(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue has accused the FBI of seeking a 50-year coverup of its role in the Oklahoma City bombing in his latest court filing in a long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Trentadue’s FOIA lawsuit against the FBI seeks records about Roger Edwin Moore, who was a CIA asset, an FBI informant and a business associate to OKC bomber Tim McVeigh; as well as for records about the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.
In response to his lawsuit, the FBI has given several batches of OKC bomb records to him this year. However, none of those records are related to Trentadue’s specific request, he said in his Tuesday filing.
“There was not a single document produced to Plaintiff that was responsive to either of his FOIA Requests,” Trentadue wrote.
Jesse Trentadue blistered the FBI in court today, accusing the bureau of seeking a 50-year coverup of its role in the OKC bombing.
Story on this is imminent. pic.twitter.com/i4Vqk9nyMh
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) October 11, 2024
Trentadue also noted that the FBI has withheld 453 pages from him on privacy grounds, even though the subjects of his request—Moore and McVeigh—are both dead.
Furthermore, he said, the FBI is producing records at a snail’s pace—the FBI has admitted it holds 36,795 pages of documents about Moore and the OKC-ARA links, but wants until 2036 to produce them all. Worse still, the FBI doesn’t want the court to review whether it’s complied with Trentadue’s FOIA request until 2036, Trentadue added.
“By asking the Court to not consider the lawfulness of Bureau’s withholding of these incriminating documents until the year 2036, the FBI is asking the Court to become a party to what is intended to be and will be a 50-year cover-up of the FBI’s heretofore secret role in the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Trentadue concluded.
“What the FBI is asking the Court to do is also both outrageous and unlawful because “[u]nreasonable delays in disclosing non-exempt documents violate the intent and purpose of the FOIA, and the courts have a duty to prevent these abuses.”
Trentadue now seeks to have the presiding judge order the FBI to compile a “Vaughn Index,” which would describe and identify each document being withheld, state the statutory exemption claimed for that document, and give a detailed explanation as to how disclosure of the particular document would damage the interest protected by the claimed exemption.
It’s not clear when the judge will rule on Trentadue’s motion.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
