Margaret Roberts Exposes the True Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Ongoing Cover-Up

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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, just 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.

Mura 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.

It was shocking, and there was immediate, there was confusion.

I remember that morning well in April, and people immediately went on CNN to say that Muslims had done it.

That was the first understanding: 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 rider 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 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 rider truck to

a motel 275 miles north in Kansas, where McVeigh had checked in to the motel using his own name.

And 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 how did they say they did that they they track they tracked the 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.

Hmm.

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 Elliott'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 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 I, believed to have been Timothy McVeigh.

Who in the end was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed.

Pretty short order.

Right.

When was he executed?

He was executed in 2001.

That is short order for a capital

crime.

Yeah, for sure.

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 U.S.

history,

destroy 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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Skubak, 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 rider 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 II

with Timothy McVeigh on videotape delivering the bomb.

They had videotape of the bomb exploding.

The

preliminary hearing

for

the case was held

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, at least of the truck on its way to deliver the bomb.

So

we know that John Doe II was real.

Well, now I'm really confused because I don't, I mean, why is John Doe II 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.

It 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 McVay, right there?

Believed to be Timothy McVay.

Our investigation would raise some questions about that, but yes, a look-alike for Timothy McVeigh or a look-alike for Timothy.

But at least we can kind of account for this guy, whether it's the correct accounting or not.

Absolutely.

This is the sketch of John Doe number two.

But this is the F this is produced by the feds.

This is FBI.

FBI.

Okay.

So,

and this person has never been identified.

No one's looking for him.

And the FBI is now saying he never existed.

That's correct.

Okay.

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 introduced a new story.

This was

that

the man believed to be John Doe II

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 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

he had the

baseball cap that some of the witnesses had described John Dotu wearing, and he was with a friend.

So 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 McVay.

That's right.

But it wasn't.

That's right.

And so the FBI is now saying that Tim McVay 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

develop, one of the top

case commanders, Danny Coulson, 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 is the video.

Have you seen the videotape?

No one, Tucker, has seen that videotape

outside the FBI.

In 30 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?

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 been absolutely right okay

so you have um

now the claim by the fbi that mcveigh did this himself he may have had he 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.

Right.

He was in Kansas.

He was in Kansas.

So they're saying that Tim McVay 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 was

the government

assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Two years before.

To the day.

To the day, April 19, 1993 was the

FBI, the final assault after an 80-some 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 McVay was so mad about that that he decided to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City.

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So

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So the FBI backs off of its claim and then completely erases its claim that there was a second perpetrator involved working with Tim McVay.

How hard did they look for John Doe number two?

Well, it was a global manhunt.

$2 million

reward offered.

All over America, people were being

stopped 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

bronze star

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,

the home where he grew up in

upstate New York, had a couple of jobs,

security jobs, security

work,

but

never really gripped in to a future after the Army.

There is 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 had developed blisters on his feet, so the story went, and couldn't make the physical

part of the tryout.

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 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 would

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 would

take

this with him to gun shows and try to 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 those dollars, in those days, like $50,000 to live this way.

But we only know of him having earned like $5,000.

So where did he get the rest of the money?

Unaccounted for.

But he just, he drove,

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 I recall, they were very concerned about backlash from conservative Christian white Americans becoming radicalized white supremacists, you know, Nazis, what, you know, whatever that means, but 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.

Yeah.

So Tim McVay 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, it 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.

Right.

You know,

if you were lost and male and ex-military and seeking direction, you know, 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,

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 up.

Well, he was being pressed to be an informant and refused.

Yeah.

And so they murdered his wife and son.

So, but back to Tim McVay,

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 three of them served together.

And

after

McVeigh,

Nichols left the service first,

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 40A, hatched this plot to bomb the Morrow building.

How'd 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, and

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 of 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'd he pay for that?

No one knows.

What was he doing there?

No one knows for sure.

He married a what?

A Filipino, 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 think it's possible that Ramsey 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.

Yes.

Terry Nichols is in prison.

I believe you've interviewed him.

I have.

Has he answered these questions?

No.

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's 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 paid for the rider truck and ammonium nitrate.

That is right.

This just seems 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 don't know why 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 feds telling?

Like, what did they hope to accomplish by doing this?

Do 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 rage at Waco, his rage at the overreach of Waco.

And remember, this was the Oklahoma City federal building where a a lot of agencies had their offices.

Not the FBI, but the ATF and DEA and other federal agencies.

So

that was,

you know, 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 cabs.

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

he basically, his story is the same as the government's, that, you know, it's the, it's revenge over Waco and the government's overreach and the government's

attempt to take, you know, guns away from people who are entitled to 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

basically they're saying that Timothy McFay did it with the help of Terry Nichols.

But by the time the trial comes around,

there's no hint 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,

in that first year, Tucker,

there were

some other really strong indications that John Doe 2 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.

He

became

an unnamed source for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper leaking what was going on inside the grand jury.

And eventually,

after

the

indictment came down in August of 1995,

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 Dotu.

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 Hoppe Heidelberg off the jury and

warning him that if he broke the grand jury rules, he could go to jail.

So

there were more details.

Who 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 indictments.

Yes.

But Hoppe Heidelberg, who was the grand juror,

said he believed the government knew, A, that John Doe No.

2 existed, and B, knew his identity.

Not that he knew his identity, but knew he existed.

And Hoppe 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 the story the government put out about the soldier

from

who

supposedly innocently

happened to be at the rider 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 anything 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 want to do this interview with you about a man called Kenneth Trentidu if I'm pronouncing his name correctly yes a construction worker from San Diego and this is this is all real

This story maybe 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 Trentadou?

Kenneth Trenadou

was

a

construction worker who had,

in the past,

been

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.

Nobody was looking very hard for him for six or seven years.

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.

He had was coming back across the border.

Was he involved in, did we know of, crime of any kind, or was he just a construction worker?

Just a construction.

He had totally put his life back together.

He was totally 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 into the computer and bam, there was a warrant for the guy and they arrest him.

Yes.

This is San Diego, the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego.

Yes.

Across from Tijuana.

Yeah.

Yep.

So then what?

So, 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 II 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 Trinidou is arrested.

He is

a...

dead ringer lookalike for the John Dotu poster.

He's driving the brown truck that John Doe 2 may have driven.

He's got the tattoo on his left arm.

The John Doe 2.

He looks like that guy.

Yes.

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 number two Wanna 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 Trinidou, 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, 1,300 miles away.

So he's busted just randomly coming across the border from Tijuana, visiting his in-laws.

And then two months later, he's on a plane on some like federal marshal plane to Oklahoma City.

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 Trinidou is now in Oklahoma City.

And

just to complete the timing, this is

approximately one week after

the indictment came 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 Wannam Poster.

They move him 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 Trenadu?

Two days after

he is moved, at three o'clock in the morning,

well, first he's moved to a

special housing unit for reasons unknown,

but he is in solitary solitary confinement in a suicide-proof cell.

Two days after he arrives in Oklahoma City, Kenneth Trinidou

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.

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.

Trinidou, 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 Kenneth Trenidou, who is in your facility.

Once sorted out,

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 Trinidoux'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.

Trinidou said, yes, he definitely has a wife.

And he has a brother, too, who's a lawyer.

So eventually,

this is how Jesse Trinidou comes in to the picture.

Hannah'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 afoul either of each other or the institution do not have families with high-powered lawyers who are intent on finding out 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 found these injuries.

They were concealed

under heavy makeup and that's when 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 sounds like so um this sets that really the reason that

most people know about

this story is because of his brother, Jesse Trenadue, who just launches into like a multi-year crusade to bring justice.

Absolutely.

Right.

And he's the reason there was a FOIA filed to get

the videotape of the actual bombings we could find out who was in the truck with Tim McVay.

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 2014.

The trial was fully finished until its star witness,

an FBI whistleblower, 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 30 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.

Right.

Yeah.

The central piece of evidence and 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.

Yeah.

Wow.

Who do you think John

Doe number two was?

I believe John Doe number two

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

from 22 banks in 1994, 95.

That would be roughly twice that much in today's dollars.

None of the money was ever found by the FBI.

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 gang 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 to to have an insurrection.

That was their intent.

So

they were arrested basically in early 1996,

but

no one ever connected the dots back to.

Well, 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 No.

2 was one of these guys, one of these neo-Nazi types,

but they just sort of stop looking for him and they don't care enough to keep the investigation going into who this person was?

Yeah, it just

doesn't stack, I agree.

But

there has been a concerted effort to basically wind down

the various tentacles of this investigation rather than than keeping them going.

I would say that's fair.

So, from spending my life in D.C., 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's why it doesn't matter.

That's why they haven't released the tapes from January 6th and never will,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So, what do you think the government's

wrongdoing in this case might have been?

Well,

here,

and just to backtrack a moment, you asked me who do I think it was.

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, come in,

well, it begins in 2001.

And

if this is solved, it will be partly owing to Timothy McVeigh,

who sent Jesse Trinidad, 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 every prisoner's worst nightmare.

And

the prison slang for it came to be getting Trinidude.

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 Trinidude.

Timothy McVeigh and Hit from His Prison wrote letters to a journalist about the Trinidud 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 Timothy McVeigh in 2001

asked this death row prisoner, who he knew, knew Jesse,

please tell Jesse Trinidou, this is what happened to Kenneth Trinidou.

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

the dead ringer look alike.

So what happened in Guthrie?

Guthrie,

amazingly,

wound up dead in his federal prison cell.

He was prisoner number two.

It was

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.

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 said he had written a book

and he was writing writing a tell-all.

And 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 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 Marshal 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

was threatening Richard Guthrie with charging him in the bombing.

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 lookalike for,

I mean, look, we know how these composite sketches goes.

They are approximations.

Both Guthrie.

Just looks like

Hollywood thug.

You know what I mean?

It's like.

But you can see a bodybuilder type in this.

So when you asked me, do I think it was Richard Guthrie?

I believe that 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 look-alike for John Doe

2,

as much of a look-alike as 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 to 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 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

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 Trinidad.

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 called, he,

again,

lack of evidence, but he

awarded the money based on

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 Trinidou.

And who was he?

Was he an assignation 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, 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,

and he could hear, he 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 shipped me to a new facility.

I want to tell what happened.

And Jesse's, 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 Trinidou's murder.

That's unbelievable.

Can I just go back to Tim McVay for a moment and clear something up that I have read, but don't know if it's true.

So there was

a psychiatrist, a contract employee of the CIA for many decades called Lewis Joylin West, Jolly West,

who was 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 lockup 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 McVay in jail.

Is that true?

You know, know, Tucker, I've seen that reference too, 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 U.S.

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

detour.

but a lot of suicides in this case yes three a lot of sad three prisoner uh unexplained deaths let's say

um 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's there's data on this um

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 Trenadu

hanging suicide.

Hangings are generally bloodless affairs or nearly so.

But the orderly who found Kenneth Trenadu and had to clean up the cell, not found him, was assigned to clean up the cell, described it as a bloodbath.

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 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 memoir 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 this investigation for Jesse's FOIA case,

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 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, McVay

made

these

claims after

his trial.

Never mentioned the Matt trial.

Never mentioned them at trial.

No.

This is speculation, but

what would

Timothy McVay's motive be for

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 white right-wingers,

something they've been working on for a long time.

But what would his motive be in staying quiet about that?

Like, why wouldn't he say, yeah, I was part of this at trial and like i'm not gonna 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 rupee ridge waco um

you know that he was he was at the 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.

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 Texas, 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've 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.

But he did have a brief 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

you know,

there's evidence

that

the government had Timothy McVeigh under surveillance

before

this

attack.

And

this

evidence comes from an FBI whistleblower.

There are a lot of Marines in this story, by the way, and 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 an undercover program called Patcon, short for Patriot Conspiracy, in the 1990s,

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,

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 Oklahoma 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, Oklahoma, 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 Seiba, Texas in 1994.

He was working PatCon surveillance at the time.

So we know that

PatCon surveilled McVeigh

months before the bombing.

And there are many other

so why didn't they stop it?

They

didn't stop it.

They tried to stop it.

The feds.

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 had McVeigh under surveillance, that there was a transponder on the bomb truck.

Something happened.

There was a transponder on the bomb truck?

There's evidence of that, yes.

Like a federal transponder?

Like they were following him.

Yes.

Tracking him.

Yes.

That's best evidence.

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 of those

guys

who may very well be I've I've given you a lot of names today Tucker so I'm trying to 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 transponder.

He seems to know the truck had a transponder on it.

He's never been charged?

Never been charged.

Andreas Strassmeier is in Elohim City, which is where all these Aryan would-be terrorists supposedly are planning the bombing of various federal buildings, including the OKC one.

And the bombing comes off, 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 mean?

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, totally.

You know, somehow Andreas Strassmeier

was never interviewed.

And

there are markings, and

it can be reasonably assumed that Andreas Strassmeier may have been an undercover informant.

Well, I mean, I

don't want to speculate or anything, but it seems entirely possible.

Coming from his

political pedigree in Germany, the intelligence training,

his

patron in Washington, D.C.,

an Air Force colonel who was believed to have, you know, worked for the CIA.

He has all of those

traits.

And,

which

I'm, 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 Oklahoma news reporter was beating the bushes.

And he found, his name is J.D.

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 in the run-up to the Oklahoma City.

Correct.

She was embedded at Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma, 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,

Strassmeyer 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.

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 an accessory to the bombing, it sounds like she.

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 crazy.

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.

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 terroristic attacks.

I mean, it was, you know, it was the beginning of,

it wasn't, we saw this after 9-11.

But yes, it was a great boon for the Clinton presidency.

And as you said, it 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,

whether 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, 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

ask the hard questions about Oklahoma City.

And instead, they

actually helped bury this story along with the victims of the bombing.

I just a couple of instances of this.

I mean,

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 journalist 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 J.D.

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 Jarrell.

Wow.

Yeah.

And Tom Jarrell afterwards told the producer, who's 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 Imus show.

So

this story that was rolled by ABC News was

broken by Roger

on

Don Imus's radio show in New York City.

Right, which is a great way to bury and discredit true things.

Roll them out on Don Imos.

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,

13, 14 years later, they had this another chance.

to bring this to the national media when Jesse set John Matthews up with

the whistleblower, John 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

an 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 Seiba, Texas,

all gone, all removed.

Why?

And Tina Brown made that decision, so far as you know?

As far

somebody 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 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 it sounds like somebody 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,

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 a larger goal here, which is disarming the population.

Okay, whatever you want.

Right.

No, it's it's uh I 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 be 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, 9/11,

you have

2021, January 6th, both, you know, Phil, those stories, the stories that we are presenting on television are just not true.

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 Rohrabacher, the same congressman who tried to look from Orange 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 this same picture

after the

Boston Marathon bombing and

just faced

stonewalling from some of the same 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.

But

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

attach to so many of these terrible events where we still don't fully understand what happened.

Can I ask one last question?

So now Pam Bondi's the attorney general, Cash Patel runs FBI, Dan Bongino, right beneath him.

I mean, there are people who say they're reform-minded.

I think Bongino is reform-minded for the record.

But,

you know, 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 30 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, 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 22 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 an octopus of a surveillance program.

And

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 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 can think of a few, by the way.

I've always wondered, people I know personally.

Like, 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 their frontline jobs bad enough like betraying their families 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 was a heavy

infiltration by the federal government.

And this has been battered around Capitol Hill now.

Why can't we get an answer?

Chuck Grassley and

someone else

have a 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

here.

I mean,

you know.

Well, this could be.

How many federal law enforcement officials and or informants were in the crowd on January 6th?

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 a 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 A, 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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