justice Department’s directive. One month after the Wisconsin training event, the FBI assigned Robeson a new handler, Corey Baumgardner, an agent in Wisconsin. Baumgardner later testified that he collected a firearm from Robeson: an AR-15-style rifle with an illegal suppressor and a launcher attachment. Instead of handing the firearm to the agent, Robeson left it on the ground in front of his truck. Baumgardner collected the gun, without having to see Robeson handle it.

The gambit appeared to allow Robeson and the FBI to have it both ways: Robeson could have access to guns, maintaining his credibility with the militia members, and FBI agents wouldn’t directly see him handle firearms.

Federal agents went to great lengths to maintain this sleight of hand. As part of the sting, the FBI in early August 2020 went to Delaware, where Robeson and Plunk met with a group that included Croft, a truck driver Robeson started messaging online in 2019 about targeting politicians for violence, and Frank Butler, a Navy veteran from Virginia.

Butler had been in contact online and in person with both Robeson and Chappel, and Chappel had discussed with him a fantastical plan to fly an explosives-laden drone into the Virginia governor’s North Carolina vacation home, though the plot went nowhere. Butler, who was never charged with a crime, later told investigators that Robeson and Chappel “were literally brainwashing me” and “weaponizing me.” (Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that Robeson had offered to provide money to “purchase weapons for attacks” and “the use of a drone, to aid in acts of domestic terrorism.”)

After their meeting in Delaware, Robeson had something for Croft. Baumgardner, the FBI agent in Wisconsin, had driven the AR-15-style rifle he’d collected next to Robeson’s truck more than 900 miles to Delaware. The rifle had originally belonged to Croft, and Robeson tried to give the weapon back to him. According to internal FBI reports, Croft refused to accept it, saying he couldn’t keep it at that moment. Plunk, the other FBI informant, took the illegal gun instead.

The following month, two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants — Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk — gathered for another training event in Luther, Michigan, with around 26 others, including Croft from Delaware and Fox from Michigan. Plunk secretly recorded audio and video during the training event. In one recording, Robeson proclaimed that he was now the national leader of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had appointed someone else to run his chapter in Wisconsin. “I’m no longer the state C.O.,” Robeson said. “I’m the national C.O.”

Also during this training event, on the afternoon of September 13, 2020, Plunk gave the rifle to Croft, who, in turn, handed it over to Chappel, according to FBI reports.

The story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation.

FBI agents appeared to view the rifle with an illegal suppressor and attached launcher as a critical piece of evidence in their conspiracy case. But the story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation. The illegal rifle made a full circle, from the FBI and back, through the hands of three paid informants, never staying long with any targets of the investigation.

The gun anecdote is emblematic of the larger sting: The FBI’s informants were ham-fistedly encouraging their targets to discuss plots to harm elected officials. Those efforts reached farcical levels on September 12, 2020, during a meeting and training exercises in Luther.

For that meeting, Chappel brought a friend nicknamed “Red,” a slender man with a 187th Airborne sleeve tattoo on his right arm. “Red” was in fact Timothy Bates, an undercover FBI agent who identifies himself in government recordings as “UCE 7775,” referring to his FBI undercover employee number. Just three weeks earlier, Bates had been in Denver, where he encouraged political violence. In Colorado, an FBI informant named Mickey Windecker introduced Bates to a racial justice activist who expressed interest in assassinating the state’s attorney general — a plot that, like the one targeting Virginia’s governor, ultimately fizzled.

Bates and Chappel, both Army veterans, led a close-quarters combat training for the Wolverine Watchmen. Bates also told the group gathered in Michigan that he could supply explosives. The group’s rough plan to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home involved possibly blowing up a nearby bridge to slow rescue efforts.

“So my guy up in Minnesota, he can pretty much get whatever. He has access to whatever one would want,” Bates said in an undercover recording. Bates had brought along several videos showing men assembling and detonating homemade bombs. These videos were all stage-managed by the FBI, with agents pretending to be rogue bomb-makers.

In this screenshot from a video produced by the FBI, a man demonstrates how a pipe bomb can destroy a vehicle. An FBI undercover agent showed this video to attendees at a training session in Luther, Mich., on Sept. 12, 2020.
Photo: FBI evidence

One showed an SUV obliterated by a pipe bomb. “It’s a short video,” Bates told the group.

“Oh, yeah!” Robeson said, laughing approvingly at the explosion.

Bates explained that some of the bombs used C-4 inside pipes, with timing devices. Others used liquid explosives, he said.

“I need to come play with y’all,” Plunk said excitedly.

As he watched the video, Fox asked Bates: “What kind of price tag we looking at?”

“Depending on how big you want it,” Bates answered. “For that right there? That’s pretty cheap — 1,600 bucks, maybe. Maybe a thousand bucks.”

It wasn’t the first time Bates had offered bargain prices. In Colorado, Bates suggested he could hire a hitman for $500 to kill the state’s attorney general. In Michigan, he was offering explosives for pennies on the dollar.

That evening, Robeson, Chappel, Bates, and a few militia members drove near Whitmer’s vacation home. They inspected the bridge they’d bomb, tried to view Whitmer’s home from across the lake, and drove down her road. This apparent reconnaissance trip was central to the government’s case.

But true to form, Robeson mucked up the evidence. Fellow Wisconsinite Brian Higgins was the one who drove past Whitmer’s home — a seemingly incriminating act — but Higgins later told federal agents that Robeson had said they were hunting for sexual predators. In his December meeting with FBI agents, Robeson confirmed that Higgins was not initially aware of the kidnapping plot and instead believed they were out “hunting pedophiles.” But once he was in Michigan, Higgins learned that some of the attendees had a rough plan to kidnap Whitmer. Higgins drove down Whitmer’s road using a dash camera and provided the video to Chappel. After he returned to Wisconsin, Higgins claims he told Robeson he didn’t want to be involved in the plot.

The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

Feeling guilty for tricking him, Robeson tried to protect Higgins from criminal exposure — a fact federal prosecutors admitted to in a court filing. Robeson called Chappel, still unaware that he was also an FBI informant, and told him to destroy his copy of Higgins’s dash-cam video. The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

During the December 10, 2020, recorded interview with Robeson, Impola tried to coerce the informant into changing his story about what Higgins knew before the drive: “If you’re sticking with the story that [Higgins] was out there on a pedophile ring,” the FBI special agent said, “you’ll be his star witness in the defense. There’s zero options for that.”

A Confederate flag hangs from a porch on a property in Munith, Mich., where members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia group trained with an FBI informant named Dan Chappel.
Photo: Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP

“We Have One Chief”

When arrests and charges were announced in the Whitmer plot, the Justice Department portrayed Adam Fox as the leader. But FBI recordings suggest the informants were the ones in charge.

On October 7, 2020, as the government was making arrests in the case, Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk were on a recorded phone line talking about who should make future calls to action — in other words, who should be the leader.

“I was thinking we should have one person … to make the call for both states.”

“I mean, I’m good with Robey, because you’re the national guy, the president,” Chappel said, adding a minute later: “We have one chief.”

“We can definitely roll,” Robeson said. “That’s fine.”

The FBI arrested 13 people that day, and the foiled kidnapping plot made national news. (Higgins, the 14th defendant, was arrested a week later.) After the initial arrests, Robeson made a series of calls to Chappel; the girlfriend of one of the militia members; and others who orbited the supposed kidnapping plot. Robeson offered several outlandish claims, including that he believed Croft, a primary target of the investigation, had leaked information that caused the arrests. FBI reports indicate that Robeson again called Chappel, still unaware that he was also working for the FBI, and told him to throw the rifle with the illegal suppressor and attached launcher into a lake. Chappel, however, had already returned the gun to his bureau handlers.

During these calls, Robeson told fellow informant Plunk that he believed Chappel was an informant. Robeson appeared to be flailing after the arrests, pointing fingers to avoid being revealed as a government snitch.

His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the arrests was so concerning to FBI agents that federal and state prosecutors discussed charging him with witness tampering, according to emails that circulated among more than a dozen FBI agents the day after the kidnapping plot was announced. The bureau then began to investigate Robeson, internal records show. Agents reinterviewed the woman living in his garage, who claimed he had coerced her into having sex with him. That woman told the FBI that during the undercover sting, Robeson had an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom; that he was bringing in drugs from out of state; and that he had proposed taking her to rallies and training events in other parts of the country so she could make money, which she described to the FBI as “sex trafficking.”

For his part, Robeson appeared to realize that he had crossed the line from informant to participant in the kidnapping plot, putting himself in legal jeopardy. An internal FBI report said Robeson told another informant that he was worried he could be linked to “product,” by which he meant explosives.

Illustration: Jess Suttner for The Intercept

“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”

The Whitmer kidnapping plot has yielded five acquittals, five convictions, and four guilty pleas in federal and state courts. Robeson didn’t testify in any of the trials. When defense lawyers tried to compel him, he told the federal court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The Justice Department claimed that Robeson was a “double agent” whose statements would not be “binding admissions of the government itself.”

The recording of Robeson’s December 2020 meeting with the FBI reveals that the “double agent” ploy was a carefully planned strategy. When Robeson was called into that Wisconsin FBI office, agents described three possible scenarios for him.

The first was that all the defendants would take plea deals, in which case “your name is not on the witness list,” Impola said. The second was that Robeson could be a government witness or, in the third option, a witness for the defendants whose testimony could support their claims of entrapment.

At the time, the agents errantly assumed that option one was the likeliest. “I am fairly confident that when anybody looks at that witness list, they’re not going to trial now because they know the ramifications,” said Impola.

But what he didn’t say was that the second and third options — involving Robeson testifying in court — weren’t real options at all, at least not in the view of the FBI. There was also a fourth option that the agents didn’t mention: The Justice Department could jam Robeson, a felon, with firearms charges for crimes he committed while working undercover for the FBI.

And that’s what happened. On March 3, 2021, the Justice Department indicted Robeson in Wisconsin on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged that Robeson bought a .50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms available to civilians in the United States, and later sold it on Facebook — all while working for the FBI.

At his plea hearing, Robeson claimed he’d bought the gun to bolster his FBI cover. “I did this trying to keep my undercover position where I was at and kind of make me look a little more aggressive in the organization,” Robeson said in court.

Robeson was sentenced to probation on a federal felony charge that could have carried a 10-year sentence. He and his handlers knew he had illegally possessed, purchased, and sold multiple firearms in the course of the sting; the single gun charge represented a threat of more to come if he were to testify in any of the state or federal prosecutions.

With that threat, FBI agents stopped the facts from getting in the way of their “good story” about the Whitmer kidnapping plot. In their zeal to protect a career-making case, those federal agents also poured jet fuel on conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the January 6 Capitol riot that will be central to this year’s presidential election.

The post The Informant at the Heart of the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Was a Liability. So Federal Agents Shut Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

LGBTQ+ rights supporters protest against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Nov. 6, 2022, in Fort Myers, Fla.
Photo: Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images

The Republican-led Florida House last week passed some of the most extreme anti-trans legislation to move through the far-right chamber to date. Media attention focused on a measure that would ban trans people from carrying accurate driver’s licenses by requiring state IDs to list only the gender assigned to a person at birth. The proposal has been dubbed the “trans erasure bill.”

That same piece of legislation, House Bill 1639, would also mandate a series of pernicious measures relating to private health insurance coverage. These aspects of the proposed law have garnered fewer headlines, but the impact could be far-reaching: They risk raising the cost of health insurance for everyone in the state.

Cisgender people are not the key concern here. The anti-trans legislation is most vile, of course, for its explicit intent to render public life and necessary health care ever more inaccessible for trans people.

Control over gender-nonconforming people requires control over everyone.

Yet the fact that a Republican agenda for trans erasure means doing damage to the wider health care system is a reminder that control over gender-nonconforming people requires control over everyone.

The trans erasure bill mandates that all private health insurance plans, for every Floridian, cover what is commonly described as “conversion therapy” — a dangerous pseudoscientific approach to changing someone’s sexual preferences or gender identity. The bill doesn’t call it that, of course, but with a little translation of the obfuscating language and poor grammar, it’s easy to show what Florida Republicans are trying to do.

The bill “forbids health insurers and HMOs from prohibiting coverage of mental health and therapeutic services to treat a person’s perception that his or her sex is inconsistent with sex at birth by affirming the person’s sex at birth.” That is, health insurers must cover therapy that insists that a gender assigned at birth is correct, and that a person suffering from gender dysphoria should be made to accept this.

Conversion therapy is a debunked practice, banned in 2020 states and rejected by the American Medical Association. Yet, should the trans erasure bill become law, Florida residents under private health insurance plans will have to pay for it to be covered.

[pullqutote pull=left]“For every anti-LGBTQ bill we see pass in Florida, we’ll see it taken up elsewhere.”[/pullquote]

Florida has been ground zero for introducing a spate of anti-trans legislation aiming at health insurance and medical liability as a means to bring about de facto health care bans for trans adults, alongside explicit bans on care for trans youth.

“It’s so important we stop these bills in Florida,” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a senior policy adviser for Equality Florida who is running for state Senate, told me. “For every anti-LGBTQ bill we see pass in Florida, we’ll see it taken up elsewhere.”

It’s not clear, and has not been calculated, what the exact cost of the “conversion therapy” mandate would be for privately insured Floridians. No research was carried out by Republicans on the financial consequences of the measure, despite such analysis being required by state law before any mandate on health insurance is enacted. Florida Republicans, though, might not know that: They’re usually fighting tooth and nail against enacting these mandates, which in most cases have been proposed to expand access to health care, not restrict it.

This grim irony — that the Florida GOP usually opposes government mandates on health care coverage provisions but is in this case seeking to impose its own in the name of conversion therapy — is not lost on LGBTQ+ and health care advocates in the state.

“They’ve taken their culture-war attacks against trans people so far that it’s costing everyone,” said Smith. “If the human price wasn’t bad enough — and it should be — it’s hitting all our pockets,” he told me, noting that Florida is one of “a handful of remaining states” that has refused to expand Medicaid, in turn denying coverage to 800,000 uninsured Floridians.

In a series of tweets, Smith cited Florida’s own law, which states that the legislature “recognizes that most mandated benefits contribute to the increasing cost of health insurance premiums.” Nonetheless, he noted, “HB 1639 mandates anti-trans ‘conversion therapy’ on all health care plans no matter what the cost on Floridians.”

“If the human price wasn’t bad enough — and it should be — it’s hitting all our pockets.”

There’s no real contradiction here. Republicans have long combined costly totalitarian bureaucracy and law enforcement with vicious austerity measures in service of their ultimate goals: white supremacy, Christo-nationalism, and property protection.

The answer to the conversion therapy mandate is not to call upon Republicans to remain consistent in their austerity logics and resist all government mandated health care. Rather, it’s to fight for a robust system of free health care for all, less vulnerable to the compulsions of conservative minority rule.

Other measures in the trans erasure bill take specific aim at insurance plans that cover gender-affirming care and require that coverage for “de-transition” medical treatment be offered for any such plan.

“De-transition” care should already be covered as gender affirming health care — to transition again is still to transition — but the legislation is an invitation for private insurers to treat trans people as a site of risk and raise premiums accordingly or drop gender-affirming care coverage altogether.

The bill explicitly states that plans that cover trans health care can charge “an appropriate additional premium,” singling out trans people for higher premiums to cover the care they need. Meanwhile, all Floridians would have to pay more for the inclusion of conversion therapy in their coverage.

Having passed the House last week, the Florida Senate now has until the end of the week — the close of the legislative session — to take up the trans erasure bill and other anti-trans legislation passed by the House. If the Senate responds to rightful public concern about the legislation and does not pick it up in the coming days, the bill dies.

It would be a small but necessary victory against the Republican war on trans existence.

The post Florida Anti-Trans Bill Could Raise Everyone’s Health Insurance Costs appeared first on The Intercept.