Kidnapping Is Not A 'Violent Felony': Appeals Court Voids Two More Whitmer Plot Convictions

A Michigan Court of Appeals panel on July 20 vacated the convictions of Pete Musico and Paul Bellar, two men a jury found guilty in 2022 of providing material support for an act of terrorism over their connection to the alleged 2020 plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

The reason? Michigan's Anti-Terrorism Act defines an act of terrorism as conduct that would constitute a violent felony under state law. Kidnapping, the judges held, is not a violent felony as that term is defined. So kidnapping cannot serve as the predicate act for a material-support conviction - no matter what the defendants did or intended.

The panel did not reach that conclusion on its own. It was bound by a June decision in the case of co-defendant Joseph Morrison, decided by a different panel, which held that kidnapping "cannot properly form the basis for defendant's conviction." Monday's per curiam opinion said the court was bound by that interpretation and that the jury in this case was tainted by the same erroneous instructions. Because the trial judge had told jurors to treat kidnapping as a violent felony, and because they heard extensive testimony about the plot, the appellate judges concluded the verdict may have rested on an invalid basis.

Both men had also been convicted of committing a felony motivated by gang membership and of possessing a firearm during a felony. Because kidnapping was the underlying felony in each, those convictions were vacated too - even though, the panel noted, jurors could reasonably have found that the Wolverine Watchmen, the group the men belonged to, functioned as a gang and appeared involved in illegal activity.

The sentences erased were substantial. Michigan Advance and the Free Press report Musico had drawn 12 to 20 years, the harshest of the three; Bellar seven to 20; Morrison 10 to 20, later corrected downward. Prosecutors had cast the trio - Morrison, his father-in-law Musico, and their acquaintance Bellar - as early members and founders of the Wolverine Watchmen, the militia that trained alongside the plot's alleged ringleaders.

The cases now return to Jackson County Circuit Court. Because the reversal rests on instructional error rather than insufficiency of the evidence, the panel left the door open for further proceedings, and Attorney General Dana Nessel says she is walking through it.

"A previous ruling used linguistic gymnastics to overturn the conviction of an extremist," Nessel said. "Now, that broken precedent has legally bound this Court of Appeals panel to reverse the convictions of two more dangerous criminals." She said her office had already begun appealing the Morrison decision and would do the same here, adding that it "will not downplay domestic terrorism." Lawyers for the three men could not be reached, The Epoch Times reported.

The Big Picture

Monday's ruling lands on a prosecution whose record was mixed long before this. Fourteen people were charged across state and federal courts. Five were acquitted outright. With three convictions now vacated, six stand.

The federal case fared better for prosecutors, but only on the second attempt. In April 2022, a Grand Rapids jury acquitted Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of conspiracy and deadlocked on Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr., forcing a mistrial. Retried that August, Fox and Croft were convicted of conspiring to kidnap the governor and to use weapons of mass destruction, with Croft additionally convicted of possessing an unregistered explosive device wrapped in pennies for shrapnel, according to the Justice Department. Two others, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty and testified for the government.

Entrapment was the defense's central theme throughout, and it worked at least twice. Attorneys portrayed their clients as loudmouthed weekend hobbyists talked into a conspiracy by federal handlers. BuzzFeed News reported that informants working under FBI direction were involved in nearly every phase of the alleged plot including its inception, raising the obvious question of whether a conspiracy would have existed without them. Prosecutors countered that the men had discussed abducting Whitmer before the sting began, scouted her vacation home, and tested explosives. The Sixth Circuit sided with the government in 2025, calling the entrapment evidence "weak" and upholding both convictions.

None of that history has anything to do with Monday's outcome; Musico and Bellar did not win on entrapment, on the facts, or on the sufficiency of the evidence against them. They won because Michigan's legislature wrote a terrorism statute that, as two appellate panels now read it, does not reach the crime they were accused of supporting. Whether the Michigan Supreme Court agrees is the next question.