On April 15th, 1995, a bomb exploded at the Alfred P. Muir Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people working or visiting the building that morning. It was a scene of unbelievable destruction and death, and the entire nation was left just aghast that this could have happened in America s heartland.
00:00:00.360So 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.
00:00:09.460So 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?
00:00:15.780Sure. The Oklahoma City bombing was and is America's deadliest domestic terror attack.
00:00:28.560It happened on a Wednesday morning in 1995, an April morning, out of nowhere, nine in the morning at the federal building, the Alfred P. Muirah Federal Building, nine stories tall.
00:00:45.480A devastating explosion hit the building and killed 168 people who were working or visiting the building that morning.
00:01:02.620The front of the building looked like ice cream that had been scooped out.
00:01:09.280It was just a scene of unbelievable destruction and death and blood and confusion.
00:01:19.080And the entire nation was left just aghast that this could have happened in America's heartland.
00:01:27.040It was shocking and there was immediately, there was confusion.
00:01:51.180I remember that morning well in April and people immediately went on CNN to say that Muslims had done it.
00:01:59.500That was the first understanding was this was some kind of Islamic terror attack.
00:02:03.520And then we were told that, no, it was really one guy with an accomplice who wasn't there.
00:03:01.420And it was quite an amazing couple of days in lightning fast speed.
00:03:09.400The 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.
00:03:35.500And 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.
00:04:01.200And the officer, the arresting officer found that he was carrying a concealed weapon.
00:04:09.100McVeigh was very polite the entire time.
00:04:14.140There was no thought that McVeigh was connected to the bombing.
00:04:19.720The highway patrolman took him into the Perry jail and he sat there.
00:04:26.160He 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.
00:04:40.980For 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.
00:05:01.220That's what we remember of our first sight of Timothy McVeigh, the suspected bomber.
00:05:17.340They 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.
00:05:38.020And so they went to the rental agency and sure enough, put two and two together.
00:05:45.360The identification was made from first the rider, the rental truck agency where McVeigh had rented the truck.
00:05:58.080They 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.
00:06:10.920And with the sketches, the FBI spanned out in Junction City and found that motel where McVeigh had registered under his own name.
00:06:27.580The other man, who eventually would emerge as the mystery man of the Oklahoma City bombing, was never identified.
00:06:38.800But the staff at Elliott's body shop where they rented the Ryder truck two days before the bombing on a Monday,
00:06:49.340they 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.
00:07:11.800Okay, so, and Robert Kling was Timothy McVeigh.
00:07:16.380Robert Kling was John Doe One, believed to have been Timothy McVeigh.
00:07:21.460Who in the end was convicted, sentenced to death and executed in pretty short order.
00:07:58.320How could you have the biggest terror attack, domestic terror attack in U.S. 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?
00:19:03.660But I want to go into this slowly because I think this is not one of those.
00:19:07.920This is not the Kennedy assassination.
00:19:09.200This is not something on which there have been 50 books written.
00:19:11.540I mean, you have written a great book on this, maybe one or two others.
00:19:15.460But 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.
00:20:21.020He was enraged at the government for its overreach at Waco, which was the government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
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00:23:03.380So the FBI backs off of its claim and then completely erases its claim that there was a second perpetrator involved working with Tim McVeigh.
00:23:14.680How hard did they look for John Doe No. 2?
00:25:31.580And he was pretty aimless at the time.
00:25:37.220So 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?
00:25:48.840Yeah, that was a really curious passage.
00:25:56.020And he headed south to Florida and hooked up with one of the kind of mysterious connections that
00:26:08.600we know about in the next couple of years of his life, a retired gun dealer named Roger Moore.
00:26:18.240And he basically went on the gun show circuit.
00:26:22.040He 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.
00:26:48.900It was just basically the story of an insurrection.
00:26:53.760And he would take this with him to gun shows and try to, you know, sell it or convince people to read it.
00:27:04.680He was trying to convince all his friends to read the Turner Diaries.
00:27:10.220And he just floated around it in without knowing what really was going on in Timothy McVeigh's life for the two years that led up to the bombing.
00:27:55.500But 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.
00:28:14.580So 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.
00:28:29.480And so they were, as I recall, they were very concerned about backlash from conservative Christian white Americans becoming radicalized white supremacists, you know, Nazis, you know, whatever that means.
00:28:43.900But, like, radical anti-government white people, that was the threat.
00:29:05.400So 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 to support.
00:29:23.600We can assume he was a federal informant, it sounds like, or may have been a federal informant.
00:29:57.200You 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,
00:30:12.580there 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.
00:30:26.360And the gun show circuit was that place.
00:30:29.420So I think it could have been just he was searching.
00:31:51.400And in fact, with a third soldier named Michael Fortier, who will be part of this story, the three of them served together.
00:32:01.720And after McVeigh, Nichols left the service first and then McVeigh and they hooked up again together to be in the army surplus business.
00:32:17.960So that was how they came back together after the army.
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00:33:48.600There'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.
00:34:08.160But 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.
00:34:31.400But they were scrambling to put together a business because they both were familiar with how the army surplus business works.
00:34:49.920Now we're getting into the, 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?
00:35:14.180He married a Filipino, but he didn't take her on all of these trips.
00:35:25.000He, the people who investigated later found out that he reportedly took a bomb building book on one of these trips,
00:35:37.200that a Filipino terrorist turned government informant said that Terry Nichols attended a meeting on one of the islands there with Ramzi Youssef,
00:35:49.840who was plotting a terrorist attack during Nichols' last trip to the Philippines, which was in late 1994.
00:35:59.280That would have been months before the Oklahoma City bombing.
00:36:02.960So, no good answers for how these guys...
00:36:07.040Ramzi Youssef is a World Trade Center bomber.
00:36:38.260Ramzi And it was also known that at this boarding house where Terry Nichols made many phone calls in Cebu City,
00:36:48.700it was a hangout for Islamic terrorists.
00:36:53.180Ramzi That would cut against the prevailing story, which was that Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh were Christian nationalists, white supremacists.
00:37:19.620Ramzi It's, you know, why would a white supremacist Christian nationalist be hanging around with Muslim terrorists in Cebu City, Philippines?
00:37:44.180Ramzi Terry Nichols, when Representative Dana Rohrabacher on, in Congress, took up this matter and really pressed, Terry Nichols eventually bailed out of a second interview with the congressman.
00:38:03.740Ramzi Because he said, there is no connection between the Philippines, my travel there, and the bombing.
00:38:13.080Ramzi So that was, that's Terry Nichols' word on this.
00:38:15.940Ramzi 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 Ryder truck and ammonium nitrate.
00:39:04.660Ramzi 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.
00:39:15.920Ramzi It's crazy what they can exclude from the story without you noticing if the story is big enough, loud enough, salacious enough.
00:39:27.860Ramzi You don't ask the obvious questions.
00:39:29.280Ramzi It's like, how did these two unemployed losers afford this bomb, this truck, this plot?
00:39:37.020Ramzi Like, where'd the money come from?
00:39:40.020Ramzi I've never thought about it till right now.
00:39:41.500Ramzi 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? Did they have a manifesto? Were they starting a group?
00:39:55.520Ramzi 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.
00:40:11.500Ramzi 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 other federal agencies.
00:40:27.460Ramzi 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.
00:40:42.460Ramzi Did Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols ever explain their motives?
00:40:47.540Ramzi 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.
00:41:04.340Ramzi I mean, Timothy McVeigh made sure that early on that Terry Nichols helped him rob a quarry in Kansas of blasting cabs.
00:41:13.500Ramzi So, he was, you know, he was in up to his neck, he would say, you know, before he even knew it.
00:41:19.920Ramzi And then he was helpless to say no to McVeigh.
00:41:24.080Ramzi As to McVeigh, he, he, his story is the same as the government's, that, you know, it's the, it's revenge over Waco.
00:41:35.940Ramzi And the government's overreach and the government's, um, attempt to take, you know, guns away from people who are entitled to, to hold them.
00:41:48.060Ramzi So, they steal the blasting caps from a quarry.
00:41:51.580Ramzi They assemble an enormous amount of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from ag companies.
00:41:56.820Ramzi They, they spend many months apparently planning this.
00:42:01.060Ramzi That's the government never offers or even suggests an accounting of how much they spent doing this. Is that correct?
00:42:26.500Ramzi Right. So by this point, are you starting to ask yourself,
00:42:30.260Ramzi Well, maybe I imagined John Doe number two.
00:42:32.680Ramzi Well, there's another, there, in that first year, Tucker, um, there were some other really strong indications that John Doe two was real.
00:42:47.100Ramzi One of them, an extraordinary story is, as you know, grand jury proceedings are completely closed, sealed,
00:43:01.020Ramzi 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.
00:43:25.240Ramzi He began complaining to his congressman about the fact that the government was hiding evidence of John Doe two.
00:43:36.720Ramzi He became an unnamed source for the Daily Oklahoma newspaper, leaking what was going on inside the grand jury.
00:43:51.020Ramzi And eventually, after the indictment came down in August of 1995, a couple of months later, he went fully public.
00:44:05.600Ramzi Heidelberg wrote, well, he gave an interview, he broke rules, which could get him kicked off this grand jury.
00:44:15.380Ramzi 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 two.
00:44:29.900Ramzi Heidelberg 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.
00:44:46.900Ramzi Heidelberg 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.
00:45:24.960Ramzi Heidelberg Heidelberg Heidelberg Heidelberg Heidelberg, who was the grand juror, said he believed the government knew, A, that John Doe number two existed, and B, knew his identity?
00:45:43.260Ramzi Not that he knew his identity, but knew he existed.
00:45:46.260Ramzi Heidelberg 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.
00:45:58.520Ramzi Heidelberg Heidelberg, he said, for him, the red flag of this whole scenario was the story the government put out about the soldier from, who supposedly, innocently.
00:46:16.520Ramzi Heidelberg Happened to be at the rider truck rental place.
00:46:23.220Ramzi Heidelberg Heidelberg said, this was the red flag to me.
00:46:27.660That soldier didn't look anything like the John Doe two sketch, and this was a coverup.
00:46:35.960Ramzi So, one of the reasons that we know that everything you're saying is right, that it was a coverup, 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,
00:47:00.680Ramzi Which is why I wanted to do this interview with you, about a man called Kenneth Trentadu, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
00:47:07.020Ramzi 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, you know, we have serious problems with our government. This is evil. So, who was Kenneth Trentadu?
00:47:22.960Ramzi Kenneth Trentadu 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.
00:47:48.020Ramzi He turned to robbery to feed his habit, and eventually got arrested for bank robbery. Went to prison, did his time, came out.
00:48:04.520Ramzi 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.
00:48:20.080Ramzi He was a construction worker. The probation officer said, the parole officer said no. It was a red line. And Kenneth Trentadu walked away, stopped making his appointed visits.
00:48:34.520Ramzi He was a parole officer with the parole officer. Nobody was looking very hard for him for six or seven years. When?
00:48:41.560Ramzi What was he doing during that period?
00:48:42.920Ramzi He was working construction, putting his life back together. He married his long-term girlfriend. And in 1995, they were expecting their first child.
00:48:56.120Ramzi He was Hispanic. They had, he had, was coming back across the border.
00:49:03.720Ramzi Was he involved in, that we know of crime of any kind, or was he just a construction worker?
00:49:09.000Ramzi Just a construction worker. He had totally put his life back together. He was totally on the up and up.
00:49:14.520Ramzi And he, he, he crossed the border from Mexico where he had been visiting his wife's family. And he was arrested.
01:10:58.360And my reporting, if I could take us on one quick detail, because it is so incredible here
01:11:09.240that there is a third prisoner in this situation who winds up in the same death scenario as Richard
01:11:20.980Guthrie and Kenneth Trinidue, and that is a man named Alden Gillis Baker.
01:11:29.060Baker came forward to Jesse two or three years after Kenneth's death.
01:11:37.600Jesse mounted a huge wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government, which went to trial in the year 2000.
01:11:47.040And he was, 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.
01:12:02.600He caught, 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.
01:12:22.880But Kenneth, but Alden Gillis Baker, while Jesse was preparing for that lawsuit, came forward.
01:12:58.340He, he came forward to Jesse and said after, well, that he said he had witnessed the murder.
01:13:06.280He said, he described the SWAT team coming into Kenneth's cell.
01:13:12.420He said his death lasted about 30 minutes.
01:13:18.200He heard, you know, struggling, shouting, moaning, and then nothing.
01:13:24.900And they left the cell, the SWAT team returning some hours later, said Baker to, and he could hear, he didn't see what happened, but he was hearing.
01:13:37.820And he heard them tearing up bedsheets, which he took to be, they were basically staging a hanging.
01:13:48.780Baker came forward to Jesse a couple of years after, while he was preparing for the wrongful death trial.
01:14:09.840And Jesse's, as part of the wrongful death trial, took a deposition of Alden Gillis-Baker with what I've told you here from, from his account.
01:14:22.840And he would have been a star witness at this trial.
01:15:23.960Can I just go back to Tim McVeigh for a moment and clear something up that I have read, but I don't know if it's true.
01:15:30.680So, there was a psychiatrist, a contract employee of the CIA for many decades called Louis Joylyn West, Jolly West, who was, you know, one of the people who conducted experiments with LSD and other drugs on unsuspecting civilians.
01:15:46.460One of the darkest people in the 20th century American history.
01:15:50.360Also, the person 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.
01:17:26.960And we might add, as a curiosity to the Trinidue hanging suicide, hangings are generally bloodless affairs, or nearly so.
01:17:41.120But the orderly who found Kenneth Trinidue and had to clean up the cell, not found him, was assigned to clean up the cell, described it as a bloodbath.
01:17:51.860He had to clean up the blood with a mop.
01:18:15.300And you had, I did lead us astray, and you had asked, you know, what was going on here with McVeigh and the federal government?
01:18:25.340McVeigh told the story at least three places, one being the letter to the sister.
01:18:34.660He told the story of, it's a shocking claim, so I'll pause a moment here.
01:18:44.560But Timothy McVeigh, while on death row, being interviewed by that death row prisoner who I mentioned,
01:18:55.020Timothy McVeigh claimed that he operated in the Oklahoma City bombing, not as a terrorist, but as an undercover federal operative.
01:19:09.140That he was basically recruited during his military service in Iraq.
01:19:16.800He 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.
01:19:42.180He 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.
01:19:59.460I interviewed David Hammer, Terry Nichols, and Peter Langan, who is the co-leader of the Aryan Republican Army.
01:20:11.020So, but back to what McVeigh told, he told the death row inmate that he was undercover for an unspecified defense department operation.
01:20:26.020He told Terry Nichols, this is what Nichols told Jesse and me on, in Supermax.
01:20:33.300He told us that Timothy McVeigh let slip that he was undercover for the FBI.
01:20:46.740He told his sister that he had been recruited for, he had been recruited during that tryout for the special operations.
01:21:03.300Essentially, that scenario would be, he didn't wash out of special operations.
01:21:08.940He basically joined this new unit, but he told her that he was going to be doing domestic operations.
01:21:22.520And as a matter of fact, in 1998, the New York Times published that letter, not with much context.
01:21:29.340But yes, McVeigh made these claims after his trial.
01:21:44.420This is speculation, but what, why would, what would Tim McVeigh, Timothy McVeigh's motive be for, you know, carrying out this terror attack at the behest of the feds?
01:21:58.640Their motive would be a little bit clearer, which would be like, prove that there really is a domestic terror threat from white right-wingers.
01:22:06.340That's something they've been working on for a long time.
01:22:09.980But what would his motive be in Sting's quiet about that?
01:22:14.540Like, 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.
01:22:22.520Well, one explanation might be that he became radicalized during, just like a lot of people during Rupee Ridge, Waco, you know, that he was, he was at the, at the point of this operation, deeply conflicted over what it was he was doing.
01:23:53.980But 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.
01:24:07.160This would have been his first representation to his first lawyer.
01:24:11.940Yeah, 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.
01:24:26.500And 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.
01:24:51.660I mean, 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.
01:30:40.960That's best evidence that they, I'm sure the government will say, no, we didn't.
01:30:46.280But 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.
01:31:00.640One 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.
01:31:18.700But he may well have been another informant.
01:31:29.820He was in the country illegally on an expired visa.
01:31:34.080He'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.
01:31:57.940After 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.
01:32:14.380He was one who said, yes, the truck had a, he seems to know the truck had a transponder on it.
01:32:23.660Andreas Strasmeier 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.
01:32:37.460And 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?
01:32:48.300Imagine 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 and others.
01:33:13.400You know, somehow, Andreas Strasmeier was never interviewed, and there are markings, and it can be reasonably assumed that Andreas Strasmeier may have been an undercover informant.
01:33:34.200Well, I mean, I'm, you know, don't want to speculate or anything, but it seems entirely possible.
01:33:39.220Coming from his, you know, 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.
01:34:06.580And, 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.
01:34:35.580Of the national news media, they were taking their spoon-fed story from the DOJ in Washington, D.C.
01:34:45.440while this 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.
01:34:59.200He 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 bombing.
01:35:22.140This, she was embedded at Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma, the hideout of the Aryan Republican Army, where Andreas Strasmeier was the militia leader, the paramilitary trainer.
01:35:38.860And she told the FBI afterward, well, she told her handlers during the run-up, before the bombing.
01:35:54.220This is why the survivors of the victims who know about this are so outraged.
01:36:02.060She told of his, you know, in late September, October, Strasmeier said, it's time to stop talking and start blowing up federal buildings.
01:36:16.220And he took, and she went along on at least one, and maybe as many as three, these apparently scouting missions to Oklahoma City.
01:36:31.760Oklahoma City was on the short list of targets, one, you know, as well as two buildings in Tulsa.
01:36:39.760But, 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.
01:36:53.660So, 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.
01:38:25.840He was, you know, I mean, everybody remembers him as the great comforter and chief going to Oklahoma City and in a, you know, almost ministerial way.
01:40:19.620And 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.
01:40:28.180Their number one goal was to protect themselves.
01:40:31.100Their number two goal was to infiltrate white supremacist groups.
01:40:33.640And 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.
01:40:57.960And 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.
01:41:18.040And instead, they actually helped bury this story along with the victims of the bombing.
01:41:27.880I just a couple of instances of this, I mean, because it's been a long investigation.
01:41:37.040But 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.
01:42:03.420And they did, with the help of J.D. Cash, the Oklahoma journalist.
01:42:31.900And 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.
01:42:46.380And Roger, being a Marine, his producing partner knew that he was tight with Colonel David Hackworth, who was Newsweek's military affairs correspondent.
01:42:57.440He said, call Hack, see if you can get yourself on the Don Imus show.
01:43:02.060So, this story that was rolled by ABC News was broken by Roger on Don Imus's radio show in New York City.
01:43:19.080Right, which is a great way to bury and discredit true things.
01:43:23.200Roll him out on Don Imus, you know, no one will pay, you know, people sort of, what?
01:43:28.240But then, again, however many years later, 13, 14 years later, they had this, another chance to bring this to the national media.
01:43:41.820When Jesse set John Matthews up with the whistleblower, John Matthews up with Newsweek for a cover story.
01:43:53.900And at the time, and I'm sure you know John Solomon, John Solomon was the editor on that story.
01:44:00.560And they got everything in the can, including their reporting confirmed that Andreas Strasmeier, the German that the FBI never interviewed, that he was an undercover operative working for PatCon.
01:44:31.560Because just as back in 1997, the Department of Justice bore down on Newsweek magazine and its editor, Tina Brown.
01:44:42.780And the night before the story aired, every detail, including, as I told you, the sighting by John Matthews in San Ceiba, Texas, all gone, all removed.
01:44:58.880Why, and Tina Brown made that decision, so far as you know?
01:47:05.940The Gretchen Whitmer assassination attack where, like, everybody involved seemed to be a Fed.
01:47:10.280That's a huge alignment to that story.
01:47:13.620And 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.
01:47:38.720And there's a book written about that.
01:47:43.560And Dana Rohrabacher, the same congressman who tried to look.
01:48:46.260But, yes, to your point about what has happened since the bombing, since the Oklahoma City bombing, because we don't know what really happened.
01:49:02.360And 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.
01:49:31.240I mean, there are people who say they're reform-minded.
01:49:34.220I think Bongino is reform-minded, for the record.
01:49:37.040But, you know, there are people of good faith, I think, in positions of authority in federal law enforcement now.
01:49:44.000What should they immediately declassify, disclose, stop efforts to hide about the Oklahoma City bombing 30 years ago that could resolve all these questions?
01:49:59.340Like, what should we know that we don't?
01:50:01.220Release the videotapes of the bombing.
01:50:04.480Let America see this movie as well, and maybe just as important, maybe more important.
01:50:13.440And Jesse has a letter on Attorney General Bondi's desk as of March, which says,
01:50:21.500stop the DOJ resistance to unsealing the FBI whistleblower's deposition.
01:50:35.140This is where, potentially, he laid out the entire scope of the PATCON program, which nobody knows about.
01:50:47.780On 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.
01:51:02.900No, John Matthews, their top spy, says, I worked PATCON for eight years, and I infiltrated 22 groups.
01:51:12.920And 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.
01:51:33.640You 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.
01:51:55.480It'd be interesting to know what's going on now.
01:51:58.920I mean, as someone who's been in, you know, around right-wingers this whole life, I don't know a lot of potential bombers, you know, not kind of that sort of right-winger.
01:52:06.840But 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,
01:52:18.560if 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,
01:52:29.220then 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.
01:52:40.580I did some research on this for the last chapter of the book, and I'm...
01:53:10.580$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.
01:53:24.180But 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.
01:53:46.680Has there been any reform at all in the past six months that you've noticed?
01:53:50.440Because I haven't noticed any reform at all.
01:53:52.260No, and we both know that, again, it's this slow walk.
01:53:59.160The 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.