Aug. 4, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:54:10
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| So you're, I would say, one of the living experts on the Oklahoma City bombing, which to some of us seems like just the other day, but it was 30 years ago this year. | ||
| So for those not steeped in the details of the story, if you wouldn't mind giving us the overview, what was the Oklahoma City bombing? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The Oklahoma City bombing was and is America's deadliest domestic terror attack. | ||
| It happened on a Wednesday morning in 1995, an April morning, out of nowhere, nine in the morning at the federal building the alfred p muir federal building nine stories tall a devastating explosion hit the building and killed 168 people who were working or | ||
| visiting the building that morning the front of the building looked like ice cream that had been scooped out. | ||
| It was just a scene of unbelievable destruction and death and blood and confusion and the entire nation was left just aghast that this could have happened in America's heartland. | ||
|
unidentified
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music it was air | |
| It was shocking and there was immediately there went on CNN to say that Muslims had done it. | ||
| That was the first understanding was this was some kind of Islamic terror attack. | ||
| And then we were told that no, it was really one guy with an accomplice who wasn't there. | ||
| The guy was called Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| He had a Ryder truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with diesel fuel, I think. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's when most of us learned that that mixture could produce an explosion like this. | ||
| Now that's, I think, well known, but that's when most of us learned it. | ||
| And he was a white supremacist. | ||
| He was mad at the government. | ||
| He was mad about Waco and Ruby Ridge. | ||
| And he's a former, he was a veteran. | ||
| But he was part of a network of white supremacists. | ||
| And then we spent the next year or two hearing about this. | ||
| Bill Clinton often referred to this. | ||
| And then he was executed. | ||
| And that was kind of the end of the story. | ||
| So that's the layman's understanding of Oklahoma City. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it was quite an amazing couple of days in lightning fast speed. | ||
| The FBI. | ||
| found Timothy McVeigh tracing the axle from the Ryder truck to a motel 275 miles north in Kansas where McVeigh had checked in to the motel using his own name. | ||
| Pretty soon, just within a matter of a couple of days, the FBI found its way to Perry, Oklahoma, about 75 miles north. | ||
| of Oklahoma City, where McVeigh had been arrested on traffic charges, driving his Mercury car, the getaway car, without a license plate. | ||
| And the officer, the arresting officer, found that he was carrying a concealed weapon. | ||
| McVeigh was very polite the entire time. | ||
| There was no thought that McVeigh was connected to the bombing. | ||
| The highway patrolman took him into the Perry jail and he sat there. | ||
| He was on his way to a bond hearing and to be released when the FBI, through this incredible speed of their investigation, found him in Perry, Oklahoma on Friday afternoon for that now famous perp walk out the door without a vest in his orange jumpsuit and his thousand mile stare and | ||
| the gathered crowd around chanting baby killer. | ||
| That's what we remember of our first sight of Timothy McVeigh, the suspected bomber. | ||
| Boy, the FBI is good. | ||
| I mean, they got him within days on the basis of a truck axle. | ||
| How did they say they did that? | ||
| They tracked the VIN number on the truck axle to Ryder in Florida, and Ryder had a record of that truck being rented out of Junction City, Kansas. | ||
| And so they went to the rental agency and sure enough put two and two together. | ||
| The identification was made from first the rider, the rental truck agency where McVeigh had rented the truck. | ||
| They remembered him and they made a composite sketch of the two men, not one but two men who had been present for the rental of the truck. | ||
| And with the sketches, the FBI spanned out in Junction City and found that motel where McVeigh had registered under his own name. | ||
| What do you mean, two men? | ||
| Who was the other man? | ||
| The other man, who eventually would emerge as the mystery man of the Oklahoma City bombing, was never identified, but the staff at Elliot's body shop, | ||
| where they rented the Ryder truck, two days before the bombing on a Monday, they all said there was a second man there, and he was described as being very muscular, having a tattoo, having dark hair, and just very nervous. | ||
| And just standing to the side while John Doe one, who called himself Robert Kling, rented the truck. | ||
| Okay, so and Robert Kling was Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| Robert Kling was John Doe one, believed to have been Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| Who, in the end, was convicted, sentenced to death and executed, pretty, pretty short order. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When was he executed? | ||
| He was executed in 2001. | ||
| That is short order for a capital crime. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| So six years later. | ||
| So he's been dead for 24 years. | ||
| The terror attack was 30 years ago. | ||
| When you say the man with him was never identified, do you mean to this day? | ||
| To this day, never identified and really the abiding mystery of the case. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| How could you have the biggest terror attack, domestic terror attack in US history, destroy, you know, the downtown of a major American city and you don't over 30 years, you don't find the second guy? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
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| Let's go back. | ||
| Are we sure there was a second guy? | ||
| Yes, although it has been disputed. | ||
| We're sure because, first of all, 24 ordinary people. | ||
| in Oklahoma City who eventually were interviewed by the FBI about the bombing run, 24 eyewitnesses saw Timothy McVeigh with a second man in the Ryder truck, so we know he was there. | ||
| As you can remember, the investigation was a very big deal for a very long time. | ||
| Journalism covered it, and journalists reported, top journalists reported that the FBI had surveillance videotape because of course that's what they do in a big crime like this. | ||
| They went out and collected all the videotape and they had John Doe 2 with Timothy McVeigh on videotape delivering the bomb. | ||
| They had videotape of the bomb exploding. | ||
| The preliminary hearing for the the case was held, you know, a week or so after the crime. | ||
| And the videotapes were discussed there. | ||
| The FBI agent on the witness stand admitted that the FBI had videotape of the delivery of at least of the truck on its way to deliver the bomb. | ||
| So we know that John Doe 2 was real. | ||
| Well, now I'm really confused because I don't, I mean, why is John Doe 2 not at the top of the FBI most wanted list as a perpetrator of the country's worst domestic terror attack in its history? | ||
| Pretty soon and in puzzling fashion considering that this was the biggest. | ||
| manhunt in history was a global manhunt. | ||
| There was a $2 million reward offered for the identification and capture of John Doe 2. | ||
| But pretty soon, within a couple of months, the FBI began to back away from John Doe 2. | ||
| They produced a new theory that John Doe 2 was a case of mistaken identity, that the staffer that was the basis of the sketch at the body shop was mistaken that he was really talking about a completely innocent soldier who So, I'm sorry to interrupt, but just to hold this up. | ||
| So, this is the flyer produced by the FBI after the terrorist attack, right? | ||
| So, I believe that turned out to be Tim McVeigh, right there. | ||
| Believed to be Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| Our investigation would raise some questions about that, but yes, a look alike for Timothy McVeigh or a look alike for Tim McVeigh. | ||
| But at least we can kind of account for this guy, whether it's the correct accounting or not. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| This is the F. This is produced by the feds. | ||
| This is FBI. | ||
| FBI. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, and this person has never been identified. | ||
| Nobody's looking for him and the FBI is now saying he never existed. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| On what, given that you had dozens of people identify this person as a person, you know, as being alive and being with Tim McVeigh, dozens of people. | ||
| And given that the FBI itself said, yeah, he existed, on what basis are they now saying he never existed? | ||
| Well, a couple of months later, they interviewed him. | ||
| They introduced a new story. | ||
| This was that the man believed to be John Doe 2 was this innocent soldier who had come into the body shop the day before and had somehow been mistakenly time traveled into their into the memory of the mechanic who gave the info about the sketch, | ||
| but that it was all just a mistake that Timothy McVeigh was by himself. | ||
| It was never a very credible explanation. | ||
| They identified this. | ||
| Yes, they identified him., they talked to him. | ||
| They found that, you know, he had the baseball cap that some of the witnesses had described John Dottu wearing and he was in with a friend. | ||
| So the two the two of them were together and it was somewhat it was somewhat credible or credible enough and they were very certain and confident about it and the story began to change. | ||
| So they said if I'm following this that actually some other guy and a buddy walked into the same body shop around the same time and the guy at the body shop just misremembered and thought that that guy was with Tim McVeigh. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And he wasn't. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so the FBI is now saying that Tim McVeigh did this alone. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How do they explain away the eyewitness testimony of people who were there at the scene and saw them both in the truck together? | ||
| Tucker, that is one of the abiding questions never answered about this case. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, years later after some of the controversies that would, you know, develop. | ||
| One of the top case commanders, Danny Colson, conceded that this single fact of 24 eyewitnesses who saw John Doe 2 in the bomb truck with Timothy McVeigh is not something that can just be explained away with this new story. | ||
| I have an idea. | ||
| Let's go to the videotape. | ||
| There was videotape that was admitted. | ||
| You said on the stand by a federal officer that they had the videotape. | ||
| So that would just show where where is the video have you seen the videotape? | ||
| No one, Tucker, has seen that videotape. | ||
| In thirty years? | ||
| In thirty years. | ||
| The FBI. | ||
| In thirty years, they've never produced that. | ||
| They've never produced it. | ||
| And imagine this was an incredibly high profile mass murder trial. | ||
| Those images were not shown at the trial. | ||
| The videotape was not shown at the trial. | ||
| It was not shown at the trial? | ||
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unidentified
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No. | |
| Why? | ||
| Well, that's never been credibly answered by the FBI. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I just want to start as big picture as we can before we get into the details, but I'm already coming just as an ignorant person who sort of sort of remembers all of this, we're coming to points that are just like don't make any sense at all on the most basic level. | ||
| And there are many of these. | ||
| I'm aware. | ||
| I'm now aware. | ||
| But I want to go into this slowly because I think. | ||
| This is not one of this is not the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| This is not something on which there have been 50 books written. | ||
| I mean, you have written a great book on this, maybe one or two others, but most people, I don't think as of right now, summer of 2025 have revisited this in their heads and said actually the Warren Commission was fake. | ||
| Like that's not that hasn't happened. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you have now the claim by the FBI that McVeigh did this himself. | ||
| He may have had help from this friend of his called Terry Nichols, who is to this day still in prison serving life. | ||
| But he was not in Oklahoma City that day, is my understanding correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| He was in Kansas. | ||
| He was in Kansas. | ||
| So they're saying that Tim McVeigh did the actual bombing totally by himself. | ||
| Rented the bomb truck in Junction city by himself, drove to Oklahoma City by himself, delivered and detonated the bomb by himself. | ||
| That's the state's case. | ||
| That's the government's case. | ||
| And escaped by himself. | ||
| What do they say his motive was? | ||
| He was enraged at the government for its overreach. | ||
| at Waco, which Texas. | ||
| Two years before. | ||
| To the day. | ||
| To the day, April 19, 1993 was the FBI, the final assault after an 80-something day standoff. | ||
| Two years before Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| That was where Janet Reno killed all those kids. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There were children, there were heavy casualties for children as well as adults. | ||
| And they said Tim McVeigh was so mad about that that he decided to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. | ||
| Any indication as to why Oklahoma City? | ||
| Well, Oklahoma City was central to an anti government movement in the Midwest. | ||
| So it was it was a it was a high profile target. | ||
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| So the FBI backs off of its claim and then completely erases its claim that there was. | ||
| was a second perpetrator involved working with Tim McVeigh. | ||
| How hard did they look for John Doe number two? | ||
| Well, it was a global manhunt. | ||
| Two million dollar reward offered. | ||
| All over America, people were being stopped in the street, detained in a few instances arrested. | ||
| So they were looking hard for a month. | ||
| Who was Tim McVeigh exactly? | ||
| Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| Timothy McVeigh was a 26-year-old Bron Starr, ex-soldier from the Desert Storm operation in Iraq. | ||
| And he had come back home in 1992. | ||
| This was three years before the bombing and kind of kicked around his home. | ||
| where he grew up in upstate New York, had a couple of jobs, security jobs, security work, but never really gripped into a future after the Army. | ||
| There's a story about he was a great soldier, an intense, passionate soldier, and he was offered a tryout for special forces at the end of his tour. | ||
| and he he he He had developed blisters on his feet, so the story went, and couldn't make the physical. | ||
| So he washed out of special forces and that had been his dream. | ||
| That's where he always saw himself. | ||
| So when he came back home, security guard work wasn't satisfying. | ||
| He was living with his dad and he was just he was he was pretty aimless at at the time. | ||
| So how did he get from being an unemployed security guard, bronze star winning veteran living with his dad in Upstate New York to blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City? | ||
| Yeah, that was a really curious passage. | ||
| He became very political and he headed south to Florida and hooked up with one of the kind of mysterious connections that we know about in the next couple of years of his life. | ||
| A retired gun dealer named Roger Moore. | ||
| And he basically went on the gun show circuit. | ||
| He carried with him copies of the Turner Diaries, which is this anti-Semitic, apocalyptic novel that he was very much, and not just anti-Semitic, but anti-government. | ||
| It was just basically the story of an insurrection. | ||
| And he... | ||
| he would take this with him to gun shows and try to you know sell it or convince people to read it. | ||
| He was trying to convince all his friends to read the Turner Diaries. | ||
| And he just floated around. | ||
| Without knowing what really was going on in Timothy McVeigh's life for the two years that led up to the bombing, it's really a puzzle. | ||
| And he just, he lived this road warrior life, staying in motels, unexplained. | ||
| I've heard somebody account for, like, it would have cost someone in in those dollars in those days like 50 000 dollars to live this way but we only know of him having earned like 5 000 dollars so where did he get the rest of the money unaccounted for but he just he drove dro you know thousands of miles stayed in motels hit gun show circuits and | ||
| Eventually, two years later, plus some months, bombed the federal building. | ||
| So we know at the time, so the government had committed a number of, a couple at least of high profile massacres of conservative Christian white people. | ||
| One at Ruby Ridge and one at Waco. | ||
| And so they were, as I recall, they were very concerned about backlash from conservative Christian white Americans becoming radicalized white supremacists, you know, Nazis, whatever that means. | ||
| like radical anti-government white people. | ||
| That was the threat in their view in the Clinton years, the first Clinton term. | ||
| And so they were trying to neutralize that threat by infiltrating those groups with federal informants. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| But at scale, like they were really working on this. | ||
| Can we say that for certain? | ||
| Yes. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So Tim McVeigh going to all these different, you know, basically hanging around with all these people, joining the circuit of, you know, this political philosophy based in gun shows and no visible means of support, we can assume he was a federal informant, sounds like. | ||
| Or may have been a federal informant. | ||
| There's never been any record. | ||
| I think that would be perhaps a bit of a reach to assume he was a federal informant. | ||
| It was, at least to my understanding, and there is going to be some evidence about that, but I think making that connection, the gun shows were a hangout. | ||
| If you were lost and male and ex-military and seeking direction, as McVeigh's attorney would argue in his defense at trial, there were a lot of people who shared his beliefs about what had happened at Waco. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who were seeking others, seeking a clubhouse, if you were, Will. | ||
| And the gun show circuit was that place. | ||
| So I think it could have been just he was searching. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| But that world would have been crawling with informants. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Crawling with informants and crawling with law enforcement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's what happened to Randy Weaver, of course. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| His world was crawling with law enforcement because, again, the FBI had identified that world, that brand of politics as the main threat. | ||
| Randy Weaver sold a shotgun that was, like, too short or something, and they wanted to... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so they murdered his wife and son. | ||
| So, but back to Tim McVeigh. | ||
| So we don't really know what he was doing during that time, it sounds like, with any great specificity. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Who was Terry Nichols? | ||
| Terry Nichols was an army buddy of McVeigh's. | ||
| And he was older. | ||
| He went into the service older. | ||
| He was perhaps 10 years older than McVeigh or five. | ||
| But they had served together. | ||
| They liked each other. | ||
| And in fact, with a third soldier named Michael Fortier, who will be part of this story, the Threaters. | ||
| three of them served together and after McVeigh Nichols left the service first and then And then McVeigh and they hooked up again together to be in the Army surplus business. | ||
| So that was how they came back together after the Army. | ||
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| So the government alleges that the two of them, maybe with 48, hatched this plot. | ||
| to bomb the Morrow building. | ||
| How did they pay for it? | ||
| There's a lot that's missing about the money. | ||
| And nobody ever, the investigation never succeeded in following the money in this enormous terrorist attack, which is just remains an unsolved mystery. | ||
| But because they were both virtually penniless. | ||
| Terry Nichols had run up credit card debt and tried to declare himself exempt from, tried to give up his citizenship at one point and tried to say none of his credit card debt was valid, but they were scrambling to put together a business because they both were familiar with how the Army surplus business works. | ||
| So that was their plan, that was their hope. | ||
| They had no other, so far as we know, they had no other source of income. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Now we're getting into, again, stuff that doesn't make any sense because I think, not to get ahead in the story, but I think Terry Nichols made a number of trips to the Philippines, didn't he? | ||
| He did. | ||
| He traveled. | ||
| That's not as long a flight as you can take in the world. | ||
| How did he pay for that? | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| What was he doing there? | ||
| Nobody knows for sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He married a what? | ||
| A Filipino. | ||
| But he didn't take her on all of these trips. | ||
| The people who investigated later found out that he reportedly took a bomb building book on one of these trips that a Filipino terrorist turned government informant said. | ||
| that Terry Nichols attended a meeting on one of the islands there with Ramsey Youssef, who was plotting a terrorist attack during Nichols' last trip to the Philippines, which was in late 1994. | ||
| That would have been months before the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| So no good answers for how these guys Ramsey Youssef is a World Trade Center bomber. | ||
| 93. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| The first World Trade Center bombing. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that Ramsay Youssef met Terry Nichols? | ||
| Well, that's what this terrorist said, claimed, had happened. | ||
| Well, that would just be, given the Earth's population outside the bounds of probability, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Random probability. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And it was also known that at this boarding house where Terry Nichols made many phone calls in Cebu City, it was a hangout for Islamic terrorists. | ||
| So there is this very curious, intriguing but unanswered possibility that Terry Nichols had some connection to that lobe of activity. | ||
| That would cut against the prevailing story, which was that Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh were Christian nationalists, white supremacists. | ||
| You know, why would a white supremacist Christian nationalist be hanging around with Muslim terrorists in Cebu City, Philippines? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| Well, it's a very obvious question, but it's a question. | ||
| Again, we're getting to the. | ||
| This is a question that has no answer. | ||
| Terry Nichols is in prison. | ||
| I believe you've interviewed him. | ||
| I have. | ||
| Has he answered these questions? | ||
| No. | ||
| Terry Nichols, when Representative Dana Rohrbacher in Congress took up this matter and really pressed, Terry Nichols eventually bailed out of a second interview with the congressman because he said, There is no connection between the Philippines, my travel there, and the bombing. | ||
| So that was that's too Terry Nichols word on this. | ||
| But Terry Nichols never explained how he afforded to travel as an unemployed person trying to start an army surplus business to the Philippines multiple times or pay for the Ryder truck and ammonium nitrate. | ||
| That is right. | ||
| This just seems now we're now we're getting to like bonkers level unanswered questions. | ||
| It's like what did the Fed say about all this in the indictment during the trial? | ||
| Did they ever explain the money? | ||
| No. | ||
| This trial was basically simplified. | ||
| It was political ideology. | ||
| It was Timothy McVeigh, the mastermind. | ||
| It was McVeigh built the bomb delivered the bomb and that was the end of the story. | ||
| I'm laughing. | ||
| It's, you know, it's, let me just pause and say parenthetically, if you're just a news, a hapless news consumer as I was at the time, I was in the news business, but not covering this, just sort of reading the news every day. | ||
| It's crazy what they can exclude from the story without you noticing if the story is big enough, loud enough, salacious enough. | ||
| You don't ask the obvious questions, which is like, how did these two unemployed losers afford? | ||
| this bomb, this truck, this plot, like where'd the money come from? | ||
| So true. | ||
| It is so true. | ||
| I've never thought about it till right now. | ||
| Okay, so another dumb question, but what was the point of the bombing exactly in the in the feds telling like what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? | ||
| Did they have a manifesto? | ||
| Were they starting a group? | ||
| Were they No manifesto. | ||
| Again, the feds always pointed to McVeigh and his rage at the federal government, his, you know, his rage at Waco, his rage at the overreach of Waco and remember this was the Oklahoma City Federal Building where a lot of agencies had their offices not the FBI but the ATF and DEA and and other federal agencies so | ||
| that was you know the the theory the crime theory here is that this was Timothy McVeigh's revenge on the federal government for its overreach at Waco did Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols ever explain their motives Terry Nichols basically has always steadfastly said he was the helper here, | ||
| you know, and got in way over his head and had done things. | ||
| I mean, Timothy McVeigh made sure that early on that Terry Nichols helped him rob a quarry in Kansas of blasting caps. | ||
| So he was, you know, he was in up to his neck, he would say, you know, before he even knew it. | ||
| And then he was helpless to say no to McVeigh. | ||
| As to McVeigh, he. | ||
| His story is the same as the government's, that it's revenge over Waco and the government's overreach and the government's attempt to take guns away from people who are entitled to hold them. | ||
| So they steal the blasting caps from a quarry. | ||
| They assemble an enormous amount of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from ag companies. | ||
| They spend many months apparently planning this. | ||
| The government never offers or even suggests an accounting of how much they spent doing this. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| They never tell us that. | ||
| And they basically, they're saying that Timothy McVeigh did it with the help of Terry Nichols. | ||
| But by the time the trial comes around, there's, there's no hint of a, of an accomplice of a John Doe number two, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So by this point, are you starting to ask yourself, well, maybe I imagined John Doe number two? | ||
| Well, there's another, there in that first year, Tucker, there were some other really strong indications that. | ||
| that John DOTO was real. | ||
| One of them, an extraordinary story, is, as you know, grand jury proceedings are completely closed, sealed, and off the record. | ||
| Inside the McVeigh grand jury, there was a grand juror named Hoppy Heidelberg, who was so upset about the way the federal prosecutors were running, managing, steering, and in his opinion rigging that grand jury that he went rogue. | ||
| He began complaining to his congressmen about the fact that the government was hiding evidence of John Dotu. | ||
| became an unnamed source for the Daily Oklahoma newspaper leaking what was going on inside the grand jury and eventually after the | ||
| A couple of months later, he went fully public, wrote, well, he gave an interview. | ||
| He broke rules which could get him kicked off this grand jury, but he also wrote the judge, the federal judge who was overseeing this grand jury, a letter in which he said, The federal government is hiding the identity of John Doe 2. | ||
| The victims of this crime deserve to know who committed this crime, who was really behind this crime, and it isn't happening and actually petitioned the judge to impanel a new jury. | ||
| The judge wrote back in three or four sentences, kicking Hoppy Heidelberg off the jury and warning him that if he broke the grand jury rules, he could go to jail. | ||
| There were more details. | ||
| What was the judge? | ||
| The judge, his name was David Russell and He was not the judge of the McVeigh trial. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He was a different judge. | ||
| Presiding over the grand jury. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| To produce the to produce the indictments. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But Hoppy Heidelberg, who was the grand juror, said he believed the government knew A that John Doe number two existed and B knew his identity. | ||
| Not that he knew his identity, but knew he existed. | ||
| And Hoppy Heidelberg told the in the interview with the journalist that he gave, which he was absolutely a violation of the grand jury rules, but he was going rogue. | ||
| He said, for him, the red flag of this whole scenario was that, was this story the government put out about the soldier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From who supposedly innocently happened to be at the Ryder truck rental place. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, with a buddy. | ||
| He said, Hoppy Heidelberg said, this was the red flag to me. | ||
| That soldier didn't look at all like the John Doe 2 sketch. | ||
| And this was a cover up. | ||
| So one of the reasons that we know that everything you're saying is right, that it was a cover-up, that the government knew that there was a second accomplice terrorist, John Doe number two, is real, is because of an incredible story that I had never heard before until someone I know told me it, which is why I wanted to do this interview with you about a man called Kenneth Trentadue, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| A construction worker from San Diego. | ||
| And this is, this is all real. | ||
| This story may be more than any other I've heard in a long time makes me think I you know we have serious problems with our government this is evil so will you tell who was Kenneth Trentadoux Kenneth Trentadoux was a construction worker who had in the past been, | ||
| he basically had a drug problem, came back from the army in the Vietnam War era. | ||
| addicted to heroin. | ||
| He turned to robbery to feed his habit. | ||
| and eventually got arrested for bank robbery, went to prison, did his time, came out. | ||
| He had a falling out with his probation officer over whether it was okay for him to drink a beer after a day of hard work. | ||
| He was a construction worker. | ||
| He was a construction worker. | ||
| The probation officer said, the parole officer said, no, it was a red line. | ||
| And Kenneth Trenadu walked away, stopped making his appointed visits with the parole officer. | ||
| They, no one was looking very hard for him for six or seven years. | ||
| When What was he doing during that time? | ||
| He was working construction, putting his life back together. | ||
| He married his long term girlfriend, and in 1995 they were expecting their first child. | ||
| She was Hispanic. | ||
| They had he was coming back across the border. | ||
| Was he involved in, we know of crime of any kind, or was he just a construction worker? | ||
| He had totally put on the up and up. | ||
| And he crossed the border from Mexico where he had been visiting his wife's family and he was arrested for the old parole violation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So they just put his name in the computer and bam, there was a warrant for the guy and they arrest him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Is it Sandy, the Sandy Isidro border crossing in San Diego? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Cross from Tijuana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So then what is okay? | ||
| So he goes to jail on a parole violation. | ||
| Now a very, again, inexplicable. | ||
| chain of events occurs. | ||
| I'm sorry, when is this? | ||
| This is June of 1995, so two months after the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| This is the two months in which this manhunt for John Doe 2 has been most active. | ||
| It is now in mid June at almost exactly the same moment that the government is beginning to back away from the John Doe 2 story and support this innocent soldier mistaken identity story. | ||
| It's almost exactly that moment that Kenneth Trinidadue is arrested. | ||
| He is a dead ringer lookalike for the John Doe 2 poster. | ||
| He's driving the brown truck that John Doe 2 may have driven. | ||
| He's got the John Doe 2. | ||
| He's got the tattoo on his left arm, the John Doe 2. | ||
| He looks like that guy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Is there any indication that he was that guy? | ||
| There come to be some strong indications as the investigation unfolds. | ||
| But at that moment, no, and he wasn't that guy. | ||
| But at some point, the authorities are holding this guy on a completely unrelated charge. | ||
| And somebody says notices internally, wait a second, this guy looks a lot like the John Doe No. 2 wanted poster. | ||
| Well, that's what we assume happened. | ||
| But what is known to have happened and what is the remarkable chain of events that happened is. | ||
| that Kenneth Trinidado, now in jail, awaiting minor penalty for the probation violation, is suddenly moved from San Diego. | ||
| This is two months later, he chills in custody for two months, and then he is suddenly moved to Oklahoma City, 1300 miles away. | ||
| So he's busted just randomly coming across the border from Tijuana visiting his law. | ||
| And then two months later, he's on a plane, on some like Federal Marshall plane. | ||
| That's exactly what happened. | ||
| And the family couldn't figure out why. | ||
| They were concerned and suspicious. | ||
| His crimes were all in California. | ||
| His probation officer was in California who presumably would have been a witness at that hearing. | ||
| But Kenneth Trinidad is now in Oklahoma City. | ||
| And just to complete the timing, this is approximately at one week after the indictment came down. | ||
| down in the McVeigh case. | ||
| So he's so clearly the feds think he could be John Doe number two. | ||
| I mean, I think we can assume that. | ||
| That's a fair assumption. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense otherwise. | ||
| He looks just like the one and poster. | ||
| They moved to Oklahoma City. | ||
| They think that this could be John Doe number two. | ||
| That's a reasonable assumption. | ||
| I can't think of another. | ||
| What happens to Kenneth Trinidad? | ||
| Two days after he has moved at 3 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| Well, first he's moved to a special housing unit for reasons unknown, but he is in solitary confinement in a suicide-proof cell. | ||
| Two days after he arrives in Oklahoma City, Kenneth Trinidue, at three in the morning, is found tortured, bloodied, and supposedly hanging in his cell. | ||
| His suicide-proof cell. | ||
| He's dead. | ||
| He's dead two days after getting to Oklahoma City. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay, so it sounds like he was murdered. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| What was the condition of his body? | ||
| Brutalized, brutalized. | ||
| Bloody, stun gun-like injuries on his feet, bruises, lacerations, all the signs of a terrible beating. | ||
| So he was beaten to death by the feds, it sounds like. | ||
| It does. | ||
| However, if I could just complete the picture here of how the family found out about this death, it came as a phone call to Mrs. Trinidue, his mother. | ||
| And it was the associate warden to tell her that her son, Vance Paul Brockway, had killed himself. | ||
| Well, this wasn't even a name she knew. | ||
| She said, I don't have a son named Vance Paul Brockway. | ||
| I do have a son named Cassidy. | ||
| kenneth trinidadu who is in your facility once sorted out um the warden reinforced that this was her son, he was dead, he killed himself and made a very bizarre offer of free cremation. | ||
| And Kenneth Trinidad's mother said, well, I will have to speak to his wife about that. | ||
| And the warden said, oh, well, he doesn't have a wife. | ||
| And Mrs. Trinidad said, yes, he definitely has a wife. | ||
| And he has a brother too, who's a lawyer. | ||
| So eventually, this is how. | ||
| Jesse Trinidadu comes into the picture. | ||
| Anna's brother. | ||
| The lawyer who, unfortunately for the feds, is a high performing, high intelligence, very motivated lawyer who wants to find out what happened to his brother. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And this is the X factor in this whole story because 99% of the prisoners who run a foul either of each other or the institution do not have families with high powered lawyers who are intent on finding out what happened. | ||
| And to your question, Tucker, about what was the state of the body when Jesse called the prison to find out himself what had happened, one of the first things he said was, do not cremate the body, send it home, send Kenneth home for burial. | ||
| When the casket arrived several days later and the family had the funeral home take the coroner's makeup off Kenneth, that's when they the family had to see this for the first time. | ||
| His throat was slashed, the stun gun-like burns on his feet, the bruising, the lacerations, they discovered it in the funeral home. | ||
| And Jesse, being a lawyer, hard as that had to have been, took photographs and videotape of the body for evidence. | ||
| It's very obvious it wasn't a suicide. | ||
| Very obvious. | ||
| So it sounds like what happened was it was a case of mistaken identity. | ||
| And this guy just got swept into this hysteria into an FBI investigation and the feds beat him to death, maybe accidentally, who knows, during questioning and then tried to cover it up. | ||
| You think that's what happened? | ||
| I think that's a reasonable assumption. | ||
| Do you think there's any chance he was John Doe number two? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, no, it sounds like. | ||
| So this sets really the reason that most people know about Absolutely. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he's the reason there was a FOIA filed to get the videotape of the actual bombing so we could find out who was in the truck with Tim McVeigh. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And how long has that been ongoing? | ||
| That has been ongoing. | ||
| The FOIA was filed in 2008. | ||
| It went all the way to trial in 20014, the trial was fully finished until its star witness, an FBI whistleblower, | ||
| and we haven't talked about him yet, but bailed out of the trial, leading to a long and still ongoing conflict over Jesse's allegation of witness tampering against the FBI. | ||
| So bottom line in thirty years, despite lawsuits of trial.. | ||
| The FBI, the federal government has never produced this videotape. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And they're now claiming they just don't have it somehow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, they just don't have it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The central piece of evidence in the biggest terror attack, they just don't have it, just like they don't actually have the original moon landing footage. | ||
| They just taped over it because they needed the Betamax tapes. | ||
| They're just out of space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You wonder how, like, why not try harder with the lies? | ||
| Do you ever wonder about that? | ||
| If you're going to lie, like, at least make them inventive so you don't patronize the person you're lying to? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Who do you think John Doe No. 2 was? | ||
| I believe John Doe No. 2 was one of the neo-Nazi bank robbers that Timothy McVeigh was associated with, that the FBI was chasing him for from the very beginning, though somewhat off the books. | ||
| They weren't telling the public they were looking for this neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, but they were looking at them. | ||
| These investigations were connected. | ||
| They didn't know who had been robbing the bank robbers to an earlier point of yours, Tucker, about following the money. | ||
| The Aryan Republican Army, also known as the Midwest bank robbers to the FBI, robbed 250,000 dollars from 22 banks in 1994, 1995. | ||
| That would be roughly twice that much in today's dollars. | ||
| None of the money was ever found. | ||
| Once they arrested these bank robbers and they got them, you know, deposed them, they still didn't learn where the money went, But one of the leaders of the bank robbery game did say that he had contributed heavily to white power causes. | ||
| So this was a heavy duty operation and they were intending to overthrow. | ||
| to That was their intent. | ||
| So they were they were arrested basically in early 1996. | ||
| But no one ever connected the dots back to I'm a little confused or even more confused because white supremacists, whatever those are, were the number one priority of the FBI have been for decades, decades and decades. | ||
| They hate them on many levels. | ||
| And so you're saying that John Doe number two was one of these guys, one of these neo-Nazi types, but they just sort of stopped looking for him. | ||
| and they don't care enough to keep the investigation going into who this person was? | ||
| It just it doesn't it doesn't stack, I agree. | ||
| And but there has been a concerted effort to basically wind down the various tentacles of this investigation rather than keeping them going. | ||
| I would I would say that's fair. | ||
| So from spending my life in DC, I know that when investigations pull back before achieving their goal, it's 100% of the time because the investigation is revealing wrongdoing on the part of the government yes i mean that i mean that's why that's why that's why they haven't released the tapes from january 6th and never will etc etc etc um so what do you think the government's wrongdoing in this case might have been well here | ||
| and and just to backtrack a moment you asked me who do i think it was i'm there are i the names are known of this group of you know five or six members of the Aryan Republican Army. | ||
| They're well known. | ||
| One of the most remarkable moments of this, the Jesse Trinidad investigation comes in, well, it begins in 2001. | ||
| And if this is solved, it will be partly owing to Timothy McVeigh, who sent Jesse Trinidad, who who McVeigh himself was engrossed in the Kenneth Trinidad murder because, of course, this was a cause celeb in federal prison, right? | ||
| This is every prisoner's worst nightmare. | ||
| And the prison slang for it came to be getting trinidad. | ||
| That's when the SWAT team comes into your cell in the middle of the night and brutalizes you and kills you. | ||
| So that is what is understood in prison as getting trinidad. | ||
| Timothy McVeigh and hit from his prison wrote letters to a journalist about the Trinidad case. | ||
| And so he was obviously interested in it. | ||
| A few years later, he actually met up with a prisoner who has played a key role in Jesse's case who landed on death row with Timothy McVeigh and interviewed him for a book that he published from death row. | ||
| But the part of the story that's relevant here is that Timothy McVeigh in 2001 asked this death row prisoner who he knew knew Jesse, please tell Jesse Trinidadu, this is what happened to Kenneth Trinidadu. | ||
| The FBI mistook him for Richard Guthrie. | ||
| Richard Guthrie was the co-leader of the Aryan Republican Army gang. | ||
| So that would be one answer. | ||
| Did they look alike, Guthrie and Infinito? | ||
| Dead ringer look. | ||
| What happened in Guthrie? | ||
| Guthrie amazingly wound up dead. | ||
| He was prisoner number two. | ||
| It was days after days. | ||
| After days before he was going to give testimony in another of the bank robbers trials, it was shortly after he unloaded everything he knew about the insurrection they were planning to the federal prosecutors. | ||
| So he had, and he told his family that he was looking forward to the future. | ||
| He was going to give an interview reportedly to the LA Times. | ||
| He had he said he had written a book and he was writing a tell all. | ||
| All of a sudden, from his jail cell in Kentucky, he wound up hanging. | ||
| So he's the second hanging, very suspicious hanging death of the second federal prisoner in this story. | ||
| And there is a third, by the way. | ||
| Can we just pause on Guthrie for a second? | ||
| It sounds like you don't believe that he killed himself. | ||
| Why would he have been killed? | ||
| I mean, the clear motive would be his former compatriots who were mad about his upcoming testimony. | ||
| Well, he was a federal, high-value federal prisoner. | ||
| He was under the watch of the United States Marshall Service before he and his compatriots went to trial. | ||
| So it's hard to imagine, and he too was in solitary confinement. | ||
| So it's hard to imagine. | ||
| Reportedly, the FBI knew... | ||
| So they were reportedly very close either knew or were close to knowing his role in the bombing. | ||
| Do you I mean, based on your reporting, do you think he was John Doe number two? | ||
| I think based on my reporting, I think it's either him or another member of the gang who also is a look alike for I mean, look, we know how these composite sketches goes. | ||
| They are approximations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Both Guthrie looks like Hollywood thug. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, but you can see. | |
| a bodybuilder type in this, you know, you you get So when you ask me, do I think it was Richard Guthrie? | ||
| I believe the witnesses on the ground that morning saw the men who were with Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| I believe based on my reporting that those men were members of the Aryan Republican Army. | ||
| So I believe Richard Guthrie was there. | ||
| But there was another member of that gang who was reported to be a lookalike for John Doe to as much of a lookalike as he Richard Guthrie, so it could have been him. | ||
| But again, I just refer back to the government's behavior. | ||
| They have been intentionally opaque on this subject. | ||
| They've lied about it. | ||
| I understand they killed a guy in a case of mistaken identity. | ||
| I get why they wouldn't want him cop to that. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| But why the lack of transparency otherwise? | ||
| I just don't understand why it wouldn't. | ||
| Like what are they, what are they hiding? | ||
| Well, they're pretending there was not a John Doe number two. | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| And my reporting, if I could take us on one. | ||
| One quick detail, because it is so incredible here, that there is a third prisoner in this situation who winds up in the same death scenario as Richard Guthrie and Kenneth Trinidadoo, and that is a man named Alden Gillis Baker. | ||
| Baker came forward to Jesse two or three years after Kenneth's death. | ||
| Jesse mounted a huge wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government, which went to trial in the year 2000. | ||
| And his family was awarded a million dollars by, it's a civil trial, by a judge who couldn't, didn't, wouldn't. | ||
| Call this a murder. | ||
| He caught, he again, lack of evidence, but he. | ||
| he awarded the money based on the wrong the abuses against the family after the death of the way that the whole death thing was handled. | ||
| But Kenneth, but Alden Gillis Baker, while Jesse was preparing for that lawsuit, came forward. | ||
| He was now in a different prison. | ||
| He was on the cell block with Kenneth Trinidad. | ||
| And who was he? | ||
| Was he an examination guy too? | ||
| No, he was a suspected serial killer, psychotic criminal. | ||
| He had been in the federal prison system for seven or eight years. | ||
| So he's a dangerous guy. | ||
| He came forward to Jesse and said after, well, that he said he had witnessed the murder. | ||
| He said he described the SWAT team coming into Kenneth's cell. | ||
| He said his death lasted about 30 minutes. | ||
| He heard, you know, struggling, shouting, moaning, and then nothing. | ||
| And they left the cell, the SWAT team. | ||
| Returning some hours later, said Baker to, and he could hear, didn't see what. | ||
| happened, but he was hearing. | ||
| And he heard them tearing up bed sheets, which he took to be they were basically staging a hanging. | ||
| Baker came forward to Jesse a couple of years after while he was preparing for the wrongful death trial. | ||
| And he was in a new facility. | ||
| He said, They loaded me up on drugs and ship me to a new facility. | ||
| I want to tell what happened. | ||
| And Jesse's in as part of the wrongful death trial took a deposition of Alden Gillis Baker with what I've told you here from his account. | ||
| And he would have been a star witness at this trial. | ||
| He started receiving threats. | ||
| He was in a California prison. | ||
| He started receiving threats from fellow inmates. | ||
| He begged the prosecutor to protect him. | ||
| And the prosecutor refused. | ||
| And Jesse petitioned the court for a protective order for Alden Baker, which was never answered. | ||
| And in August of 2000, two months before the trial opened, Alden Gillis Baker was found hanged in his cell. | ||
| So that's how Jesse lost the star witness to Kenneth Trinidad's murder. | ||
| That's unbelievable. | ||
| Can I just go back to Tim McVeigh for a moment and clear something up that I have read, don't know if it's true. | ||
| So there was a psychiatrist, a contract employee of the CIA for many decades called Louis Joylin West Jolly West, who was, you know, one of the people who conducted experiments with LSD and other drugs on unsuspecting civilians, one of the darkest people in the 20th century American history. | ||
| Also the person who declared, who declared Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. | ||
| Jack Ruby mentally ill visited him in the in lock up in Dallas, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Clearly sent to do that. | ||
| So he's a super dark guy. | ||
| I have read that he visited Tim McVeigh in jail. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| You know, Tucker, I've seen that reference to, but no more than you do. | ||
| I know I don't know that is true or not. | ||
| Okay, because if we ever find out that's true, then it's just it is worth overthrowing the US government at that point, because it's just like they're not even trying to hide it from us. | ||
| Okay, so you don't know if that's true. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To your point, I did take us on that detour, but I think you'll agree, it was an amazing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A lot of suicides in this case. | ||
| Yes, three. | ||
| A lot of sadness. | ||
| Three prisoner unexplained deaths, let's say. | ||
| But you had asked. | ||
| Well, the kind of people who commit violent crimes don't typically kill themselves. | ||
| I'm just saying, like, I think there are data on this. | ||
| You know, the kind of people who kill themselves are like, you know, sad women, accountants whose wives leave them. | ||
| That's more the profile. | ||
| It's not, you know, bodybuilders who are also rapists. | ||
| They, they kill other people, not themselves. | ||
| So it's even more unusual, I think, among that population. | ||
| Just saying. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And we might add as a curiosity to the Trinidadu hanging suicide, hangings are generally bloodless affairs or nearly so. | ||
| But the orderly who found Kenneth Trinidadu and had to clean up the cell, not found him, was assigned to clean up the cell, described it as a blood bath. | ||
| He had to clean up the blood with a mop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do we know about Tim McVeigh's contact with the federal government? | ||
| Like he obviously served in the U.S. Army. | ||
| But I seem to recall a letter that he wrote his sister in which he refers to contact with the Intel services. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And you had I did lead us astray and you had asked, you know, what was going on here with McVeigh and the federal government. | ||
| McVeigh told the story at least three places, one being the letter to the sister. | ||
| He told the story of it's a shocking claim, so I'll pause a moment here. | ||
| But Timothy McVeigh while in on death row, being interviewed by that death row prisoner who I mentioned, Timothy McVeigh claimed that he operated in the Oklahoma City bombing not as a terrorist, | ||
| but as an undercover federal operative, that he was basically recruited during his military service in Iraq. | ||
| He told the story slightly different ways, but to the death row inmate who wrote the memoirs and published this story. | ||
| McVeigh said that he was recruited into an unspecified defense department operation domestic surveillance operation. | ||
| He gave I interviewed three prisoners that was, you know, once I became involved in in this investigation for Jesse's FOIA case, not the not the videotapes case, but a previous FOIA. | ||
| I interviewed David Hammer, Terry Nichols and Peter Langan, who is the co-leader of the Aryan Republican Army. | ||
| So, but back to what McVeigh told, he told the death row inmate that he was undercover for an unspecified defense department operation. | ||
| He told Terry Nichols, this is what Nichols told Jesse and me on in Supermax. | ||
| He told us that Timothy McVeigh let slip that he was undercover for the FBI. | ||
| He told his sister that he had been recruited for, he had been recruited during that tryout for the special operations. | ||
| Essentially, that scenario would be he didn't wash out of special operations. | ||
| He basically joined this new unit, but he told her that he was going to be doing domestic operations. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, in 1998, the New York Times published that letter, not with much context, but yes, McVeigh made these claims after his trial. | ||
| Never mentioned them at trial. | ||
| Never mentioned them at trial. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| This is speculation, but what would Tim McTimothy McVeigh's motive be for, you know, carrying out this terror attack at the behest of the feds? | ||
| Their motive would be a little bit clearer, which would be to prove that there really is a domestic terror threat from right-wingers, something they've been working on for a long time. | ||
| But what would his motive be in staying quiet about that? | ||
| Why wouldn't he say, yeah, I was part of this at trial and like, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going down for this. | ||
| I was asked to do it. | ||
| Well, one explanation might be that he became radicalized during, just like a lot of people during RuPaul Ridge, Waco, you know, that he was at the point of this operation deeply conflicted over what it was he was doing. | ||
| To add one more source. | ||
| No, that's fair. | ||
| It radicalizes me hearing about it. | ||
| I've got to be honest, it does. | ||
| Well, there's one more source which I haven't seen. | ||
| This story does have three or four just superb researchers who have dedicated decades to trying to figure out what happened here. | ||
| And one of them wrote a book. | ||
| She researched through The University of Texas library that has the McVeigh's attorney Stephen Jones donated his papers to. | ||
| And she has uncovered documents from his original attorneys. | ||
| He was given a public defender, McVeigh was, right away. | ||
| And they immediately started trying to get out of that case because they were so conflicted. | ||
| I mean, their friends had been, you know, injured. | ||
| The courthouse was damaged. | ||
| They were freaked out. | ||
| period with them until they could find, you know, hand him off to Stephen Jones in which he told them that he had been working. | ||
| This would have been his first representation to his first lawyer. | ||
| Before trial. | ||
| Significant. | ||
| Yeah, before and before the preliminary hearing, I mean, within hours and days of the bombing. | ||
| And he told his first lawyers that he had been a government operative. | ||
| And he said that he was shocked at the damage done by the bomb as if he had been there to create a demonstration with his truck in the road not destroy the whole building. | ||
| I say as if I don't know that but his what I do know is that he told them he was shocked at the level of damage that was done. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you think it's plausible that he was telling the truth? | ||
| I Well, let's go back to another question of yours, which is, you know, what was going on here? | ||
| Why is the government covering this up? | ||
| And I can just tell you that it appears, based on other revelations that have come to Jesse Trinidad, because he's been the engine of this investigation, this whole investigation, Jesse, that there's evidence that the government has... | ||
| And this evidence comes from an FBI whistleblower. | ||
| There are a lot of Marines in this story, by the way. | ||
| There's a lot of Marines do or die in this story. | ||
| Jesse being one and John Matthews, who is this FBI whistleblower, being another. | ||
| And that, you know, brotherhood kind of. | ||
| clearly motivated Matthews to come forward to Jesse in 2011 in Salt Lake City and tell the story. | ||
| It's an untold story because it's been suppressed, first by the defense, by the Justice Department bearing down on Newsweek magazine, which was going to publish this story of Matthews' work for the FBI in a undercover program called PATCON, short for Patriot Conspiracy. | ||
| in the 1990s before and after covering before and after the Oklahoma City bombing, which was a sweeping infiltration program. | ||
| Matthews was a Vietnam vet, went to Nicaragua with the, you know, the Iran-Contra operation, I mean, to train the and now found himself in PATCON. | ||
| And it was, as he told Jesse on the phone, much bigger and uglier than you can imagine. | ||
| I want to tell you about this. | ||
| He was alienated by this program because he said it was inciting the violence that it was supposed to be preventing. | ||
| And he was with PATCON for like eight years. | ||
| So long answer to your question, what could have been going on here? | ||
| Matthews believed, so from his knowledge of PATCON, Matthews told Jesse, first, that he believed PATCON was, he believed Oklahomaa City was a PATCON operation. | ||
| He denied working the operation. | ||
| He was based in Arizona, but Arizona is another lobe of the McVeigh, the run-up to the bombing. | ||
| McVeigh stayed and lived in Kingman, Arizona, and Michael Fortier lived in Kingman, Arizona. | ||
| But back to what John Matthews knew. | ||
| The whistleblower. | ||
| The whistleblower and the potential. | ||
| here for the FBI having had McVeigh under surveillance is that Matthews told Jesse that he saw Timothy McVeigh with another member of this, let's say, at least satellite member of this Aryan Republican Army group, not a member of the gang, but one of them. | ||
| He saw McVeigh together with that guy at a military training in San Seba, Texas in 1994. | ||
| he was working PATCON surveillance at the time. | ||
| So we know that PAC-CON surveilled McVeigh months before the bombing. | ||
| And there are many other... | ||
| They didn't stop it. | ||
| They tried to stop it. | ||
| The feds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| How did they try and stop it? | ||
| Well, they... | ||
| All the evidence... | ||
| The best evidence, I have to just say best evidence, is that they... | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| Was there a transponder on the bomb truck? | ||
| There's evidence of that, yes. | ||
| Like a federal transponder, like they were following him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Tracking him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's best evidence that they, I'm sure the government will say, no, we didn't. | ||
| But a member of this, I haven't said the words Elohim City, but this is the location where the Aryan Republican Army hung out, hid out in eastern Oklahoma. | ||
| one One of those guys who may very well be I've given you a lot of names today, Tucker, so I'm trying to winnow the names, but he may well have been Another informant. | ||
| His name is Andreas Strassmeier. | ||
| He's a German national. | ||
| He was in the country illegally on an expired visa. | ||
| He's got a lot of heavy German political pedigree and intelligence training, and was out front fomenting this, let's blow up federal buildings out of this enclave called Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma. | ||
| After the bombing, he went back to Germany, and since then he has been, had the odd practice of basically issuing insider knowledge about how the bombing really went down. | ||
| He was one who said, yes, the truck had a trans he seems to know the truck had a transponder. | ||
| Have you ever been charged? | ||
| Never been charged. | ||
| Andreas Strassmeier is in Elohim City, which is where all these Aryan would be terrorists are supposedly planning the bombing of various federal buildings, including the OKC one, and the bombing comes off, the biggest manhunt in history, and he just goes back to Germany and he's fine and no one ever goes after him legally. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Imagine how many leads, I think it was, I don't know, 25,000 or something. | ||
| that the FBI was pursuing during the biggest manhunt in history, and, you know, which led them to, like, elementary school teachers of Timothy McVeigh, right, no toddlers, you know, | ||
| somehow Andreas Strassmeier was never interviewed, and there are, there are marking, and it's, and it can be reasonably assumed that Andreas Strassmeier may have been a undercover informant. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't want to speculate or anything, but it seems entirely possible. | ||
| Coming from his, you know, political pedigree in Germany, the intelligence training, his patron in Washington, DC, an Air Force colonel who was believed to have, you know, worked for the CIA, he has all of those, all of those traits. | ||
| And which I must introduce one more character here. | ||
| It turns out during a couple of years after the bombing, and as a matter of fact, on the eve of Timothy McVeigh's trial, this, you know, let's remember one of the lessons of this story is just the uncuriosity of the national news media. | ||
| They were taking their spoon-fed story from the DOJ in Washington, D.C., while this Oklahoma news reporter was beating the bushes and he found his name is JD Cash he's one of the heroes of this story and became very close to Jesse he found an undercover informant whose name was Carol Howe who | ||
| was embedded inside the bomb plot for eight months in the run-up to the Oklahoma City bomb plot. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| This she was embedded at Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma, the highest the hideout of the Aryan Republican Army where Andreas Strassmeier was the militia leader, the paramilitary trainer. | ||
| And she told the FBI afterward, well, she told her handlers during the run-up, before the bombing. | ||
| This is why the survivors of the victims who know about this are so outraged. | ||
| She told of his, you know, in late. | ||
| September, October, Strassmeier said, it's time to stop talking and start blowing up federal buildings. | ||
| And he took and she went along on at least one and maybe as many as three these apparently scouting missions to Oklahoma City. | ||
| Oklahoma City was on the short list of targets, one, you know, as well as two buildings in Tulsa. | ||
| But yes, she told them that he was planning this, you know, that there was going to be a bombing and it might be the federal building in Oklahoma City. | ||
| So, and they knew this, the FBI. | ||
| Now, she was an informant for the ATF, not the FBI. | ||
| But the FBI debriefed her right after the bombing and she was never charged. | ||
| She was charged. | ||
| Not she was charged in reprisal, basically for going public about this afterwards. | ||
| What would she have been? | ||
| What were you thinking she would be charged with? | ||
| Well, I mean, she was accessory to the bombing, it sounds like. | ||
| She was an informant. | ||
| Yes, but she was also, of course, she was, but I mean, like strictly speaking, she was part of the plotting, correct? | ||
| She, no, she was, she was an observer. | ||
| She was an observer. | ||
| I have a theory of this case and I want to throw it out to you against your superior knowledge. | ||
| But before I do that, can we just pull back and assess the political effects of all of this for a second? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So Oklahoma City happens in April of 1995. | ||
| Clinton is totally focused on his reelection at that point. | ||
| Things are about to get super things are about to get really crazy in his life with the Monica Lewinsky stuff and there's just a lot going on in America at this point and Clinton's worried about it and he's unpopular. | ||
| Oklahoma City happens. | ||
| What happens to Bill Clinton's political career? | ||
| This saved his political career. | ||
| He was, you know, I mean everybody remembers him as the great comforter in chief going to Oklahoma City and in a, you know, almost ministerial way, you know, comforting the victims and then it was possible to, you know, pass in Washington they could pass new legislation. | ||
| The FBI's budget was increased to, you know, prevent to, you know, prevent terrorist attacks. | ||
| I mean, it was, you know, it was the beginning of it wasn't we saw this after 911. | ||
| But yes, it was a great boon for the Clinton presidency. | ||
| And as you said, it was a great boon for federal law enforcement who got more money and more power. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But the irony is just like the FBI and CIA got more money and more power after 9/11, which they allowed to happen, obviously. | ||
| I mean, they, well, they allowed it to happen or not on purpose, but it happened on their watch. | ||
| They were paid to prevent it from happening. | ||
| It happened anyway, but they got richer and more powerful as a result. | ||
| Their screw up helped them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's true here as well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So here's my theory. | ||
| My theory is that the federal various agencies, ATF, FBI, maybe others, were fully aware that this plot was in progress. | ||
| They may or may not have wanted it to happen, probably not at the scale it actually did happen. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| They weren't fully in charge of it, but they knew that it was going on and they thought they could kind of fine-tune it. | ||
| They couldn't. | ||
| It went off. | ||
| It killed a lot of people. | ||
| And then they just kind of made the best of it from there, hid their own involvement in it. | ||
| Wound up murdering a guy, hid that. | ||
| Their number one goal was to protect themselves. | ||
| Their number two goal was to infiltrate white supremacist groups. | ||
| And none of this has come out really to the public, despite a number of books, first and foremost yours, and the efforts of Jesse Trent to do because the American news media is totally vested in denying any of this and pretending that the real threat is these fringe groups. | ||
| That's my theory. | ||
| Absolutely, Tucker. | ||
| You think that's right? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And this story is such, it's so much about the failure of the news media and how they had 30 years to, | ||
| I just a couple of instances of this and I mean in the because it's been a long investigation but literally in 1997 on the eve of the Timothy McVeigh trial at this time when the Oklahoma journalists discovered the informant, | ||
| ABC deployed A news team to get that story, to get the Carol Howe story. | ||
| And they did with the help of JD Cash, the Oklahoma journalist. | ||
| They got it in the can and the day of air, the Department of Justice bore down on the ABC network and they killed the story. | ||
| Was it a Jackie Judd story, do you know? | ||
| No, it was Tom Jerrill. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Tom Jerrill afterwards told the producer, who is one of Jesse's crew, another Marine told him that in all his career he had never seen anything like this, that they were totally blindsided. | ||
| And Roger, being a Marine, his producing partner knew that he was tight with Colonel David Hackworth, who was Newsweek's military affairs correspondent. | ||
| He said, Call Hack, see if you can get yourself on the Don Ima show. | ||
| So this story that was rolled by ABC News was broken by Roger on Don Imus' radio show in New York City. | ||
| Right, which is a great way to bury and discredit true things. | ||
| Roll them out on Don Imus, you know, no one will pay, you know, people sort of what? | ||
| And then move on to something else. | ||
| But then again, however many years later, thirteen, fourteen years later, they had this another chance to bring this to the national media when Jesse set Jon Matthews up with the whistleblower. | ||
| The whistleblower, Jon Matthews up with Newsweek for a cover story. | ||
| And at the time, and I'm sure you know John Solomon, John Solomon was the editor on that story. | ||
| And they got everything in the can, including their reporting confirmed that Andreas Strassmeier, the German that the FBI never interviewed, that he was a undercover operative working for PATCON. | ||
| So did that run? | ||
| No, none of that information ran because just as back in 1997, the Department of Justice bore down on Newsweek magazine and its editor, Tina Brown, and the night before the story aired, | ||
| every detail, including, as I told you, the sighting by John Matthews in San Seba, Texas, all gone, all removed. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And Tina Brown made that decision, so far as you know? | ||
| As far as I know, someone at the publication made that decision., why would it was an executive edit? | ||
| Right. | ||
| If it was Tina Brown, I don't, I used to work for Tina Brown. | ||
| I, I would be sad to hear that. | ||
| That's pretty craven. | ||
| I would not be surprised in the slightest, but I would be sad. | ||
| I don't know that, but sounds like someone made that decision. | ||
| So why would a news organization cave to the DOJ on something like that? | ||
| I don't really understand. | ||
| Well, perhaps by threats. | ||
| I mean, the I didn't hear any. | ||
| Profanity comes immediately to mind. | ||
| I mean, if I got a call from DOJ saying you can't say that. | ||
| In the first case, I did hear an explanation from Roger Charles, who worked on that story that was killed. | ||
| And he said that the principals were calling this is what you know the network and what was said was if this story runs it will be the end of the ATF and there will be machine guns on every corner and that was enough for the executives in New York to say we can't go there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's going to get in the way of gun control. | ||
| So don't do it. | ||
| There's there's a there's a a larger goal here which is disarming the population. | ||
| Okay, whatever you want. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, it's it's uh, yeah, I mean we could do hours because you spent your life in the media as I have and just the corruption of it is just beyond it's beyond belief um but everyone knows that I guess what I would say is that by not covering stories like this you allow new ones to occur so this was 1995 then you have 2001 911 you have 2021 6 january both you know fill those | ||
| stories the stories we are presented on television are just not true and um and the government involved in really sinister ways in both and a lot of others. | ||
| I mean, in between. | ||
| The Rich and Whitmer assassination attack where like everybody involved seemed to be a fed. | ||
| That's a huge alignment to that story. | ||
| And I would mention one more, Tucker, which was new to me as I researched, is that the Boston Marathon bombing has spun out a whole spiral of possibilities that the older brother, the one who was killed, was an FBI undercover operative. | ||
| And there's a book written about that and Dana Rohrbacher, the same congressman who tried to look for Morris County, California. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| He pressed with a house investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing and the possible German connections. | ||
| I mean, looking among other things at Andreas Strassmeier, he continued to look at the same picture after the Boston Marathon bombing and just faced stonewalling from some of the people. | ||
| I mean, Janet Napolitano, who was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing case, was one of the ones stonewalling him. | ||
| And Robert Mueller, who, of course, was involved in Jesse's case trying to get justice for Kenneth on Capitol Hill. | ||
| That's another whole story. | ||
| Yes, to your point about what has happened since the bombing, because since the Oklahoma City bombing because we don't know what really happened and the potential for this creeping surveillance cancer that seems to, | ||
| you know, attach to so many of these terrible events where we still don't fully understand what happened. | ||
| I'll ask one last question. | ||
| So now Pam Bondi's the Attorney General, Cash Patel runs the FBI, Dan Bonino right beneath him. | ||
| I mean, there are people who say they're reform minded. | ||
| I think Bonino is reform minded. | ||
| I reminded for the record, but there are people of good faith, I think, in positions of authority in federal law enforcement. | ||
| Now, what should they immediately declassify, disclose, stop efforts to hide about the Oklahoma City bombing thirty years ago that could resolve all these questions? | ||
| Like, what should we know that we don't? | ||
| Release the videotapes of the bombing. | ||
| Let America see this movie as well, and maybe just as important, maybe more important. | ||
| And Jesse has a letter on Attorney General Bondi's desk as of March, which says stop the DOJ resistance to unsealing the FBI whistleblower's deposition. | ||
| This is where potentially he laid out the entire scope of the PATCON program, which nobody knows about. | ||
| On the record, the FBI will say, oh, PATCON was just this little operation we had, just lasted for two years. | ||
| years and it was just targeting three extremist right-wing groups. | ||
| No, John Matthews, their top spy, says I worked PATCON for eight years and I infiltrated twenty two groups and he says PATCON was run out of the White House and PATCON was even involved in Waco and PATCON was a precursor to Fast and Furious that included gun walking, | ||
| illegal ammunition and gun sales. | ||
| You know, it was a it was an octopus of a surveillance program and that was 19 that was the 1990s and the lid has been kept on it while all these other things happened that we are talking about and perhaps might have been prevented. | ||
| It'd be interesting to know what's going on now. | ||
| I mean, as someone who's been in you know, around right wingers his whole life, I don't know a lot of potential bombers, you know, not kind of that that sort of right winger, but you wonder how many people, I mean, if the government has decided that. | ||
| that everyone to the right of Chuck Schumer is a security risk. | ||
| And they have. | ||
| Anyone who opposes our program is a security risk. | ||
| Anyone who's not on board with totally destroying the country is our enemy. | ||
| And that's their view for sure. | ||
| Then you wonder how many people they are collecting information from, how many people they are sending money to, how many people are in effect federal informants at some level at some time in their lives. | ||
| I did some research on this for the last chapter of the book. | ||
| I'm I can think of a few, by the way. | ||
| I've always wondered. | ||
| People I know personally. | ||
| What is that person? | ||
| It's a staggering prospect. | ||
| And the latest stats that I heard was that on any given day, the FBI has 15,000 informants out there working. | ||
| In the spending like over $40 million a year on this. | ||
| And think about what it is. | ||
| Is their frontline jobs bad enough? | ||
| Like betraying their families, friends. | ||
| friends and work associates but then to complete their projects, they're committing crimes and sometimes and their managers are looking the other way and nobody seems to be keeping tabs on this which has definitely increased exponentially since 9-11. | ||
| Has there been any reform at all in the past six months that you've noticed? | ||
| Because I haven't noticed any reform at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| And we both know that, again, it's this slow walk. | ||
| The allegation from the January 6th detainees is that there is a heavy infiltration by the federal government. | ||
| And this has been batted around Capitol Hill now. | ||
| Why can't we get an answer? | ||
| Chuck Grassley and someone else have a letter. | ||
| letter now on the desk of why should they have a letter I mean Republicans control the Department of Justice so I don't understand what the motive is uh here I mean you know Well this could be how many in for how many federal law enforcement officials and or informants were in the crowd on January 6? | ||
| Simple question. | ||
| Why can't we get that answered? | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| It's not enough to pardon people. | ||
| It's like, what the hell just happened? | ||
| And what are they doing now? | ||
| And why can't I know? | ||
| I live here. | ||
| I'm a citizen. | ||
| No, do you feel the frustration? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And maybe this is the answer to your question, what can Attorney General Bondi's Department of Justice do right now? | ||
| Well, answer that question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I really appreciate you taking all this time. | ||
| It's an amazing story. | ||
| If you had told me two years ago that there was something weird behind Oklahoma City, I would have been really surprised, but it turns out everything about it was weird. | ||
| Tucker, thank you. | ||
| And they murdered a guy and got away with it. | ||
| At least one. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
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