GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Hundreds and hundreds of documents are on file in the federal case against Adam Fox, convicted as a leader in the foiled plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The latest, filed on Thursday, just days before his sentencing, is a letter from Fox’s mom.

The federal government is asking that the judge sentence Fox to life in prison, arguing that the 2020 kidnapping plot was a forerunner of rampant anti-government extremism.

But his mom, Christina Badgero, in a six-page letter to U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker, wrote the judge never really got to know her son.

The judge also got letters from Fox’s sister and an aunt.

“You know him as the defendant in the Whitmer conspiracy to kidnap case,” Fox’s mom wrote, “but I want you to know him for the man that he truly is, not the counterfeit version portrayed to you by the federal government and the media.”

Fox and co-defendant Barry Croft Jr., a trucker from Delaware, were convicted in August of conspiring to kidnap Whitmer.

They were also found guilty of conspiring to obtain a weapon of mass destruction.

The FBI broke up the plot with arrests in October 2020.

At trial, Fox’s attorney portrayed him as hapless and virtually homeless, a man with a loud, vile mouth who lived in the basement of a vacuum shop.

Fox’s mom wrote about her son’s troubled upbringing and her role in it, writing that she had failed as a “loving and nurturing mother.”

As a result, she wrote, he became a man “desperately seeking to belong or fit in.”

“We had many political discussions and one thing I want to stress is that Adam was never anti-government but he, like myself and others, are anti corruption within the government,” she wrote.

She wrote about what led him to live in the basement of the Vac Shack, about buying his first AR-15 and joining the militia, about how COVID-19 changed his mental state and led him to join rallies, about meeting a guy named Dan, who turned out to be a government informant who became the star witness in his trial.

“In all this one thing remained pure and that is Adam’s heart,” his mom wrote. “His heart has always been good and filled with love and forgiveness.”

Her son, she wrote, is “not evil nor is he a terrorist or a threat to democracy.”

Nor, she wrote, “does he deserve life in prison.”

Fox is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday in US District Court in Grand Rapids. Croft, his convicted sidekick, will face the same judge for sentencing on Wednesday. Others convicted in the case, both in federal and state courts, already are serving prison time.