Note: Headline USA’s policy is not to use pronouns in stories involving transgender individuals whose preferred pronouns differ from their biological ones. In this article, the subject is referred to by biological pronouns when chronicling his activities from the 1990s, when he still publicly identified as a man.
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Donna Langan, a transgender domestic terrorist who recently made the record books as the first federal prison inmate in history to receive a sex change, has now dropped a lawsuit over the matter.
After suing the Federal Bureau of Prisons in late 2021 for “violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by not providing gender confirmation surgery,” Langan received a vaginoplasty and breast augmentation surgery on Jan. 5, 2023.
Langan refused to drop the lawsuit at the time, arguing that the U.S. government should also pay for facial hair removal surgery.
“Plaintiff’s position is that the case will not be moot unless and until Plaintiff receives permanent facial hair removal,” Langan said in a March court filing.
But three months later, as of Thursday, Langan planned to have the court voluntarily dismiss the case without prejudice—allowing it to be refiled at a later date.
Langan’s attorney did not immediately respond to a Headline USA email asking why the transgender inmate dropped the lawsuit, and whether it would be refiled.
As a former federal informant, neo-Nazi bank robber and longtime cross-dresser whose father was a CIA agent, Langan is surely one of the most interesting prison inmates in the country.
Formerly known as Pete “Commander Pedro” Langan, he headed the Aryan Republican Army—the most prolific group of bank robbers in the 1990s. The ARA was recently featured in the Showtime series Waco: The Aftermath—though Langan’s character was not included in the show.
The proceeds of the ARA’s robberies were used to fund right-wing groups such as the Aryan Nations and—as detailed in the recent Showtime series—researchers have shown that the bank robbers also likely assisted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in his April 19, 1995, attack.
Indeed, Langan and the ARA’s connections to the OKC bombing are thoroughly documented in court records, as well as by criminologist Mark Hamm in his 2001 book, In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground.
An avowed neo-Nazi by the early 1990s, Langan was imprisoned for armed robbery. But the U.S. Secret Service intervened to release him from prison to be a federal informant, so that he could help track down a fellow neo-Nazi who had been plotting to kill President George H.W. Bush and incoming President Bill Clinton.
It was an offer Langan couldn’t refuse—except he did. When the Secret Service let Langan loose, the informant went rogue and disappeared with the man he was supposed to help apprehend.
Langan went on to declare war on the U.S. government and formed the ARA with the goal of robbing banks to fund the Aryan Nations and other neo-Nazi extremist groups. To that end, the ARA was one of the most prolific gangs of the 20th century, robbing at least 22 banks in the mid-’90s before its members were apprehended in 1996.
When he was arrested, Langan told authorities that his fellow ARA members were involved in the OKC bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children.
During his trial for his role in the bank robberies, Langan subpoenaed ARA associate Mark Thomas to testify about another ARA member’s connections to the OKC bombing.
“Thomas was prepared to take the stand and reveal that [fellow ARA member Kevin McCarthy] had assisted McVeigh,” Hamm wrote in In Bad Company.
“A week before Thomas was scheduled to testify, however, he was indicted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, thus cancelling his appearance at the Langan trial. With that, Kevin McCarthy became a protected government asset, and the FBI abandoned the entire McVeigh–ARA connection.”
Langan was convicted of five bank robbery-related charges in 1997, and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. His cohorts received lighter sentences, including just five years for McCarthy (as part of a plea deal where he testified against Langan).
That didn’t stop Langan from trying to reveal the ARA–OKC connections about six years later, this time in the state trial of Terry Nichols, who helped McVeigh construct the Ryder Truck bomb but wasn’t in Oklahoma on the day of the attack.
Prosecutors objected to Nichols using Langan as a defense witness to testify about the ARA–OKC connections. At a hearing over the matter, FBI agent John Hersley testified that it was impossible for McCarthy to be involved in the bombing because he was in Iowa on April 19, 1995.
In doing so, Hersley contradicted McCarthy’s own alibi that he was in Kansas. Nevertheless, the judge accepted the FBI agent’s testimony and rejected Langan from testifying for Nichols.
Langan tried once more to introduce evidence about the ARA’s connections to the OKC bombing by filing a sworn court statement in a lawsuit by Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who had been suing the FBI for records about the bombing. But Trentadue’s case, too, was dismissed in 2010.
In his book In Bad Company, Hamm explained the likely reason why the U.S. government has ignored Langan’s allegations about the OKC bombing.
“According to Pete, the government needed witnesses to nail the coffin shut on the Langan case. The government was therefore willing to overlook McCarthy’s involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing in order to make their case against Langan. As egotistical as this sounds, it cannot be denied that this is a common tactic of government prosecutors,” Hamm wrote.
“Yet the real problem for the government, Langan concluded, was the embarrassing fact that the Secret Service had sprung him from jail back in 1993; after that, of course, he went on to form the Aryan Republican Army. And the weight of the evidence suggests that the Aryan Republican Army did, in the final analysis, play a direct role in the plot to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
