(Ken Silva, Headline USA) U.S. Judge Daphne Oberg has blasted the FBI’s “woefully inadequate” response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about its involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing—ordering the bureau to increase the rate that it’s been producing the nearly 70,000 pages of documents that exist on the topic.
Judge Oberg’s order was made Wednesday in response to Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who has been suing the FBI for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.
Trentadue initially requested the records from the FBI in 2015, and waited nine years before filing his lawsuit in February 2024. In response to the lawsuit, the FBI proposed to produce 500 pages of documents per month, which would mean that it would take another nearly 12 years for the entire disclosure.
Trentadue has repeatedly objected to such a slow rate of production.
“If the Court accepts the FBI’s proposed snail-pace processing of these materials, Plaintiff will be close to 90-years of age when he finally receives all of them,” he said in a court filing last June.
On Wednesday, Judge Oberg agreed.
If the FBI had started producing documents at 500 pages per month when Trentadue first filed his FOIA requests in 2015, then he would already have almost all of them, Judge Oberg noted. However, the FBI didn’t make any progress on the FOIA requests for nearly a decade, until Trentadue sued over the matter, she said.
“The FBI’s proposed processing rate is woefully inadequate under the circumstances,” she said.
“Problematically, the FBI provides no evidence it applied its own policies to Mr. Trentadue’s request—nor does it explain why it suddenly began producing documents under the interim release policy only after Mr. Trentadue filed suit,” the judge said.
“Under the FBI’s proposal, the total time from the date of the first request to the date production is completed would be more than twenty years,” she added.
The judge also deemed the Oklahoma City bombing a matter of great public interest. The 30th anniversary of that incident, which remains the deadliest domestic terrorism attack in U.S. history, is April 19.
“Under these circumstances, a substantially higher processing rate is merited,” the judge said, ordering the parties to meet and confer about a processing rate of more than 500 pages per month.
Trentadue has argued that the FBI should have to produce records at a rate of 5,500 pages per month.
Trentadue’s Quest for Justice
Trentadue has been suing the U.S. government for OKC bomb-related records for nearly 30 years, ever since his brother was murdered in a federal penitentiary. The complex story of how the death of Trentadue’s brother relates to the OKC bombing can be read in Mother Jones.
One of the key players Trentadue seeks info about is a man named Roger Edwin Moore (not the James Bond actor), who was an FBI informant as part of the bureau’s 1980s- and early 90s-era Operation Punchout. In the early 90s, Moore met McVeigh. The two would become business partners, embarking on the national gun show circuit in 1993.
“According to Terry Nichols, one of McVeigh’s accomplices, not only did Moore provide them with the Kinestik explosives used to detonate the bomb that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building, but Moore also told McVeigh that he knew McVeigh ‘would put them [the Kinesteik] to good use,’” Trentadue said in his Wednesday court filing.
Along with Moore, Trentadue also continues to seek info on the ARA.
In 2001, then-Indiana State University criminologist Mark Hamm published a book making the case that the ARA helped carry out the bombing. Hamm’s In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground detailed the movements of McVeigh and the ARA throughout 1993 and ’94, showing that the bomber was often in Arizona, Kansas and Oklahoma at the same time as several other ARA members. McVeigh and ARA members were also both spotted by witnesses at Elohim City, a white nationalist compound in the Ozarks.
Even more shocking, Trentadue later uncovered evidence that the ARA may even have been an FBI front group. Trentadue obtained an email from former FBI agent Don Jarrett—who investigated right-wing terrorism in the 1990s—saying that the Aryan robbers were thoroughly infiltrated by FBI informants.
In his current lawsuit, Trentadue expressed his belief that the ARA was indeed an FBI front group.
“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. Members of the ARA also assisted McVeigh in carrying out the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building,” he said in his complaint last February.
“The ARA was actually a front group created by the FBI in which the Bureau had embedded at least one informant.”
Meanwhile, Trentadue still has another lawsuit against the FBI for records about the OKC bombing.
That lawsuit, which has been ongoing for decades, seeks surveillance footage of the blast. The FBI has denied that such footage exists, but Trentadue has evidence to the contrary—including a Secret Service investigative memo that describes the surveillance footage.
Trentadue’s lawsuit went to trial in 2014.
There, he was to have FBI informant-turned-whistleblower John Matthews testify on his behalf about how the bureau was monitoring McVeigh in the lead-up to the attack. However, Matthews changed his mind about testifying the night before he was supposed to take the stand, leading to Trentadue alleging that the FBI engaged in witness tampering and threatened Matthews.
Trentadue’s allegations have been subject of a court-appointed investigation for the last nearly eight years. The investigation has been conducted behind closed doors, with gag orders on all parties.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
