(Ken Silva, Headline USA) There was a lot of news last week about the FBI suppressing evidence: Sen. Chuck Grassley alleged Thursday that the bureau has a “Prohibited Access” label to hide damning documents, while Director Kash Patel was widely criticized a day later for his dubious claims that the FBI doesn’t have footage of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s associates abusing girls.
To top it off, an attorney suing the FBI in federal court filed a motion Friday afternoon, accusing the bureau of lying about footage in another scandalous case: the Oklahoma City bombing, which remains the deadliest domestic terrorism attack in American history.
The late-Friday motion comes from Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who’s been suing the FBI for records on the OKC bombing for decades. Trentadue said in his motion that a researcher he works with recently uncovered previously hidden FBI records about the bombing. Those records, unearthed by OKC bomb researcher Richard Booth, show that an agent falsely testified in court that the bureau didn’t have surveillance footage of OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh and his mystery accomplice “John Doe 2.”
“Booth did a text based search of those FBI records and discovered therein four documents proving that the Bureau is in possession of videotapes from security cameras at the Regency Towers Apartments (“RTA”) that show the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building, and Timothy McVeigh actually arming the truck bomb at approximately 8:57 am on the morning of [April] 19, 1995, when the Ryder Truck that was carrying the bomb was parked in front of the RTA,” Trentadue’s motion states.
“More importantly, these same RTA videotapes would show John Doe 2, the accomplice that 24-witnesses have said was in the truck with McVeigh that morning, but who the FBI insists never existed.”
Trentadue’s filing comes some 17 years after he initially sued the FBI for surveillance footage of the OKC bombing in 2008. His lawsuit went to trial in 2014, and the FBI vociferously argued that no footage from the RTA buildings exists. The presiding judge has yet to issue a final judgment, in large part due to allegations that the FBI tampered with one of Trentadue’s witnesses (that wild saga can be read here).
While the court continues to investigate the witness-tampering allegations, Trentadue now also wants the presiding judge to reopen his original case that went to trial, and to consider the new evidence uncovered by Booth.
According to Trentadue, the existence of new records gives him an even stronger case for the presiding judge to rule in his favor. Moreover, Trentadue said the new OKC records support Sen. Grassley’s allegations that the FBI intentionally hides FBI records by filing them under “Prohibited Access” status—meaning that they don’t appear in the bureau’s general records-keeping system.
The FBI has declined to comment on Trentadue’s case.
New Records: What do They Say?
Just eight days after the Oklahoma City bombing, an FBI agent named Jon Hersley testified in court that security footage from the top of a nearby apartment complex showed the bombers’ Ryder Truck heading towards the Murrah building minutes before the explosion.
“I believe that particular camera was located on the apartment building there,” Hersley said on the stand during McVeigh’s April 27, 1995, preliminary hearing—referring to the Regency Tower Apartments, or RTA. “I don’t know the exact location of the camera, but it kind of scans that whole area there … It scans in front of the Tower building and also over towards the parking lot.”
But when Trentadue sued for the footage nearly 20 years later, Hersley suddenly changed his tune. At Trentadue’s 2014 trial, he testified that he was mistaken in his 1995 testimony, and that the RTA camera he described didn’t exist. Instead, Hersley testified he had only seen pictures from an ATM machine’s camera that was inside of the Regency Tower Apartments.
At the time, Trentadue expressed skepticism over Hersley’s contradictory testimony.
“The testimony about this videotape given by Mr. Hersley 20 years ago just after the bombing conflicts with the testimony that he gave at this trial,” Trentadue said in a December 2014 proposed findings of facts, which he filed after the trial concluded. “The testimony given by Mr. Hersley at the [April 1995] Preliminary Hearing is the more credible.”
Fast forward another 10-plus years: OKC bombing researcher Booth has apparently proven that Trentadue was correct.
In a sworn declaration accompanying Trentadue’s Friday motion, Booth said he was tasked to search through a trove of some 1.5 million pages of documents from the FBI case file of Terry Nichols—one of McVeigh’s accomplices who helped him build a bomb, but who wasn’t in Oklahoma on the day of the attack. Booth said he found records about the Regency Tower Apartments’ security footage—records that were hidden from Trentadue and the public for decades.
The first record Booth found is an FBI report detailing an interview agents conducted with Wesley Edward Bogie, who worked security at the Regency Tower Apartments. According to the FBI report, agents showed Bogie “three still photographs taken from the RTA security camera,” which depicted McVeigh’s Ryder Truck and two individuals nearby. The significance of this report is that the footage it describes couldn’t have been from the ATM machine inside the apartment complex—it must’ve been from another camera, according to Booth.
Another record Booth found describes footage clear enough that the Regency Tower Apartment’s assistant manager was able to identify a tenant that was pictured. Again, this indicates that the footage came from a camera other than the ATM inside of the building, Booth said in his declaration.
A third record Booth found is from the FBI’s June 1996 interview of Oklahoma City Police Department Sgt. Ritchie Willis, who told agents that he recovered film from a Regency Towers security camera that “was still recording” at the time it was removed. Willis said he provided that film to FBI agent Lou Ann Sandstrom about eight hours after the bombing.
“This document is highly significant because it establishes as a fact that the tape obtained by Sgt. Willis was still recording when it was taken into custody, that the recording came from one of the RTA security cameras, that the camera depicted 5th Street, and that it was removed from a VCR,” Booth said in his declaration.
The fourth record states that the private firm ADT Security serviced the external security cameras at the Regency Tower Apartments—another indication that such footage exists, but is being suppressed by the FBI.
“More importantly, the obvious conclusion one can draw from these documents is that the RTA videotapes contain material that the Bureau does not want people to see, namely, the still-unidentified John Doe #2,” Booth added—referring to McVeigh’s accomplice, whom the FBI initially launched a massive manhunt for, only to later claim that he never actually existed.
What Now?
In his Friday motion, Trentadue asked for the judge to reopen his case to consider the new records unearthed by Booth.
“This newly discovered evidence consists of the Bureau’s own records that were deliberately withheld from both the Court and Plaintiff,” Trentadue said.
“This evidence is also very important because it shows that the FBI did not conduct a good faith reasonable search for responsive records and, in all fairness, the Court should receive and consider this evidence especially given the FBI’s attempts to mislead the Court about the ‘search’ that was actually done in response to Plaintiff’s FOIA Request and the results of that search,” he added.
The Justice Department must now respond to Trentadue’s motion. What happens next is unclear, as Trentadue’s case is already in uncharted territory—this writer is unaware of any other FOIA case in history to go to trial, and the transparency group Judicial Watch has described the lawsuit as one of the most extraordinary FOIA cases in American history.
“We’re one of the largest FOIA litigants in this country, and we’ve never been involved in anything that involves that degree of alleged misconduct by the [FBI]. It’s astounding,” Judicial Watch investigator Sean Dunagan told this reporter in 2022.
If the judge rules in his favor, Trentadue seeks to depose FBI agents and search their physical archives to see what they did with the missing surveillance footage. But the FBI has said in court briefings that the court doesn’t have the power to let Trentadue do that—suggesting that the bureau would appeal any judgment against it.
Such an appeal could extend the litigation for years. Meanwhile, Trentadue still awaits a separate judgment in the same case, over the witness tampering allegations he made a decade ago.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
