(Ken Silva, Headline USA) After asking for 20 years to comply with a records request about its involvement with the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI now wants to entirely pause a lawsuit seeking to force production of those records.
As Headline USA reported in February, Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue initially filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2016 for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the OKC bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.
Trentaudue sued the FBI over the matter in February, demanding the bureau to produce the 69,375 pages of documents that it’s holding. In response, the FBI asked a judge to take another nearly 12 years to fork over those documents to him, which means that it would take at least 20 years for the bureau to comply with his initial FOIA request.
After Trentadue strenuously objected to the FBI’s desired timeline in a June court filing, the FBI finally responded on Tuesday—now seeking to pause the lawsuit altogether.
“Mr. Trentadue does not oppose a rolling production schedule, but wants the United States to review and process all records within one year. Mr. Trentadue indicated that he would file an opposition,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Melina Shiraldi said in a Tuesday court filing on behalf of the FBI.
“For the foregoing reasons, the United States respectfully requests a Status Conference to determine an interim release rate for FBI and to stay the schedule of this litigation until after all the responsive documents are produced.”
Attached to the DOJ’s court filing was a declaration from FBI FOIA official Michael Seidel, who told the judge about the backlog unfinished FOIA requests the bureau is struggling to process.
According to Seidel, the FBI had more than 12,000 unaddressed requests at the end of 2023. Only 236 FBI employees and 108 contractors are currently available to process those requests, he said.
“Accordingly, the FBI respectfully requests that this court allow the FBI to process at 500 pages per month,” he concluded, asking for a production timeline that wouldn’t be finished until Trentadue is about 90 years old.
Trentadue told Headline USA he plans to respond to the FBI soon.
“I plan on raising a blister on the Boo-row’s ass so big that it’ll take ten doctors to pick it,” he said.
Along with Seidel’s declaration, the DOJ also included the death certificates of OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh; McVeigh’s former business colleague, CIA asset Roger Moore; and deceased Nazi bank robber Richard Lee Guthrie, who’s suspected of having helped fund the bombing.
The DOJ surprisingly filed death certificates for CIA asset Roger Moore and ARA bank robber Richard Lee Guthrie in a filing related to Jesse Trentadue's OKC bombing litigation.
Story on the recent filing coming soon… pic.twitter.com/koNt2b50fF
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) July 11, 2024
According to Trentadue’s lawsuit, Moore was an FBI informant as part of the bureau’s 1980s- and early 90s-era Operation Punchout, which was designed to identify and apprehend surplus dealers that bought and sold government property stolen from Department of Defense facilities in Utah.
Furthermore, Moore build patrol boats for use by the US Navy in the Vietnam War, as well as speedboats for the CIA, according to Aberration in the Heartland of the Real—historian Wendy Painting’s PhD thesis-turned-book about OKC bomber Tim McVeigh.
As for the Aryan Republican Army and Richard Lee Guthrie, Trentadue believes they were FBI assets that also helped fund the bombing. To his point, at least one FBI informant and one Secret Service informant were members of the ARA.
Trentadue’s June filing elaborated further on the ARA’s connection to McVeigh.
“During 1993, 1994 and 1995, a gang known as the Aryan Republican Army or “ARA” robbed banks and armored cars in the mid-west. Timothy McVeigh participated in some of those robberies and is reported to have used money obtained from these crimes to help fund the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995,” he said.
“According to Peter Langan, several members of the ARA assisted McVeigh in carrying out the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
