(Ken Silva, Headline USA) During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., made a baseless comparison between the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 2020 alleged militia plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
“We’ve had a lot of right-wing terrorism that’s tried to imitate [OKC bomber Timothy] McVeigh, or follow along the ideological tracks he set out,” Ivey said. “In fact, I believe it was [McVeigh’s accomplice, Terry Nichols] who was connected to the Michigan Militia, which was also connected to the same group that tried to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.”
This is false. Nichols, who is serving life imprisonment for helping McVeigh build a truck bomb, is a Michigan native, but neither he nor McVeigh were ever members of the Michigan Militia—and the Michigan Militia was not involved in the plot to kidnap Whitmer.
Moreover, McVeigh has little in common with right-wing dissidents involved in the Michigan plot or Jan. 6. Indeed, McVeigh was a deranged psychopath who participated in war crimes during the Gulf War, consorted with literal Nazis and federal informants, and exhibited signs of mental illness—telling people around him that government planted a microchip in his posterior.
Ivey seems to have taken his mistaken facts from the disgraced Zoom masturbator Jeffrey Toobin, who made the same false claim in his recently published book about OKC and the Jan. 6 protests. Headline USA has published two reviews of Toobin’s error-ridden book—one debunking false information about Jan. 6, and another one exposing his whitewashing of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s role in suppressing information about the OKC case.
However, there is a comparison to be drawn between the OKC and Michigan plots: Both were heavily infiltrated and provoked by federal informants.
While the role of federal informants in the Michigan plot is relatively well known—even outlets such as Buzzfeed wrote about the subject—their involvement in the OKC bombing is not as well publicized.
Nevertheless, multiple federal informants are linked to the OKC bombing.
Perhaps the most well-known informant is ATF informant Carol Howe, who warned her handlers in early 1995 that Nazis at a white supremacist compound called Elohim City were plotting to attack the federal building in Oklahoma City. Former FBI official Bob Ricks has explained away the government’s failures at Elohim City by insisting that they didn’t want to raid the compound and cause another Waco-like catastrophe.
Howe briefly dated Elohim City resident Andreas Strassmeir, who was also suspected of being an informant. Other informants at Elohim City included ones from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was acting as an intelligence cutout for the FBI at the time, according to FBI memos obtained by legendary journalist J.D. Cash.
Then, there’s Pete Langan, a former Nazi bank robber who now goes by the first name Donna and who recently made history as the first federal inmate to receive a sex change. The Secret Service sprung Langan from prison in the early 1990s to become an informant, but he instead went rogue and created the Aryan Republican Army, which helped McVeigh carry out the attack.
Even the CIA may have had an asset involved in the OKC bombing. McVeigh’s one-time gun show associate Roger Moore—whom McVeigh supposedly robbed to help fund his attack—was a key witness at McVeigh’s trial. But it was later revealed that Moore used to build boats for the CIA and was involved in Iran-Contra—raising questions about the authenticity of McVeigh’s “robbery.”
Despite the slew of government informants and assets connected to OKC, researchers dismissed the government failure to prevent the bombing as an intelligence issue.
But in 2011, former FBI informant John Matthews went public and said he saw McVeigh with Strassmeir in the leadup to the bombing.
Matthews had worked on a 1990s-era undercover FBI operation called Patriot Conspiracy, or PATCON for short. Matthews was silent about his exploits until he discovered that the FBI was releasing records identifying him as an informant.
Matthews then approached Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue—who’s been embroiled in a decades-long lawsuit against the FBI over OKC records—as well as Roger Charles, a nationally acclaimed journalist who also worked a brief stint as an investigator on McVeigh’s defense team.
Matthews told Trentadue and Charles all about PATCON, from selling guns to domestic extremists for FBI sting operations to sitting in on meetings by white supremacists about attacking a nuclear plant in Alabama.
“He told me that he had been told by the FBI that the purpose of PATCON was to infiltrate and to monitor the activities of [the] extreme political right consisting of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and various Neo-Nazi groups, but that he no longer believed what he had been told by the FBI about the purpose of PATCON,” Trentadue said in a sworn declaration to the court.
“Mr. Matthews told me that, based upon his experience, he now believed that the FBI’s real objective in PATCON had been to infiltrate and to incite these fringe groups to violence.”
Matthews’s most jolting claim was that he saw McVeigh in 1994 with a German national named Andy Strassmeir—whose name appears in CIA records in relation to the Oklahoma City bombing investigation.
“Mr. Matthews even told me that prior to the Oklahoma City Bombing he had seen Timothy McVeigh and a German National by the name of Andreas Strassmeir at a militia training facility near San Saba, Texas,” Trentadue said in his sworn declaration.
“According to Mr. Matthews, he had reported the McVeigh–Strassmeir [sighting] to the FBI, and was told by the FBI that the Bureau was already aware of that fact, which indicated to Mr. Matthews that others within the FBI were monitoring McVeigh on the [run-up] to the attack on the Murrah Building.”
So why aren’t Matthews’ allegations more well known to the American public? Matthews was set to testify for Trentadue in his trial against the FBI in 2014—the only known Freedom of Information Act case to go to trial—but the FBI allegedly intimidated him from testifying.
A federal judge appointed a “special master” to investe these witness-tampering allegations since 2015. Ever since then, Trentadue’s lawsuit has been sealed with gag orders imposed on all parties, and Matthews has gone off the grid. It’s not clear when the special master will finalize his investigation.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to make false comparisons between OKC bomber McVeigh and modern conservative dissidents. Along with Ivey’s false statement about the Michigan Militia, Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., displayed a picture of the damaged OKC federal building and a dead baby from the attack—accusing Republicans of ignoring this.
“It was famously a right-wing attack against the federal government, which may be why my colleagues never talk about it,” Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y. said Tuesday at a Homeland Security hearing, which was supposed to be about left-wing organized violence.
“I highlight this to show that right-wing movements in the U.S. have a long history of violence in this country … what is new is the extent to which the Republican party has encouraged violence—especially under the extreme MAGA cult of Donald Trump.”
While Clarke made many of the same sloppy mistakes as Ivey and Toobin in her statement, she did stumble onto a truth: Republicans have indeed been tight-lipped about OKC, as have Democrats.
In fact, Congress has been almost completely silent on the bombing, never holding a hearing into the attack. Trentadue has told Headline USA that he hopes the newly formed House select subcommittee to investigate the weaponization of the federal government will finally resume what his ongoing lawsuit started.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
