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

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

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

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

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

How much audio were you working with?

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

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

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

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

Bensinger: That’s right. In March 2021, Dan Chappel gave, like, three days of testimonies in a preliminary hearing in Michigan. We watched all of it. I just thought it was........

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